Remembering, Resistance and Kashmir’s Unquiet Art in Delhi

Srinagar: It’s autumn in Kashmir. A woman standing by a shallow stream, cloaked in an old black burqa, holds a beige suitcase with her feeble hands. 

"Gul che maraan, bhoye kati chu maraan (flowers may die, but stenches persist)," reads a message written in bold black Nastaliq script on the suitcase. 

The woman in the photo is visual artist Lubna Bashir who hails from south Kashmir. The performance print is from her 2025 act ‘Gaeb Gamut’ (Disappeared) which is being showcased at an exhibition in New Delhi’s Triveni Kala Sangam. 

The exhibition, For Now, Unquiet, is presented by the Yusmarg Collective under the India Art Fair’s Young Collectors Programme. 

Yusmarg Collective is a space for cultural practitioners that took shape in the aftermath of the curbs in J&K following the reading down of Article 370 and the Covid 19 pandemic. 

In the post-Article 370 era where any political discussion on J&K can attain dangerous hues, the exhibition is a bold attempt by five young artists from Kashmir to “bear witness” to the “unresolved, layered and insistently alive” realities of the region, reads the description of the exhibition.

In times of growing censorship and authoritarian tendencies, the exhibition draws attention to some of the pressing issues in contemporary politics. Photo: The Wire.

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Academic Sandip K. Luis in his article, The Great Indian Hyperfascism: Art of Subjection and Survival Among One-Fifth of the World’s Population presents Kashmir as a site to locate “the true character of ‘Indian contemporary art’. 

The exhibition at Triveni Kala Sangam presents glimpses of it. 

In times of growing censorship and authoritarian tendencies that push art and creative expression into obscurity, the exhibition draws attention to some of the pressing issues in contemporary politics. 

It marks a rare and significant moment as a focused gathering of Kashmiri artists on a major Delhi platform after years of political rupture, infrastructural breakdown and cultural isolation following 2019. 

The exhibition constructs a tightly argued curatorial proposition around time, spectrality and evidentiary residue. 

The curatorial premise frames time as stratified and unsettled, as a fold where memory, precariousness and present coexist into a continuum. 

Undocument, 2025, Saqib Bhat. Photo: The Wire.

The selection of works across video, performance prints, aquatints and altered documents appear structured to build an aesthetic of an afterimage to turn them into a carrier of unresolved conditions.

The exhibition “speaks of the persistence of memory, of gestures, of bodies that remain, for now, unquiet,” said Salman B. Baba, curator of this exhibition.

Baba who is fresh from the sixth edition of the Kochi Muziris Biennale where he co-curated the Western Himalayan region for Students Biennale also showcases some performance prints from his 2021 work ‘Horror of tulips’ at the exhibition. 

The prints feature a ghoulish figure at Tulip Garden in the summer capital Srinagar, a hyper-curated tourist landscape that collapses the spectacle of paradise into a point of critique. The ‘unsettled quite cries, 2024’ is part of the exhibition.

“My performance attempts to question and resist narratives that favour exotic and nationalistic rhetoric through which Kashmiri landscape and body are seen today,” Salman who works between New Delhi and Kashmir said. 

‘Undocument I, 2024’, a screen-print on processed leather by artist Saqib Mohammad Bhat features a visage of  Agha Shahid Ali, Kashmir’s most prominent poet who wrote in English. 

Dham dith Kraekhnaad (unsettled quiet cries), 2024, Salman B. Baba. Photo: The Wire.

Bhat has overlaid Ali’s smiling face on the Instrument of Accession, a historical document which sealed the fate of J&K after the unelected Dogra king Maharaja Hari Singh acceded to the Union of India in the aftermath of the events of the 1947 partition. 

Bhat’s overwriting sovereign paperwork with poetic presence materially attacks the neutrality of bureaucratic authority. The document becomes skin that renders the very idea of legitimacy fragile and vulnerable.

Bhat, a Srinagar-born artist whose work focuses on the intersection of memory and political geography, describes ‘Undocument’ as an ongoing series which stages a “confrontation between lyrical memory and bureaucratic violence”. 

He was awarded the Journalist Fund Europe Grant in 2023. His significant work has also been exhibited at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Lalit Kala Akademi and All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society.

Bashir who is studying visual arts explains that the suitcase in her performance is shown to contain the clothes of men who have been subjected to enforced disappearance since an armed insurgency broke out in Jammu and Kashmir in the early 1990s. 

According to some estimates, between 8000 to 10,000 Kashmiris have disappeared over the last more than three decades of conflict, mostly in Kashmir. For their families, a closure remains evasive, but they continue to cling onto hope. 

Horror of tulips, 2024, Salman B. Baba. Photo: The Wire.

“Many such clothes are still carefully kept by families hanging in closets, waiting to be claimed. These garments are quiet testimonies of a presence denied,” reads the description of Bashir’s artwork.

In his 2022 ‘The Clown of Yachh-e-Gham’ performance, archival prints from which are on display at the exhibition, artist Khursheed Ahmad reinterprets the political landscape of author Salman Rushdie’s ‘Shalimar the Clown’ through a Bhand (clown). 

Ahmad was born into a family of Bhands or folk artists in Kashmir who have played a significant role in public theatrical spaces over the centuries. The clown in his performance is a disruptor of the harsh political realities of Kashmir. 

Bushra Mir, a Srinagar-based visual artist, has a two minute 36 second video titled Awaaz, 2019 at the exhibition which has been taken from Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2014 critically acclaimed film Haider. 

The clip is drawn from one of the most remarkable scenes set in Srinagar’s Lal Chowk where Haider (Shahid Kapoor) springs up following the disappearance of his father. 

With a noose around his neck, Haider asks: ‘Hello…can you hear my voice?’

Iron lady I & II, 2024, Saqib Bhat. Photo: The Wire.

The clip shows Haider’s voice diminished and his face altered using visual effects to dilute his voice.

“His question has a chilling potency in the light of the government’s internet blackout in Kashmir which lasted several months. The words seem to exist but without meaning. Everything is audible and yet increasingly unintelligible,” she said. 

The clip shows Haider’s voice being thrust into echoes, his scale diminished and his image scattered repetitively in patterns, turning an individual's desire to have voice into a potent collective cry. 

Bushra’s work destabilises cinematic authority by fragmenting and echoing a filmic voice associated with Kashmir. It turns speech into interference and highlights communicative breakdown under conditions of blackout and overload. 

This work was previously exhibited in 2021 at Melbourne’s Margaret Lawrence Gallery in ‘Can you hear my voice?’ curated by David Sequeira.

That the exhibition counters the cultural production of Kashmiri imagery in recent years remains its strongest point. It alters how Kashmir can be seen and replaces spectacle with trace and counter-evidence. Through diverse media, it succeeds to produce a formal coherence to present a shared visual and conceptual vocabulary. 

The exhibition is scheduled to continue till February 8 at Triveni Kala Sangam.

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