Gallery Espace brings to Delhi, 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 comes after a gap of six years at Gallery Espace from April 17, 2009 to May 30, 2009. MOA is delighted to publish the comprehensive essay by Baroda-based scholar Deeptha Achar which is published in the well documented catalogue accompanying the show..

The artwork presented here by Nilima Sheikh can be seen as part of an unbroken trajectory, a set of preoccupations that have engaged her for several years now, more or less since 2000. Most immediately, these works resonate with the themes and the representational strategies that can be seen at play in the Firdaus and The Country without a Post Office series. What is strikingly new in this show, however, is the systematic way she explores the theme of community suffering in the face of sectarian violence and state brutality, mapping the difficult terrain where the everyday life of people intersects with large events in the public domain. Sheikh’s works thematize violence, terror, trauma, grief of ordinary people in Kashmir and Gujarat. Carefully avoiding the easy conflation of these two places via the axis of community, she explores the relationship of people to the place they live in, offers accounts of their ‘return’ to those spaces of violence which once constituted the very domain of everyday life. The motif of the return haunts this suite of seventeen works but in a way that refuses both a simple nostalgia as well as an unfettered confidence in the resilience of an oppressed people. The tension that is laid out across these incommensurate pulls forms the basis of her deceptively lyrical works in the present series.