Liminal Terrains

In continuation of Armageddon by Abhinav Kafare

Curated by Damini Yadav

In Armageddon, Abhinav Kafare explores the unstable relationship between the human body and the natural world. Developed over eight years, the photographic project moves between bodies, landscapes, stone and texture through close observation, fragmentation and visual association. Forms shift between the recognisable and the indeterminate: the body takes on the contours of a landscape, while rock formations and natural surfaces acquire a bodily presence. Emerging in part from Kafare’s experience of growing up in Mumbai, where physical proximity and cultural perceptions of the naked body shape how it is encountered and understood, the project examines how we learn to recognise, conceal and separate the human from its surroundings. Through photography, sequencing and spatial installation, Kafare unsettles the distinction between figure and ground, inviting a reconsideration of where the individual ends and the surrounding world begins.

In Liminal Terrains, these uncertainties extend into the exhibition space, where the arrangement and juxtaposition of photographs transform individual images into a shifting composition of forms, textures and fragments. The space is shaped not only by what the images depict, but by the relationships that emerge between them. A series of terracotta sculptures, introduced as a curatorial addition, brings this inquiry into another material register. Suspended between the recognisable and the indeterminate, the sculptures evoke traces of human and animal life caught in a passage between bodily presence and geological matter. What remains resists definitive identification, opening onto the gradual erosion, decomposition and disappearance of forms into the natural world. In the encounter between image and sculpture, presence and absence become difficult to separate, as forms move between states without settling into a single identity.

Abhinav Kafare (b. 1990) is an Indian visual artist and photographer based in Tampere, Finland. His practice explores perception, the body, memory, and the shifting boundaries between the individual and the world around us. His work is shaped by an interest in how we see, recognise, and construct meaning, particularly when familiar forms and relationships become uncertain.

Working primarily with photography, Kafare explores proximity, fragmentation, surface, and visual association. He approaches the image as a way of discovering rather than confirming what is already known, allowing relationships between bodies, landscapes, objects, and spaces to shift. His practice extends into photobooks, collage, moving image, sound, and installation, where meaning emerges through relationships between images, materials, spaces, and the viewer.