Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies

正在展出2026年9月27日 – 2027年6月13日·$30

A survey of painter Nilima Sheikh's five-decade practice, tracing her engagement with Kashmir through narrative scroll paintings including a new, site-responsive series debuting at MoMA.

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Low on one scroll, a kneeling woman weeps red tears, a grave-shaped lozenge in her lap and a child in a cradle behind her. The scroll is We Must Bear (2014), named after a line by the medieval Kashmiri mystic Nund Rishi.

This is Sheikh's first solo show in New York. Five double-sided scrolls from Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams hang mid-gallery, each 12 by 6 feet, so you walk around each one to read its other side. Paintings on paper about Kashmir's nomadic Bakarwal communities line the walls. Then come the ten new scrolls of Shahid (Witness), made for this room: burned and flooded land below, grey skies with blood-red horizons above.

It is slow, text-heavy painting, threaded with poetry by Agha Shahid Ali, and the subject is violence, including two panels on the 2018 attack on Asifa, an eight-year-old Bakarwal girl. A gallery handout decodes We Must Bear. It runs until June 13, 2027, included with admission ($30 adults, 16 and under free).

看点

The weeping woman in We Must Bear
Look at the scroll's lower left: a kneeling woman cries red tears over a lozenge in her lap, with a stencilled child in a cradle behind her.
The figure carrying a body uphill
At the centre of We Must Bear, a figure struggles up a slope under a lifeless body, a pose Sheikh took from a Safavid painting of Cain and Abel.
The graves along the Line of Control
Repeating octagonal lozenges stand for anonymous border graves, some overlaid with flowers cut in Sanjhi paper stencils made with artisans in Mathura.
The skies of Shahid (Witness)
Across ten new scrolls, fire and flood fill the lower registers while otherworldly beings watch from above and birds fly toward paler, bluer skies.
The stencilled words in Home, Land 4
Bakarwal voices are lettered across the landscape: "We are living in forests for hundreds of years and now we are being termed as illegal occupants."

适合

独自前往
深度爱好者

可跳过，如果

You want a light visit: these scrolls deal with war, displacement and violence against a child.

带孩子

Children 16 and under get in free, but two Home, Land text panels recount violence against an eight-year-old girl, so check them before bringing kids.