Viewing The Meeting Ground: Scenes from the KNMA Collection

Common ground.

This summer, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art travels from New Delhi to King Street with The Meeting Ground: Scenes from the KNMA Collection, a major institutional exhibition staged with Christie’s as part of its summer exhibition series. Free to visit, it offers London audiences a rare glimpse into one of South Asia’s most important museum collections, at a moment when KNMA is preparing for its vast new standalone home in New Delhi.

Curated by Akansha Rastogi with Preeti Bahadur, Avijna Bhattacharya, Premjish Achari and Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, the exhibition brings together modern and contemporary works alongside folk and indigenous practices from South Asia in a set of scenes in which artists, materials and ways of thinking are set in conversation with one another.

The exhibition develops through a set of interlinked strands rather than a single linear narrative. It begins with a dialogue between modernists including M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza, Jeram Patel, K.C.S. Paniker, K.G. Subramanyan and K. Ramanujam, mapping exchanges between different centres of artistic production in India from the mid-twentieth century to the present, before expanding into a more performative register where artists such as Neha Choksi, LN Tallur and Simryn Gill explore how acts of listening and mark-making keep memory alive. A further strand foregrounds figures including Zainul Abedin, Anwar Jalal Shemza, Zarina Hashmi, F.N. Souza and Bani Abidi, whose practices resist the rigid borders imposed by modern cartographies.

Running through these movements are artists rooted in indigenous traditions, among them Jangarh Singh Shyam and Jivya Soma Mashe, alongside the collaborative work of Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad. Together, these threads build a layered account of desire, belonging and displacement, and invite viewers to reconsider how a collection might be experienced. Essential viewing.