Nilima Sheikh works by gathering. Into a single scroll, she will bring a twelfth-century chronicle of Kashmir, a Mughal emperor’s notes on an antelope, the verses of a fourteenth-century mystic poet, and writing by a contemporary historian. Since 1969 she has built paintings in this manner, one layer at a time, holding beauty and violence in the same frame, neither subsumed by the other.
Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies asks what makes such work possible. Curators, art historians and family write from markedly different distances, followed by a montage of Sheikh’s own writing from the 1970s to 2023, most of it unpublished and gathered here for the first time. Together they map the sites and relationships that animate Sheikh’s practice: a household, a neighbourhood, a university department, and five decades spent making work alongside other people.

Published by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, and Mapin Publishing, on the occasion of the exhibition Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies, organised by the KNMA and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Edited by Roobina Karode, with essays by Cara Manes, Roobina Karode, Avijna Bhattacharya, Khushmi Mehta, Deeksha Nath and Nilima Sheikh
Publisher: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Mapin Publishing
Pages: 240
ISBN: 978-81-983821-5-3