“To Bear Witness”: The Art of Making Fractured Worlds from and beyond South Asia

Featuring Roobina Karode, Joan Kee, Ritty Lukose, Cara Manes, and Fatima Quraishi, this roundtable will consider the enduring project articulated in contemporary artist Nilima Sheikh’s statement: “The artist’s role is to bear witness—to both the past and the present.” We will use the exhibition Fractured Skies, opening at MoMA on September 27, 2026, to consider the work of artistic witnessing through selections from Nilima’s Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams (2003–10) and Home, Land (2023–25), presented alongside Shahid/Witness (2025–26), her most recent reflection on war, climate change, and struggles for justice. Moderated by Dipti Khera, the roundtable will bring Nilima Sheikh together with the exhibition’s co-curators and invited scholars. We will ask what it means for contemporary artists to work with historical arts, archives, and materials while confronting landscapes torn by armed conflict, environmental catastrophe, and gendered violence within and beyond South Asia. Nilima’s minute figures, words, and patterns, painted in layers of casein tempera across monumental canvas scrolls, suture literary and vernacular stories from the past to individual and collective memories in the present. Encountering their immersive worlds evokes awe and pain as contested histories of place and displacement, artisanal labor and loss are remapped. Drawing on perspectives from curatorial practice, feminist interventions, and material histories of Kashmir, the conversation will consider what artistic witnessing makes visible and possible—and the burdens it places on artists and viewers.

Participants: Roobina Karode, Artistic Director and Chief Curator, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Joan Kee, Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; Dipti Khera, Associate Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU; Ritty Lukose, Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU; Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Fatima Quraishi, Assistant Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University

Read more about our speakers here. 

Nilima Sheikh was born in Delhi, in 1945. After studying History at Delhi University between 1962 and 65, she studied Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda between 1965 and 71, where she learnt the linguistics of varied art-making processes. She has since investigated the grammar of preferred pictorial languages and tempera technologies. While exploring historical art forms through the lens of personal subjectivities, she uses a range of visual and literary sources in her work, including the Sanjhi stencils from Mathura. Working on different scales and surfaces since, she has exhibited her works at numerous venues in India and outside. Her participation in significant recent exhibitions include: The Imaginary Institution of Indian Art, London, 2024; Thinking Historically in the Present, Sharjah Biennial 15, Sharjah, 2023; Woman is as Woman does, CSMVS Museum, Mumbai, 2022; Miniature 2.0, Pera Museum, Istanbul, 2020; Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, 2020, Kochi Muziris Biennale, Kochi, 2018; and Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel, 2017.

Nilima’s recent solo exhibitions have been: Lines of Flight: Nilima Sheikh Archive,  Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, 2018, Terrain: Carrying Across Leaving Behind at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, 2017, and Gallery Espace, New Delhi, 2018; Each Night put Kashmir in your Dreams at The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago in 2014.  She has collaborated with artists and craftspeople from Srinagar and Baroda on a multimedia mural project Conjoining Lands, for the airport terminal in Mumbai. She has written on art in books, journals and for catalogue essays since 1971, done scenography for theatre, and also illustrated books for children. Nilima Sheikh lives and works in Baroda.

Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies is an exhibition devoted to the work of Indian artist Nilima Sheikh (b. 1945) organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (KNMA). On view at MoMA from September 27, 2026, through June 13, 2027, this first solo presentation of the artist’s work in New York showcases the artist’s visionary practice through a selection of works from the past two decades, including a new site-responsive set of paintings making its debut at MoMA and commissioned by 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.

In-person RSVP: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScF1rgzMm8--BszLmyU2NgikA7MnM7pjLrAj0DT3QJvdcxLSQ/viewform

Watch live on September 28: https://ifa.nyu.edu/livestream/index.html