Museums aim to archive history and record it for posterity. But what happens when a museum itself is lost? The fire of 2016 that ravaged the Natural History Museum, which was set up by Indira Gandhi in 1972 to record and celebrate indigenous flora and fauna, is the anchor around which Sahil Naik builds his solo show, Specters, Specimens and Ships in Doubt (held at Experimenter, Ballygunge Place recently). Naik questions the process of recording history itself — who decides what to record; how much truth is there in what is recorded?

Seemingly sanitised dioramas that capture a variety of Indian landscapes arouse curiosity about their makers whose perspective of the truth is archived for future generations. Meticulous ceramic tile mosaics of amaltas and gulmohur connect colonial and post-colonial Indian built heritage. Gouache paintings of space explorations, reminiscent of comic-book illustrations, and wood and concrete sculptures of spaceships underline the tenuous link between scientific reality and imagination.