Nilima Sheikh repays her emotional debt to Kashmir with a new show

The highlight of a new show by Nilima Sheikh, dedicated to a continuing exploration of the historical fates of Kashmir through the past decade, is a set of scrolls. The solo at New Delhi’s Lalit Kala Akademi (LKA) features some large scroll paintings from her critically applauded series, ‘Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams’.

The series is presented works courtesy Gallery Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai. An accompanying note mentions: “It has the reverie-informed palimpsest presentation of material that we associate with her work showing all of Kashmir's contradictory and multicultural histories erupting through the artist's reverie about the land as Paradise.

The magical and the marvelous, the mythic and the fabulous and ritual and fantasy pass through the photographic, the performative, the textual, the uttered and the art historical as well as through the artisanal habitual and the ecological.

Multiple cultural sensibilities from all over the world from various strata of history make up today's Kashmir. Textual references from Kalhan rub shoulder with the poetry of Lal Dedh, folktales jostle with the poetry of Aga Shahid Ali or the prose of Rushdie and the work of historian Chitralekha Zutshi while visual references range from pre-Renaissance Italian art to Bihzad to the magnificent demonography of the Siyah Qalam and Thangka art amongst others.

As we watch Sheikh's work it is not a simple lament for the destruction of Paradise by political violence that we see. Instead what we get from the artist is an unraveling in various directions of the multiple layers of forces of history at play in Kashmir today, the outcome of which is yet to be seen.

The artist has been quoted as saying on the eve of her show (The Indian Express interview): “As a child and as a young woman, I spent many formative years walking and trekking around the valley. I owe the formation of my visual world to this time. As a painter, I owe it an emotional debt.”