Moving beyond museum pieces

(left) Installation view of the exhibition, 'The Rooted Nomad: M.F. Husain', in Venice; and Kiran Nadar, founder and chairperson, KNMA. PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY KNMA,

- Avantika Bhuyan

In 2010, when art collector and philanthropist Kiran Nadar opened her eponymous museum, the idea of a private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art was a novel one for India. Back then, not-for-profit art foundations set up by collectors, patrons and artists—Devi Art Foundation, Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, JSW Foundation and Khoj Studios, to name a few—to encourage collaboration and exchange were just taking baby steps. The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, or KNMA, became an integral part of this landscape as one of the first private museums in the country.

The museum—spread across two spaces in Saket, Delhi, and Noida, Uttar Pradesh—was a result of Nadar's fascination with art. Both in her collecting style and the programming at the museum, Nadar has displayed an unconventional attitude. She surprised everyone by picking Rameshwar Broota's Runners, a monochrome depicting a nude male torso, early in her collecting journey. Early on at KNMA, in 2014, she and director-chief curator Roobina Karode put together a three-part retrospective of Nalini Malani, You Can't Keep Acid in a Paper Bag, the first time the artist's vast oeuvre and her engagement with video art was showcased.

The focus on strong practices, especially of women artists, continued with shows of Nasreen Mohamedi, Arpita Singh, Anupam Sud, Zarina, Mrinalini Mukherjee and Jayashree Chakravarty. In recent years, themed exhibitions such as MIRROR/MAZE: Echoes of Song, Space, Spectre and The Elemental You—the first in a series on the practice of South Asian diaspora artists curated by Akansha Rastogi—have considered different aspects of the ecological and sociopolitical stimuli around us.