PARTITION: THE LONG SHADOW

Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan
together with
Heinrich Boll Foundation,
India Habitat Centre
and
Zubaan Books
invite you to
the tenth talk in their series

PARTITION: THE LONG SHADOW

Imaging Dislocations: A Talk by Nilima Sheikh

Gulmohar Hall India Habitat Centre
29 July 2008
6.30 pm



Envisaged as a series of dialogues, lectures and readings from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Partition - The Long Shadow is a year-long programme marking the 60th anniversary of the Partition of India, a seminal event in the history of the subcontinent. The series of talks and discussions aims memorialize that history and caution against a repetition.

Can images, colour and texture convey something about trauma that goes beyond the expressive capacity of words? This question seems to provoke Nilima Sheikh's elegiac yet lyrical paintings based on Partition's aftermath on collective memory. Executed in 2003, these works are of disparate enough types to elude being grouped into a streamlined 'series'. Nevertheless, a thematic and affective unity binds them into a complex examination of the ways in which the painful events of 1947 have branded the innermost recesses of a modern South Asian identity and self.' (Ananya Jahanara Kabir)

Nilima Sheikh was born in 1945 in New Delhi. She studied history at the Delhi University (1962-65) and painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda (MFA, 1971). She taught painting at the Faculty between 1977 and 1981. Nilima Sheikh held her first solo exhibition in New Delhi in 1983, and has shown her work widely since then. Her practice has embraced various kinds of painting, from the hand-held miniature to an architectural scale and from conventionally hung paintings to scrolls and screens for the theatre stage. Prominent exhibitions include solo shows in Bombay, Delhi and Ahmedabad (1983, '84, '85, '93 and '95); Group Exhibition, New Delhi (1974); Pictorial Space, New Delhi (1977); New Contemporaries, Bombay (1978); touring exhibition in West Germany (1982); Through the Looking Glass in Bhopal, New Delhi, Bangalore, Bombay (1987 - 89); Dispossession, Africus, First Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa (1995); and The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (1996).