“ In a way, what I would like to point out in the end is that this series is not a tribute but an insight –it taught me to see no contradiction between precision and proliferation. Visual enumeration may not
be an antagonist to economy, nor the use of stereotype to invention. Now, more than ever before, it is crucial to look for ways to release the understanding of the past from the politics of reduction.
As against the ‘masculinisation’ of modernism, I was looking for a ‘feminisation’ of painting, the language and intimate scale of a miniature helped me to find my voice. Marxist historians looked down
at the reactionary feudal structures that produced these miniatures. I was not alien to that interpretation. If that structure had femininity, I could find a different way of looking at it.” Nilima Sheikh.

See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight By Agha Shahid Ali One must wear jeweled ice in dry plains to will the distant mountains to glass. The city from where no news can come Is now so visible in its curfewed nights that the worst is precise:

From Zero Bridge
a shadow chased by searchlights is running
away to find its body. On the edge
of the Cantonment, where Gupkar Road ends,
it shrinks almost into nothing, is
nothing by Interrogation gates
so it can slip, unseen, into the cells:
Drippings from a suspended burning tire
Are falling on the back of a prisoner,
the naked boy screaming, “I know nothing.”
A poem on Kashmir becomes an apt epitaph for a new series in the life and works of artist Nilima Sheikh.

At Chemould Prescott in Mumbai and then at Art Institute Chicago,Nilima Sheikh’s new set of works on Kashmir, with a focus on the poetry of Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali, form the core of her recent series titled “ Each Night Put Kashmir in your dreams .” As the painter recounts: “I had planned a bigger, more ambitious take, wanting to read and refer to various accounts of Kashmir historical and contemporary to try and put together configurations to rework my fairly confused or at least mixed feelings on Kashmir.”