Looking, Searching: Visual References in Nilima Sheikh’s Archive

Within the personal archive of the Vadodara-based artist Nilima Sheikh, a specific section titled “Visual References” contains a wide array of materials from across geographies (particularly in Asia) that the artist was looking at, researching, citing and reimagining as part of her practice. The records in this collection are named according to the categories created by Sheikh for her own reference. These include wildlife photographs in calendars; images of sculptures from Nepal, Tibet and China; Persian manuscript painting; European murals; studies of birds from ornithological books and scans of intricate ceramic designs (among others).

These directly put forth the artist’s extensive cross-cultural visual vocabulary that was able to contain, as well as render, a multiplicity of art historical trajectories and forms. The fact of their accessibility online in her archive, which has been digitised by the Asia Art Archive, enables a unique virtual encounter with the scans and photographs of/from books, notebooks, scrapbooks, etc. It creates a layered visual experience where, in conversation with the rest of the archive, the viewer is able to make non-linear connections, find patterns, familiarise themselves with distant (in time, space, context) art historical forms and observe how small details from the references make their way into Sheikh’s artworks.

Sheikh practises predominantly in the medium of painting, with works on paper, large scrolls and installations, as well as theater set designs and illustrations for children’s books. The artist’s archive highlights her deep engagement with questions of nation, cosmopolitanism and histories of displacement and migration through complex geographies. These explorations are evident in her work on Kashmir, the Silk Road and the partitions of the subcontinent on the one hand, and femininity, an investment in domestic spaces and close neighbourhoods on the other. The archive also foregrounds her intensive research from the 1980s through travels and documentation of “traditional” or “historical” art forms such as Pichhavai painting. Along with the visual references are also a set of textual references, including the work of poets dealing with issues of home, belonging, identity and exile, such as Lal Ded, Mahmoud Darwish, Agha Shahid Ali, Amitav Ghosh and Li Bai.

In her monograph, Trace Retrace, which presents a selection of Sheikh’s works from 1969 to 2010, the artist talks about the range of histories referenced in her work. Reflecting particularly on the complication of working with traditional art forms, she is quoted as saying, “Retrieval of lost, loved tongues is not about return. It is about building a history, an archive, a thesaurus.”

Within these files, it sometimes becomes difficult to discern whether the images are taken from books or photographed during Sheikh's travels. In some of them, however, there are certain hints of engagement—fingers pointing at sculptures or hands carefully restoring paintings at twelfth-century temple sites. It is unclear if these are Sheikh, but it alludes to the artist’s orientation to and process of investigating multiple forms and techniques. It gestures towards the care with which these notebooks and scrapbooks are composed and assembled—the artist’s attempt to create a deeply personal and yet expansive “...history, archive, thesaurus.”

To read more about the Nilima Sheikh Archive, please click here.

All images from the Nilima Sheikh Archive, Asia Art Archive. Images courtesy of Nilima Sheikh and Asia Art Archive.