Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies, opens at The Museum of Modern Art on September 27, 2026, and remains on view through June 13, 2027. The co‑organized exhibition from the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi, and MoMA brings together three major bodies of work that track the artist’s five‑decade practice as a witness to history, memory, and displacement.
Curated jointly by Cara Manes (MoMA) and Roobina Karode (KNMA), with Elizabeth Wickham (MoMA), the installation centres on Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams (2003–14), Sheikh’s series of suspended, double‑sided casein tempera scrolls that weave poetry, oral histories, and stencil patterns into densely layered narrative landscapes. These vertical scrolls, rich with maps, labouring figures, and moments of everyday life reconfigure Kashmir’s beauty and pain into visual testimonies of loss and endurance.
Surrounding the Kashmir scrolls are horizontal mixed‑tempera works from Home, Land (2023–25), which turn attention to the precarious lives of the Bakarwal nomadic communities of Jammu and Kashmir, drawing the exhibition’s concerns about displacement into the present. Debuting at MoMA is Shahid/Witness, a new commission of ten monumental suspended scrolls created for MoMA’s Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery; the series extends Sheikh’s meditation on war, unrest, and the labor of bearing witness across geographies and histories.
Significance of the Exhibition
Sheikh’s practice rests on an aesthetic of careful layering — stencils produced by traditional artisans, citations from folklore and poetry, and historical fragments. A method that transforms painting into a repository for both personal and collective memory. Overlapping formal beauty with documentation of violence and erasure, her work resists easy narrative: scenes of delicate craft and pastoral life sit alongside traces of trauma, inviting viewers to hold contradictory registers of feeling at once.
For readers interested in art and architecture, Sheikh’s vertically oriented scrolls and suspended installations also read as spatial propositions: their scale, suspended presence, and textile references (echoing Kashmiri shawls and map‑shawls) make viewing an embodied experience that links material tradition with contemporary political urgency. The show thus speaks to audiences invested in cultural heritage, feminist histories, and the politics of place, while remaining accessible to general museum‑going audiences.
About the Artist
Nilima Sheikh (b. 1945) trained at Delhi University and the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, and has shown widely, including recent presentations at the Art Institute of Chicago and documenta 14; her work is held in major international collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Major support for the exhibition is provided by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, with additional funding from MoMA’s Young Patrons Council; the Bloomberg Connects digital experience is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Exhibition Details
Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 27, 2026 – June 13, 2027.
Opening on September 27, 2026; check MoMA’s website for hours, ticketing, and program schedule.
The exhibition is supported by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art and The Young Patrons Council of The Museum of Modern Art.
Cover image: Nilima Sheikh, Son el Lumiere (detail), 2006 – 2016, Casein tempera on canvas scroll (Two sided), 120.1 x 72in. Collection & credit: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
Contributor
