I am Sajid Wajid Shaikh
B. 1989, Navi Mumbai: India

I am Sajid Wajid Shaikh (b. 1989), an interdisciplinary artist based between Navi Mumbai and Aurangabad, India. I work from the position of the artist as scribe: documenting, archiving, and encoding the psychological and political conditions of the present. My practice emerges from lived experiences of communal violence, state-sanctioned hostility, and the everyday precarity of existing as a Muslim minority in contemporary India. Working within an increasingly authoritarian socio-political climate, I situate my work in the friction between oppression and resistance, where histories are actively distorted, erased, or denied.

Through non-linear forms: including installation, kinetic and mechanical sculpture, film, drawing, painting, and community-led projects, I examine how power embeds itself into systems, rituals, and daily life. Moral philosophy and ethics operate as critical tools to reveal structural bias, normalized injustice, and the quiet violence of administrative control. My kinetic works employ machines as metaphors for engineered dysfunction, reflecting systems designed to exhaust, discipline, and regulate bodies. My drawings and paintings confront conflict, aggression, masculinity, and cyclical violence, often surfacing through grotesque or fragmented figuration.

Art, for me, functions as a cryptic letter to the future: a psychosomatic record of lived experience and an active refusal of erasure. By connecting local struggles to global questions of justice, displacement, and power, my practice insists on visibility, memory, and dissent. Making becomes a sustained form of resistance and quiet, persistent, and deliberate-asserting presence and dignity within environments that increasingly demand silence, compliance, and forgetting. The work asks how survival itself becomes political under conditions of prolonged fear.

Recent exhibitions include India Art Fair (2026), ARCO Madrid (2026), ARCO Lisbon (2025), Asia Now Paris (2025), Art Mumbai (2025), Parliament Is Now in Session at Method (2024),Witness and Evidence Gallery XXL (2024), Khel Spell Museum of Goa (2024), the Godrej Conscious Collective Programme (2023), Ephemeroptera: Time After Time: TARQ X Gallery XXL (2023)

Awards and residencies include, The Henry Clews Award (2026), Villa Swagatam, the La Napoule Art Foundation (2025), The Artist Prize by MTArt Agency (2024), the IAF + BMW  “The Future is Born of Art” commission (2022),Harkat Lab supported by the Gujral Foundation(2021) and the Facebook Artist-in-Residence Programme (2015).

Photo Credit: Shoeb Mashadi