Different initiatives of KNMA to promote art awareness

• Established at the initiative of the avid collector Kiran Nadar, KNMA opened its doors to the public in January 2010, as the first private museum of Art exhibiting Modern and Contemporary works from India and the subcontinent. Located in the heart of Delhi, India’s capital city, KNMA as a non-commercial, not-for-profit organization intends to exemplify the dynamic relationship between art and culture through its exhibitions, publications, educational and public programs.

• The growing permanent Collection of KNMA is largely focused on siganificant trajectories of Modern and Contemporary Indian Art. Its core Collection highlights a magnificent generation of 20th century Indian painters from the post-Independent decades and equally engages the disparate art practice of the younger contemporaries. The Collection will be eventually housed permanently in a landmark building that will make art viewing a stimulating and memorable visual experience.

• KNMA organizes special guided tours for several delegations from prestigious institutions in India and abroad. Various museums have visited KNMA giving more visibility to the institution internationally, and opening the platform for future collaborations at various levels, such as Los Angeles County Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Asia Society, Asia Art Archive, Queensland Art Gallery, Tate Modern, The Art Institute of Chicago, Hammer Museum and many others.

• Dignitaries like US Ambassador to India Mr. Peter Burleigh and senior generations artists like Akbar Padamsee visit the museum in a gesture of encouragement. KNMA also attempts to involve various sectors like tourism industry to be involved in the visibility of the museum with events like concierge for Hoteliers being organized at the museum premise.

• ‘Inhabiting the Museum’ is a year-long series of performance-events inviting artists to play with the idea of Duration and Time in the museum space or to create caesuras in its seemingly free-flowing temporality -to perhaps be the catalyst or the subject of that ‘spent/mapped/fatigued’ duration, straining the relationship between time and location.

• An art workshop held a few months ago with 220 school children was conducted by the French artist Herve Tullet  facilitated by the museum was an exhilarating experience for children from diverse schools in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. Apart from talks and seminar, it also hosts Experiments in Pedagogy, a unique program that seeks participation of people from various disciplines like Management, Engineering colleges, Arts and Humanities and other streams, to take their ‘theory class’ in the museum instead of the regular formal class-room environment.