Subheadline:
At MoMA, Indian artist Nilima Sheikh transforms painting into an expansive form of historical witness, bringing Kashmir, displacement, memory, violence, and human resilience into an immersive visual language of scrolls, poetry, pattern, and color.

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Some paintings tell stories.

Nilima Sheikh’s paintings ask us to enter them.

Suspended vertically, often unfolding across both sides of the canvas, Sheikh’s works combine landscape, poetry, historical accounts, folklore, citations, pattern, and meticulously applied tempera. They can appear serene at first glance—lush landscapes, architectural fragments, flowers, skies, figures—but beneath that beauty are histories of displacement, violence, loss, migration, and political uncertainty.

At The Museum of Modern Art, Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies brings five decades of the Indian artist’s practice into a New York museum context for the first time.

On view from September 27, 2026, through June 13, 2027, the exhibition is organized jointly by MoMA and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi. It presents works from three major bodies of work: Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams (2003–14), Home, Land (2023–25), and Shahid/Witness (2025–26).

A Five-Decade Practice of Bearing Witness

Born in New Delhi in 1945, Sheikh emerged from the generation of artists who studied and worked in Baroda—now Vadodara—in the late 1960s and helped shape contemporary art in post-Partition India. Over the course of her career, she developed a distinctive form of narrative painting that draws on literature, historical research, archival material, folklore, and lived experience.

For Sheikh, painting is not simply an image-making exercise.

It is a way of remembering.

It is also a way of recording stories that may otherwise be marginalized, forgotten, or displaced from official histories.

MoMA describes the artist’s role in terms of bearing witness to both the past and present. That idea becomes a central key to understanding Fractured Skies.

Her paintings often resist the immediacy of a single narrative.

Instead, multiple fragments accumulate.

A landscape may sit beside text. A historical reference may intersect with a personal story. A decorative pattern may coexist with an image of violence.

The viewer has to move through these layers slowly.

Kashmir as Landscape and Memory

A major focus of Sheikh’s practice since the early 2000s has been the Kashmir Valley—a region of extraordinary cultural richness shaped by complicated histories and continuing political tensions.

Fractured Skies brings together works from Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams, created between 2003 and 2014.

The series consists of suspended, double-sided painted scrolls executed in casein tempera on unstretched canvas. Rather than behaving like conventional paintings enclosed within rectangular frames, the works hang vertically in space, allowing viewers to encounter their fronts and backs.

That physical structure matters.

A painting becomes something closer to a page.

Or a manuscript.

Or a memory that can be unfolded.

The scroll format also connects Sheikh’s contemporary practice with longer traditions of narrative painting and storytelling across South Asia.

Beauty and Violence in the Same Frame

One of the most striking characteristics of Sheikh’s work is the coexistence of beauty and historical trauma.

Her landscapes are often extraordinarily delicate.

Flowers, trees, mountains, architectural details, patterned surfaces, figures, and carefully controlled colors can create an atmosphere of calm.

But the narratives beneath them are rarely uncomplicated.

The Kashmir works confront histories of violence, loss, displacement, and uncertainty.

The tension is intentional.

Sheikh does not need visual brutality to communicate historical trauma.

Instead, she allows beauty to carry difficult stories.

The effect is slower and more contemplative.

The viewer may first notice color and pattern.

Then text.

Then a figure.

Then a historical reference.

The painting gradually reveals another layer.

Home, Land: Displacement and the Bakarwal Communities

The exhibition places Sheikh’s Kashmir paintings alongside Home, Land, a more recent body of work created between 2023 and 2025.

These horizontal paintings on paper reflect on the precarity and displacement experienced by the nomadic Bakarwal communities of Jammu and Kashmir.

The change in format is significant.

The earlier works often unfold vertically like suspended scrolls.

The Home, Land paintings use a horizontal orientation, creating a different relationship between landscape and narrative.

Yet the underlying question remains connected:

What does it mean to belong to a place when land, political conditions, movement, and memory are constantly shifting?

In Sheikh’s work, landscape is never simply scenery.

Land carries history.

It holds memory.

And it can also become evidence of displacement.

