Nilima Sheikh’s practice is rooted in storytelling—through image, song, history, and lived experience. We meet the artist at the end of a quiet mud road in Baroda, where a green gate opens into a small compound and a house filled with light. Upstairs, her studio unfolds beneath high ceilings and north-facing windows, exaggerating the scale of the space and the works within it. A monumental scroll painting stretches across the floor, still in the process of becoming.
Sheikh shows us around her studio: children’s books she has written and illustrated, pigments gathered from near and far, and stencils that recur throughout her work—sometimes prominently, sometimes almost invisibly. Trained first as a historian and later as a painter at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda under K.G. Subramanyan, Sheikh came of age in the 1970s alongside a generation of women artists who held space for one another at a time when the art world was overwhelmingly male.
Drawing from miniature painting, oral traditions, and poetry, Sheikh’s work has, over the last two decades, returned repeatedly to the histories and lived realities of Kashmir. “The artist’s role is to bear witness,” she tells us—bringing together past and present to create a visual language that holds complexity, grief, and endurance. In this BMW Artist Film, Sheikh reflects on painting as a form of listening, remembering, and carrying stories forward.
Nilima Sheikh was born in New Delhi in 1945 and lives and works in Baroda. Her work has been exhibited widely in India and internationally, including at Documenta and the Barbican Center and in major solo exhibitions at Gallery Chemould.
