A celebrated series of paintings serve as a window onto the past, present, and future of Kashmir.
Part of Free First Sunday.
Explore the layered, multicultural complexity of Kashmir through a famed series of works by contemporary artist Nilima Sheikh (Indian, b. 1945) in this illustrated lecture by Dr. Madhuvanti Ghose, the Alsdorf Associate Curator of Indian, Southeast Asian and Himalayan Art at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Sheikh’s visions of Kashmir incorporate “visual references from pre-Renaissance Italian art to Bihzad to the magnificent demonography of the Siyah Qalam and Thangka art, amongst others,” writes scholar Kaushik Bhaumik, who also notes Sheikh’s engagement with the 17th-century Indian emperor Jahangir’s description of Kashmir as Paradise on earth.
In Sheikh’s work, says Bhaumik, “it is not a simple lament for the destruction of Paradise by political violence that we see. Instead, what we get from the artist is an unraveling in various directions of the multiple layers of forces of history at play in Kashmir today, the outcome of which is yet to be seen.”
Dr. Madhuvanti Ghose is the inaugural Alsdorf Associate Curator of Indian, Southeast Asian and Himalayan Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Since joining the museum in 2007, she has curated and organized a series of exhibitions on various aspects of Indian art. Dr. Ghose was previously Lecturer in South Asian Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She completed her doctoral dissertation from the University of London and was a Research Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University. She has served on the board of trustees and the executive committee of the American Association of Art Museum Curators, and is a recipient of the Center for Curatorial Leadership fellowship.
Free admission on the first Sunday of every month is made possible by Northern California Kaiser Permanente.
