Nilima Sheikh’s ‘Drawing Trails; Work on paper 2008-09’ includes 16 large creations.

New Delhi based Gallery Espace presents ‘Drawing Trails; Work on paper 2008-09’ by Nilima Sheikh, a solo exhibition of 16 large works (tempera on sanganer paper) and 15 book illustrations by veteran artist Nilima Sheikh.

The exhibition will also be accompanied with a well documented catalogue with a comprehensive essay by Baroda-based scholar Deeptha Achar.

In her characteristic style, which engages the contemporary through a careful positioning of diverse techniques and histories, the works that form part of the show (April 2009) engage with violence, trauma and grief in the lives of ordinary people in troubled regions, using the mediation of the written word.

Her imagined geographies set up a play between the fantastic and the real in a way that allows the emotional landscape of the remembering self to emerge. While exploring the theme of community suffering, her language works its way through art histories of visual traditions, particularly of Asia.

Many of her works are accompanied with excerpts from various articles and poems. For example her work titled ‘A girl called Bhawan’ includes a poem by Nund Rishi/ Hazrat Nuruddin (1356-1440 C.E.).

Similarly, ‘My hometown’ carries an excerpt from the article ‘My Hometown’ by MK Raina, published in Communalism Combat, January 2005. ‘Route 2’ and ‘Tree Planter’ are her works on Kashmir, with a focus on the poetry of Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali.

Whether it is the persona of Agha Shahid Ali showing the pain of leaving Kashmir or the figures grieving as they leave in ‘At a certain point I lost track of you’, the body itself becomes the repository of the past, an archive of things familiar that are left behind.

Nilima Sheikh’s specific engagement with the body in these works has allowed her to explore the intimate relationship between community practice, body and land. The picnic, marked by outdoor cooking, is staged as a Kashmiri practice that can emerge in good weather, in good times. Now, however, as ‘Tree planter’ and ‘What happened that day 2’ suggest, such good times, framed through histories of violence, are hard to come by.

‘What happened that day 3’ with an excerpt from ‘Shalimar the Clown’ by Salman Rushdie carries the following text in it: “What happened that day in Pachigam need not be set down here in full detail, because brutality is brutality and excess is excess and that’s all there is to it.

There are things that must be looked at indirectly because they would blind you if you looked them in the face, like the fire of the sun. So, to repeat: there was no Pachigam any more. Pachigam was destroyed. Imagine it yourself. Second attempt: The village of Pachigam still existed on maps of Kashmir, but that day it ceased to exist anywhere else, except in memory. Third and final attempt: The beautiful village of Pachigam still exists.

In the series of paintings titled ‘Route’, Nilima Sheikh references a set of photographs taken by a Kashmiri father en route to the cemetery, mourning over a son lost to militancy. The photographs and the diary written by the man surely stand as testimony to his grief, but also represent a will to remember, to record. At one level, Sheikh renders the route of mourning, directly drawing references from the photographs.

The organization of ‘Route 2’, for example, into distinct panels that are nevertheless worked into a continuity replicate the physical form of the photographs as well as the linear quality of the route. Sheikh’s exploration of the space between grieving and memory, however, refuses to be confined to the single instance of a father’s sorrowing; it gestures towards grieving over Kashmir itself as the reference to ‘I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight’ by Agha Shahid Ali makes all too clear.

In ‘Return’, the artist creates a landscape scattered with the rubble of a now abandoned settlement, a man scrabbles in the debris for once shining things that constituted his past. The abandoned houses gesture to violence that has forced their inhabitants to leave. What does he seek—his possessions, his past, memory itself? Does he wish to build an archive of his grief?

His gestures speak to those of the old woman who attempts to rekindle the domestic hearth in ‘Testimony’, but side by side his actions resonate with the three women who wish to testify, who are themselves testimony and record of devastation, who will the translation of memory into recorded history.

Apart from other paintings in the show, there are also on display Nilima Sheikh’s illustrations from the children’s book ‘Moon in the pot’ by Gopini Karunakar that showcase the story of a child’s urge to play with the moon.

The story is narrated through the eyes of a small kid whose grandmother Guddawwa creates a magical world of stories for her grandson. Old Guddawwa faced a life full of struggle and hardships and her only muse were her grandchildren and other kids in the community.