Shahid/Witness: From Kashmir to Global Conflict

At the center of the MoMA exhibition is a new body of work titled Shahid/Witness, created in 2025–26 and commissioned by KNMA.

The series marks a widening of Sheikh’s focus.

While her earlier work has engaged deeply with Kashmir and South Asian histories, Shahid/Witness responds to war and unrest across the world.

The project consists of ten monumental suspended painted scrolls.

At MoMA, the works respond specifically to the architecture and scale of the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery, making the installation site-responsive rather than simply a presentation of paintings on a wall.

Among the works documented by MoMA are Climate Change/Flood 2, Forest Fire, and Migrants.

Even their titles reveal the expanded geography of Sheikh’s concerns.

War and displacement are not isolated events.

They intersect with migration, environmental instability, borders, memory, and the vulnerability of communities.

Painting as Archive

Sheikh’s method is unusually research-driven.

Her paintings draw from historical accounts, archival sources, literature, poetry, folklore, and other forms of cultural memory.

This creates a fascinating relationship between painting and the archive.

An archive traditionally preserves documents.

Sheikh turns research into visual narrative.

The painting becomes a place where different kinds of evidence can coexist.

Text does not merely explain the image.

It becomes part of the image.

Pattern is not simply decoration.

It can establish rhythm, memory, place, and visual continuity.

The result is a form of painting that behaves almost like an illustrated historical manuscript—but one made for the uncertainties of the contemporary world.

The Importance of Women’s Voices

Another important dimension of Sheikh’s practice is her attention to lived experience, particularly women’s histories and perspectives.

MoMA’s presentation emphasizes how her work foregrounds women’s voices while engaging histories of violence, displacement, and erasure.

That perspective is particularly meaningful within a broader history of South Asian modern and contemporary art.

Sheikh’s paintings do not simply reconstruct historical events.

They ask whose memories become part of history in the first place.

Who gets remembered?

Who gets documented?

Who disappears from the official record?

And how might art create another form of testimony?

A Different Kind of Monumentality

At MoMA, the scale of Sheikh’s newest works becomes especially important.

Monumentality in contemporary painting is often associated with enormous canvases that dominate a wall.

Sheikh achieves something different.

Her large scrolls hang in space.

Their surfaces can be approached closely.

Their narratives require time.

Their physical scale creates an immersive environment without turning the viewer into a passive spectator.

The paintings do not simply confront the audience.

They invite the audience to move, look, read, return, and reconsider.

Why Fractured Skies Matters Now

The title Fractured Skies is evocative because the sky traditionally suggests openness, continuity, and shared space.

A fractured sky suggests the opposite.

Borders.

Division.

Disruption.

A world in which the seemingly continuous landscape has been broken by history.

That idea resonates throughout Sheikh’s work.

Her landscapes may be beautiful, but they are never neutral.

They contain traces of political history.

They carry memories of movement.

They register absence.

They hold stories that refuse to disappear.

In that sense, the exhibition is not simply about Kashmir.

It is about how places become archives of human experience.

From New Delhi to New York

The collaboration between MoMA and KNMA also gives the exhibition a broader institutional significance.

KNMA has played a major role in expanding international visibility for modern and contemporary South Asian art, while MoMA brings Sheikh’s work into one of the world’s most influential modern and contemporary art institutions.

The result is not simply a New York introduction.

It is a conversation between two institutional perspectives on modern and contemporary art.

And for New York audiences, Fractured Skies offers an opportunity to encounter a major Indian artist whose practice has developed outside many of the conventional narratives through which Western art history has traditionally been organized.

The Quiet Force of Witnessing

Sheikh’s paintings do not shout.

They accumulate.

They ask the viewer to slow down.

A flower may sit beside a reference to violence.

A landscape may contain the memory of displacement.

A decorative pattern may frame a story of loss.

A painted scroll may become both artwork and testimony.

That is the quiet force of Fractured Skies.

The exhibition demonstrates how painting can function simultaneously as image, archive, literature, history, memory, and witness.

At MoMA, Nilima Sheikh’s fractured landscapes become more than representations of distant places.

They become reminders that history is rarely whole.

It survives in fragments.

In stories.

In images.

In places.

And sometimes, in the fragile surfaces of a painting.