The work is not planned. One step reveals the next,” says artist Thamshangpha ‘Merci’ Maku of his art. “I prefer not to carry the burden of perfection.” That sense of openness runs through Phantasms, Maku’s first solo exhibition at Anant Art Gallery in Delhi, where bamboo, baskets, wood, ceramic, canvas, and weaving enter the work with their own histories and functions, only to be shifted into new contexts. The result is a body of work that feels suspended between memory and invention, inheritance and transformation.
The exhibition itself grew organically rather than as a body of work made specifically for a debut solo. “Some works connected through images and stories, and others through feelings and memories,” he says. At its centre is the body—not entirely individual, yet not wholly collective. Maku’s figures are fragmented, entangled and often caught in states of peril. “It is not a body that completely belongs to one person,” he says. “It carries fear, desire, violence, care, and history.”
That sense of in-betweenness begins in Manipur, where Maku grew up amid shifting borders, communities, languages and histories. Having lived in Delhi and Baroda for the past decade, he has come to experience home as something portable. “My understanding of the land and my people has been something I carry with me,” he says.
His visual vocabulary draws from the non-representational language of Naga women weavers, where geometry, repetition, gesture and material transmit knowledge across generations. Rather than reproducing cultural motifs, Maku studies the thinking behind them. “What interests me is that this visual language can communicate without necessarily depicting something directly. It holds knowledge without explaining itself.”
That approach extends to his use of flowers, plants, animals and insects. Growing up, nature was inseparable from everyday life—his parents took him into the fields to forage for mushrooms and wild edibles, while he developed an early interest in growing plants. “I do not think ecology entered my work as a subject that I consciously chose,” he says. “It is already part of the environment I grew up with.”
His relationship with inherited culture has similarly evolved through distance. Delhi and Baroda exposed him to new artistic languages while making him more conscious of how his homeland is perceived from outside. Food and people remain tangible connections, but the land, air and border are harder to carry. “My relationship with Naga culture is not about trying to return to something pure or original,” he says. “It is about negotiating with what I have received, what I have lost, what I remember, and what I continue to make.”
Much of this inheritance comes through oral stories—tales of forests, spirits, war and childhood shared by parents and elders. Some resist any neat distinction between fact and fiction. “There are also stories that I do not know whether to call true, false, myth, or memory,” he says. “Sometimes that uncertainty is what interests me.”