A new Mumbai exhibition sheds light on how India and the Arab world shaped each other's modernisms

Resonant Histories: India and the Arab World, now on view at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (JNAF) in Mumbai, is the result of years of shared research and institutional collaboration. Developed by JNAF, the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah and the CSMVS Museum, the exhibition traces the subtle, often unexpected ways in which artists from India and the Arab world came into one another’s orbit.

Personal relationships, historical coincidences, institutional links shape this Mumbai exhibit

The project began with the Barjeel collection, and then went on to include the Nicholson Collection, through which curators Puja Vaish and Suheyla Takesh sifted for works that revealed cross-regional affinities. As Vaish notes, “We approached the selection with an eye toward artistic dialogue between India and the Arab world, tracing shared modernist histories shaped by education, travel, and postcolonial exchange.”

Their research soon extended to the Barjeel collection, older Triennale-India catalogues, family archives and interviews, gradually mapping a web of connections formed through study, migration and shifting political landscapes.

Travel and mobility form one of the exhibition’s strongest threads. The Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi spent long stretches in Bahrain and Kuwait, where desert and coastal terrains shaped the spare, meticulously structured drawings she produced in the 1970s. Her use of grids, measured rhythms and exacting spatial logic is placed beside works by Arab artists similarly exploring geometry and abstraction, revealing parallel searches for order within rapidly transforming environments.

The Egyptian painter Nazek Hamdi offers another point of connection. Having studied at Tagore’s university and later in Rajasthan in 1955, Hamdi absorbed the visual idioms of the Bengal School. Her painting The Lotus Flower (The Lotus Girl), in which a woman in a sari holds a lotus, brings Egyptian and Indian motifs into what the exhibition describes as “quiet proximity.” The pairing underscores how artistic training in India gave Hamdi access to wider Asian modernist currents.The Lotus Flower (The Lotus Girl), 1955 

Politics also resonates throughout the show. Vivan Sundaram’s Eclipse (1991), made with charcoal and engine oil, forms a sombre focal point. Rather than depicting the Gulf War directly, the work evokes the conflict through materials whose “texture and smell recall industrial waste and burning fuel.”

Migration appears in more intimate registers. Mohamed Kazem’s depiction of a cramped room inhabited by a South Asian worker in Dubai—“a narrow bed, a shelf, a few belongings”—is set alongside Sudhir Patwardhan’s painting of a labourer in an improvised Mumbai shelter. Both works present the viewer with scenes that “neither dramatise nor embellish,” instead insisting on quiet attention to the movement of people across the Indian Ocean.

The show also highlights the circulation of political figures. Gandhi appears twice, once through an Egyptian lens and once through an Indian one, while a portrait of Gamal Abdel Nasser by a Syrian artist folds in references to Africa and Asia, echoing the ambitions of the Non-Aligned Movement. These works attest to how artists across regions registered one another’s struggles, solidarities and aspirations.

Behind the exhibition lies a story of institutional openness. A chance meeting in 2024 between Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi of Barjeel and Dr Sabyasachi Mukherjee of the CSMVS led to the collaboration. As Takesh reflects, “One can say that this exhibition is an entry point - an opening into a much larger field of study that continues to unfold.” A catalogue due in 2026 will extend this work.

Resonant Histories shifts the way modernism is perceived. By bringing together artists from Bahrain, Egypt, India, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia and the UAE, it foregrounds multiple lineages, simultaneous debates and contrasting approaches—“not to collapse them into a single narrative,” but to let their differences and echoes reshape the viewer’s understanding. It is a reminder that modern art, far from emerging from a single centre, took form through circuits of travel, exchange and long-distance conversation.

‘Resonant Histories: India and the Arab World': On view till 15 February 2026 at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, CSMVS, Mumbai.

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