“The artist’s role is to bear witness—to both the past and the present,” says Nilima Sheikh. Over the course of her five-decade career, Sheikh has transformed narrative painting as a new way of engaging with history, highlighting lived experiences, illuminating regional stories, and foregrounding women’s voices. Her research-based art practice draws on a vast array of historical accounts, archival materials, and literary sources. Adapting the traditional scroll format and painting primarily in casein and gum temperas, Sheikh weaves together image, text, and stenciled patterning to create multilayered narratives that unfold as interconnected vignettes.
Since the early 2000s, Sheikh has often turned her attention to the Kashmir Valley, the culturally rich and politically complex northernmost region of the Indian subcontinent. Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies brings together selections from her series Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams (2003–14) and Home, Land (2023–25) alongside Shahid/Witness (2025–26), a new, site-responsive set of paintings commissioned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. These three major bodies of work trace the depth of Sheikh’s engagement with the region over the past two decades and reflect the broader themes that inform her expansive practice: violence, displacement, loss, and the enduring power of human connection.
Born in New Delhi, Sheikh was a member of the generation of artists working and studying in Baroda (now Vadodara) in the late 1960s, who helped shape contemporary art in post-Partition India. Through her visionary painting practice, Sheikh has established herself as one of the most consequential artists working in South Asia today.
Organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (KNMA). The exhibition is organized by Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, and Roobina Karode, Artistic Director and Chief Curator, KNMA, with Elizabeth Wickham, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, and Avijna Bhattacharya, Senior Curator, KNMA.
Major support for the exhibition is provided by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.
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Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)