This October, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) opens a new chapter in its ongoing dialogue between tradition and the contemporary. Three distinct yet intertwined exhibitions unfold across its galleries, each exploring how artists, across generations and mediums, turn line, language, and print into tools of memory, dissent, and renewal.
Founded in 2010 through the initiative of Kiran Nadar, avid art collector and patron, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art was India’s first private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art from the subcontinent. Supported by the Shiv Nadar Foundation, KNMA has since expanded its mandate to include classical, folk, and tribal art, creating dialogues that stretch across centuries and media.
As Director and Chief Curator, Roobina Karode puts it, “These three exhibitions facilitate a vibrant conversation within the museum, resonating with the expressive tenacity of the drawn line in the intimate drawings, the meditative silence and inner noise of Saba Hasan’s sculptural books and the rebellious, animated world of zines and comics.”
Roobina explains, “The spaces at KNMA have transformed into a multisensory archive, inviting diverse audiences to form connections with art through the important acts of seeing, reading, and even touching, ultimately reiterating KNMA’s mission as a vibrant hub for artistic and cultural dialogue.”
Curated by Avijna Bhattacharya, ‘Extraordinary Line’ places drawing at the centre of thought. Spanning the decades from post-Independence India to the post-liberalisation 1990s, the exhibition explores how artists have used the drawn line to navigate shifts in politics, identity, and collective consciousness.
Works by seventeen artists including Arpita Singh, Mery Borah, C Douglas, K Ramanujam, Bhupen Khakhar, Paritosh Sen, Nikhil Biswas, Jogen Chowdhury, Manish Pushkale, Balaji Ponna, Sambaran Das, and Vivan Sundaram among others, showcase the quiet power of the hand-drawn mark, as intimate as a diary entry and as charged as a manifesto.
In its first phase, the show reflects on drawing as a witness to postcolonial transformation: a way of recording, remembering, and questioning the world. Later, as India embraced globalisation, the line began to stretch, fragment, and mutate, responding to new forms of dislocation and uncertainty.
Here, each stroke holds tension and tenderness in equal measure, proof that even the simplest gestures can contain a nation’s restlessness. The second phase shifts to the post-liberalisation era of the 1990s – a time marked by rapid economic, social, and visual transformations.
The exhibition titled ‘jo ġāyab hai, aur hāzir bhi’ curated by Neha “Zooni” Tickoo (Curator, KNMA) showcases artist Saba Hasan’s book sculptures, which are folded, burned, and layered with organic materials.
This is the first time Hasan’s book sculptures are being presented in such breadth, spanning her early works, multimedia experiments, and recent pieces that treat text as both material and metaphor. Each work carries traces of transformation: books reconstituted into relics of memory, where meaning is not written but felt through touch, texture, and time.
Borrowing its title from Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Hum Dekhenge, the exhibition meditates on presence and absence, on what it means to bear witness in an age when words can be both fragile and incendiary. By placing her book sculptures alongside her video works, the exhibition becomes an elegy to impermanence.
In Hasan’s hands, the book ceases to be an object of knowledge. It transforms into a vessel of remembering, of quiet resistance, of beauty that survives its own undoing. By transforming something as familiar as a book into an object of contemplation, Hasan invites us to listen to what has been erased, to the murmur between text and emptiness, preservation and forgetting.
If Extraordinary Line is introspective and jo ġāyab hai, is meditative, then please touch gently, bursts forth with anarchic joy. Curated by aqui Thami, Bharath Murthy, and himanshu s, with curatorial advisor Akansha Rastogi, this exhibition transforms KNMA into a living, breathing print studio.
Part of the Young Artists of Our Times series, it brings together over a thousand zines, comics, and DIY publications made by independent artists, feminists, illustrators, and small presses from across India, in 22 languages. Visitors are invited to touch, read, photocopy, and even make their own. The exhibition foregrounds self-publishing, underground circulation, and the spirit of DIY, reversing the conventional “do not touch” museum mandate.
At the heart of the show is Chapaghar, a maker’s space envisioned by aqui Thami, where the rhythm of the photocopier meets the intimacy of collaboration. Pages whirr and stack like heartbeat and breath, dissolving hierarchies between reader and maker, art and life. In this tactile, participatory archive, zines emerge not just as printed matter but as tools of resistance, friendship, and storytelling.
For Kiran Nadar, the museum’s founder and chairperson, these exhibitions mirror KNMA’s evolving mission: to bridge media, generations, and sensibilities. “By presenting works across media, generations, and cultural contexts, the exhibitions blur the boundaries between popular and high art, demonstrating how creative expression, both formal and informal, can foster reflection, challenge conventions, and cultivate spaces for dialogue, resistance, and community,” she says.
With these three exhibitions, KNMA reaffirms its identity as a living institution, one that blurs boundaries between the popular and the formal, the ephemeral and the archival.
A decade and a half after its founding, KNMA continues to evolve as a cultural epicentre, one that nurtures artistic innovation and public engagement in equal measure. Across lines, books, and zines, KNMA’s new season reads like a love letter to the act of making a reminder that art, in all its forms, remains our most enduring language for remembering, resisting, and beginning again.
The museum’s upcoming architectural expansion, spanning over 100,000 square meters near the Indira Gandhi International Airport, will further this vision. The new space will house multiple exhibition galleries, a performance centre, an education block, an archive, a library, restaurants, and a members’ room.
Date: 5th Oct 2025 – 10th Jan 2026
Venue: KNMA, Saket
Timing: 10:30 am – 6:30 pm
The museum is closed on Monday and all National holidays. Admission to exhibitions is free
