Installation view of Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from September 27, 2026, through June 13, 2027. Photo by Jonathan Dorado © The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Indian artist Nilima Sheikh’s first solo presentation in New York City offers an expansive encounter with her world. These are paintings that ask you to look up, walk around, and read both sides. Organized with New Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Fractured Skies brings together three bodies of work exploring Kashmir, displacement, and the persistence of human connection.

Portrait of Nilima Sheikh in the exhibition Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from September 27, 2026, through June 13, 2027. Photo by Jonathan Dorado © The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Across a career spanning five decades, Sheikh has developed a language in which painted scenes, written passages, and stencilled patterns share the surface. Her scrolls invite movement rather than a single, fixed viewpoint. One source of her intricate patterning is sanjhi, a paper-cutting tradition used to decorate temple interiors—a craft she encountered at Delhi’s Crafts Museum and incorporated into her painting.

At the exhibition’s heart is Shahid/Witness (2025–26), a new commission comprising ten monumental suspended scrolls. Responding to the height of MoMA’s gallery, Sheikh directs the eye skyward, imagining the heavens as witnesses to a world marked by conflict and environmental catastrophe. Alongside it, Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams (2003–14) draws together the region’s histories and literary voices, while Home, Land (2023–25) considers the precarious lives of its nomadic Bakarwal communities.

For visitors, the invitation is to slow down: follow a passage of text, return to an image, and allow its meaning to unfold. Here, inherited forms remain active tools for confronting the present.

Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies is on view at MoMA, New York, through June 13, 2027.