Broken Provenance
(2025)
Research material for Akshay Mahajan, Broken Provenance, 2025.
Digital working archive of auction-house images and screenshots of Indo-Portuguese devotional objects, liturgical forms, carved figures, ivory objects, furniture and colonial-era craft fragments.
Broken Provenance is an ongoing body of work that examines how displaced devotional objects from the Portuguese empire reveal the politics of race, faith and movement across the sea. My starting point is Goa on India’s west coast, which was a Portuguese colony from the sixteenth century until 1961, and a key node in the Indian Ocean trade between Europe, Africa and Asia.
During this period, Goan and South Asian artisans produced Catholic imagery, furniture and liturgical objects under Portuguese patronage: ivory Christs and Madonnas carved from African tusks, silver filigree caskets and Goa stone holders, mother-of-pearl crucifixes, inlaid tables and chests. Many travelled onwards to Lisbon, monasteries across Europe and missions in the Americas. Today, a large number of these objects resurface in European and American auction houses as “Indo-Portuguese”, framed by clinical catalogue entries and estimates in euros and pounds.
The project began with a simple question: what does it mean when a “Black Christ” from “South India, Goa or Sri Lanka” is reduced to dimensions, condition and “important private collection”, while the Goan carver, their caste, and the colonial conditions of production remain unnamed? Reading across multiple catalogues, I treat this language as both evidence and symptom.
Phrases like “probably Goa”, “subject to CITES regulations”, and “losses, small defects” become appropriated word-poems and scores for installation.
In the studio, I assemble these fragments — screenshots, shipping routes, excerpts from travelogues like Linschoten’s Itinerario — into collages, object studies and floor-based works. Rather than restoring a “complete” provenance, Broken Provenance dwells in what is missing: broken chains of custody, misattributed geographies, erased lives. The gaps open space to imagine other narratives and readers for these objects.
A first iteration of the project was presented at Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, Panjim, as part of Makers & Materials: Goa Past and Present.
Akshay Mahajan, Broken Provenances, 2025.
Installation view, Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, Panjim, Goa. Mixed-media installation with archival photographs, photo sculptures, found objects, wall cut-outs, assemblages and framed works.
Colonial Gymnastics, 2025 (left), Vasco Baab, 2025 (right).
(Mixed Media Collage with heirloom objects)
Goan Rural Prisoners 1905, 2025.
(Mixed Media Collage with heirloom objects)
Goan Saint I and II, 2025
(Foto Esculptura)
Broken Provenance 1 to 4
(Digitall Collage on Archival Paper)