This Art Doesn't Belong in Your Living Room

Through sculptural metaphors, digital dissent, and poetic confrontation, artist Sajid Wajid Shaikh turns everyday objects into vessels of resistance—questioning power, perception, and the quiet violence of daily life.

- Ankita Rathod

He doesn’t create to soothe. He creates to stir. “If someone sees a grenade inside a loaf of bread and feels uncomfortable—that’s good,” says Sajid Wajid Shaikh. “That means it’s working. I want you to question why it feels wrong. And what else you’ve been ignoring.” Born in 1989 in Navi Mumbai, Sajid is an interdisciplinary artist working between his home city and Aurangabad. His belief is clear: the artist is a scribe, someone who records the emotional residue of a moment before it’s erased. For him, art is not just expression—it’s archiving. And it emerges from deeply personal memory: of communal violence witnessed in childhood, of systemic prejudice internalised over years, of being a visibly Muslim man in today’s India.

Often shared first on Instagram, Sajid’s works behave like conceptual landmines—small, strange, and quietly explosive. A child’s rocking horse made of crutches. A toothbrush split into two heads. A bread roll concealing a grenade. These are not surrealist stunts. They are compressed indictments—visual haikus of injustice, sharpened for immediacy. “There are no natural famines,” he says. “They're always manufactured.” With gallery timelines too slow to respond to ongoing crises, Instagram became the only platform that could match the urgency of his ideas. “If I had to wait for a show,” he says, “the moment would pass.”