The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art has inaugurated an unprecedented trio of exhibitions that reimagine how audiences engage with contemporary art. On view from October 4, 2025, these three distinct yet interconnected shows invite visitors to touch, read, and participate in artistic expression spanning seven decades of Indian creativity.
A Season of Material Dialogues
Under the leadership of Director and Chief Curator Roobina Karode, KNMA has transformed its spaces into what she describes as “a multisensory archive, inviting diverse audiences to form connections with art through the important acts of seeing, reading, and even touching.” This curatorial approach breaks down traditional museum barriers, making contemporary art accessible and engaging across generations.
Founder and Chairperson Kiran Nadar emphasizes the institution’s commitment to showcasing diverse artistic voices: “By presenting works across media, generations, and cultural contexts, the exhibitions blur the boundaries between popular and high art, demonstrating how creative expression, both formal and informal, can foster reflection, challenge conventions, and cultivate spaces for dialogue, resistance, and community.”
Exhibition 1: Extraordinary Line – Drawing as Dissent and Documentation
Curated by Avijna Bhattacharya, Senior Curator, KNMA
Extraordinary Line positions drawing not as a preliminary sketch but as a complete artistic statement capable of capturing the complexity of postcolonial India. This intergenerational exhibition unfolds in two distinct phases that trace the evolution of Indian drawing practices from Independence to the present day.
Phase One: Post-Independence Reflections (1947-1990s)
The first section examines how artists used drawing as a mnemonic device and documentary tool to process the newly independent nation’s social and cultural transformations. During this period, drawing functioned as both intimate reflection and incisive social observation, with artists balancing formal experimentation against engagement with civic discourse.
Phase Two: Post-Liberalization Disruptions (1990s-Present)
As India opened its economy in the 1990s, artists responded to rapid social and visual transformations by extending drawing into new registers. This phase showcases how contemporary practitioners have experimented with scale, medium, and conceptual rigor to capture the dislocations and uncertainties of a changing society.
Artworks featured: Vivan Sundaram | Untitled (Mexico), 1978 & Jogen Chowdhury | Untitled (Ganesha)
The exhibition features seventeen artists including Arpita Singh, Bhupen Khakhar, Jogen Chowdhury, Vivan Sundaram, Manish Pushkale, and Balaji Ponna, among others. Their works demonstrate drawing’s autonomy as a critical form capable of accommodating intimacy, satire, and political commentary while remaining “unencumbered by the surplus.”
Exhibition 2: ‘jo ġāyab hai, aur hāzir bhi’ – Saba Hasan’s Book Sculptures
Curated by Neha ‘Zooni’ Tickoo, Curator, KNMA
In the first comprehensive presentation of her work, Saba Hasan’s book sculptures create a poetic dialogue between presence and absence, preservation and loss. The exhibition title references renowned poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s iconic poem Hum Dekhenge, establishing the book as a site of reflection and resistance.
Hasan’s distinctive practice transforms books through folding, cutting, burning, layering, and embedding organic and inorganic materials. She destabilizes language while reconstituting its fragments as sculptural artifacts of memory and erasure. The exhibition presents both early works and multimedia experiments, offering visitors a holistic view of her artistic vocabulary.
Artworks featured: Saba Hasan | A Child’s Voice | 2024 & Book of Ocean (series) 2022-23
These book sculptures interrogate the dialectics of presence and absence, creating immersive encounters with everyday objects reimagined as art. The works enact subtle, multidimensional dialogues between the seen and unseen, the personal and collective, demonstrating the transformative potential of ordinary materials.
Exhibition 3: ‘please touch gently (zines, comics, ephemera)’ – India’s DIY Publishing Revolution
Curated by aqui Thami, Bharath Murthy, and himanshu s, with curatorial advisor Akansha Rastogi, Associate Director, Visual Arts, KNMA
The fifth exhibition in KNMA’s Young Artists of Our Times series radically reconfigures the museum as a participatory archive. For the first time, KNMA presents a library-like space that explicitly invites visitors to touch, read, and even photocopy the works on display, reversing the conventional “do not touch” museum mandate.
A Thousand Voices in 22 Languages
This groundbreaking exhibition brings together contributions from over a thousand zinesters, comics artists, illustrators, feminists, and independent publishers working in 22 languages. It offers an unprecedented survey of the Indian comics scene and self-publishing subcultures, making visible the underground networks of creative resistance and community formation.
Nikhil Gulati, People of the Indus, Penguin, 2022
Three Curatorial Visions
Divided into three sections, each curated by makers with distinct propositions, the exhibition unfolds as a constellation of storytelling experiments. Zines and comics emerge as critical tools of pedagogy, memory, dissent, and community formation—fearless and unapologetic forms of expression that function as resistance, survival, and ways of being.
A Conversation Across Media and Time
Together, these three exhibitions create a vibrant conversation within the museum walls. The expressive tenacity of drawn lines, the meditative silence of sculptural books, and the rebellious animation of zines and comics form an ecosystem of contemporary practice that honors both tradition and innovation.
The exhibitions demonstrate KNMA’s expanded vision of what a museum can be—not merely a repository of objects but an active space for participation, dialogue, and community formation. By blurring boundaries between high and popular art, between seeing and touching, between preservation and creation, KNMA reaffirms its mission as a vibrant hub for artistic and cultural dialogue.
EXHIBITION DETAILS
- Extraordinary Line (curated by Avijna Bhattacharya)
- ‘jo ġāyab hai, aur hāzir bhi’ – book sculptures of Saba Hasan (curated by Neha ‘Zooni’ Tickoo)
- ‘please touch gently (zines, comics, ephemera)’ (curated by aqui Thami, Bharath Murthy, and himanshu s)
When: October 4, 2025 – January 10, 2026
Where: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), DLF South Court Mall, Saket, New Delhi
Timings: 10:30 AM – 6:30 PM (Closed Mondays and National Holidays)
Admission: Free (visitors requested to register at reception upon arrival)
About KNMA: Established in 2010 as India’s first private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art from the subcontinent, KNMA houses over 15,000 artworks spanning from 3rd century BCE to contemporary practice. A non-commercial, not-for-profit institution supported by the Shiv Nadar Foundation, KNMA is expanding to a new 100,000-square-meter location near Indira Gandhi International Airport.
Cover image: Bhupen Khakhar | Untitled, 1988 and Anupam Sinha, Tanashah, Raj Comics, 1998
All images courtesy of KNMA
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