Kiran Nadar on a landmark exhibition from her museum collection: ‘Art can do what politics and public discourse often cannot — it creates space for empathy’

Early morning, 1973, close to the sea; the artist Ramanujam disappears into his drawing, after turning into a black dog.

These words appear in Mochu’s 2015 film A Gathering at the Carnival Shop, a semi-fictional biopic about the artist K. Ramanujam, who died in 1973 at the age of 32. In the film, Mochu suggests that rather than dying — possibly by suicide, although the details remain mysterious — the artist simply dissolved into one of his fabulous pictures.

A new exhibition at Christie’s opens with Ramanujam’s dreamlike, enchanting artworks. Lead curator Akansha Rastogi considers the connections between the artist’s floating realms, with their multiple perspectives, and the very nature of a museum collection: a place of overlapping narratives, which she describes as ‘contradictory, porous, absorbing, but also radiant’.

The Meeting Ground: Scenes from the KNMA Collection brings together works from the world-renowned Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA). While the museum’s new premises — covering more than one million square feet — are under construction in Delhi, works by 67 artists from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have travelled to Christie’s in London for this special non-selling exhibition.

For the museum’s founder, the collector and philanthropist Kiran Nadar, bringing the collection to London marks ‘a particularly meaningful moment’ at a time of growing international interest in expanding the narratives of art history beyond traditional Western frameworks. ‘South Asian art has always been rich, diverse and globally relevant,’ she says, ‘yet it has often been underrepresented in major international institutions.’

KNMA holds more than 16,000 artworks from South Asia, dating from the 3rd century onwards, encompassing classical, folk, tribal and indigenous traditions, together with modernist and experimental contemporary art. Faced with such a multitude of genres, styles and histories, the curators chose to divide the exhibition into five ‘scenes’: Seeking Affinities; Regions of Remembrance; Body — Present Continuous; Clearing; and Unfinished Homelands. ‘They form the scaffolding through which we can map the complex developments across South Asian art history,’ says Rastogi.

By avoiding a chronological narrative, the exhibition offers many meeting points between different protagonists. ‘It highlights alliances premised on comradeship, hospitality and dialogues, as well as unease, contestation and diverging paths,’ says the curator.

This desire to break down barriers in a quest for artistic liberation was central to the practice of Jagdish Swaminathan. The post-colonial artist, who was a co-founder of Group 1890 in the 1960s, summed up the mood of the times in his powerful manifesto: ‘Art is neither conformity to reality nor a flight from it, it is reality itself, a whole new world of experience, the threshold for the passage into the state of freedom.’

His wondrous painting Homage to Solzhenitsyn (1973) — a triptych created in admiration of the Russian dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s defence of artistic autonomy and truth — is featured in the exhibition, together with paintings by his fellow Group 1890 members Jeram Patel and Himmat Shah.

Further examples of artistic camaraderie come from members of the Progressive Artist Group, which, in the post-colonial era, took up the challenge of creating a South Asian art identity when links to Indian traditions had been broken by years of British rule. Maqbool Fida Husain’s rich scenes of agricultural life employ surprising perspectives and Cubist techniques to create a brooding neo-romanticism — heavy with meaning, but also glorious in colour and substance.

The exhibition also includes a painting by the Progressive’s mercurial leader, Francis Newton Souza. Man and Woman Grinding Their Teeth (1957) is an arresting image. The raw energy of the scored lines of black oil paint on the faces speak of the difficulty of expressing oneself during times of political turmoil.

Nearby, works by Zarina give eloquent form to the experience of displacement, something that became a central concern to many artists during the 1947 Partition. Zarina’s Home is a Foreign Place forms part of Unfinished Homelands, the final scene in the exhibition, which brings together artists such as Rasheed Araeen and Anwar Jalal Shemza to consider the shifting sands of contested space.

The ability of art to create alliances remains highly relevant to Kiran Nadar today, in an increasingly polarised world: ‘Art can do what politics and public discourse often cannot — it creates space for empathy rather than argument. It allows us to engage with complexity, hold multiple perspectives, and connect with the human stories behind issues like memory, migration and belonging.’

As KNMA grows into one of the world’s foremost cultural institutions, Mrs Nadar reflects on the responsibilities that accompany its development: ‘The goal has never been simply to build a large museum, but to build one that serves the public with integrity and purpose.’

The works on show in London offer a glimpse of the possibilities of such a museum: not a monument to a fixed version of history, but a place where overlooked connections emerge and collide. The Meeting Ground is less a survey of South Asian art than an invitation to reconsider how art histories are made — through encounters, disagreements and shared acts of the imagination.

The Meeting Ground: Scenes from the KNMA Collection is on show at Christie’s in London until 21 August 2026