Artist Nur Mahammad’s exquisite paintings carry whiffs of Persian and Mughal miniatures. The artist, trained in Santiniketan, brings together traditional patterns and symbols while also reinterpreting them to tell stories of today. Coloured in blue, black and golden, Mahammad’s compositions appear like abstract landscapes, with stories concealed within. From within the repeated patterns of the arabesque—a decorative design of intertwined lines of floral and/or plant patterns— you can make out tiny drawings of a boat full of refugees, a forest being razed, and “bottles of hope” floating in the Mediterranean Sea. In Mahammad’s art, landscape appears as a symbolic space where memory, identity and experience intersect.
Fifteen of these acrylics on canvas and gouache-tempera works are being exhibited at Mumbai’s Anupa Mehta Contemporary Art in an exhibition titled Sukoot Uzr | Silence is not an Apology. The show talks about silence as a complex and powerful language that embodies resistance, remembrance and refusal in the world today, which is dealing with urgent issues like wars and climate change. Mahammad examines the response to the resulting displacement, cultural erasure, forced migration and fractured histories. The title emphasises that silence should not be mistaken for an apology or passive consent. Instead, it is an act of defiance, a strategy for survival and a way of preserving memory and identity when words are insufficient or impossible.
“For me, silence emerges not as an absence of voice but as a meaningful response to loss, exclusion, and injustice,” says Mahammad, 43, who is from Birbhum, West Bengal. He fragments stories across his paintings, bringing together landscape, architecture, history and personal experience in his work. The work, Floating Reflection, is inspired by Claude Monet’s Water Lilies. Mahammad depicts water through loops of the arabesque design, fashioned like Monet’s lilies. “The loop of the arabesque speaks of the endless process of shifting spaces and fragile belonging in search of home in the face of catastrophic urbanisation and ecological precarity,” says Mahammad.
Look closely and you will find cola bottles and Buraq, a nocturnal steed. Legends say that the creature carried Prophet Muhammad on the miraculous night journeys of Isra and Miraj. This motif of a winged creature, often depicted with a woman’s head and the body of a mule, is found in different images of Islamic art. In Mahammad’s paintings, the image gets an Indian touch with a tail of peacock feathers. The creature appears almost phantom-like, dodging surveillance, representing those whose homes survive only as memory and who are in perpetual passage, pointing at the labour migration, the struggles of proving one’s identity in West Bengal and displacement because of climate change and politics.
The cola bottles are the “silent resilience” bit of the story, referencing people from Egypt and Turkey expressing their anger and grief over the killings in Gaza. Palestine’s neighbours have been concealing messages of solidarity or food in these PET bottles and floating them in the Mediterranean Sea in the hope that they will reach the victims of war.
Another work, Two Shades II, is a diptych that highlights the transformation of a space into a contemplative narrative between physical and psychological ideas. One half consists of fragmented parts of a design, which speaks of past memories that are associated with the cultural history of a landscape. The other half is a cartographic map. It shows the complex urban structure of the present, responsible for the complicated social constructs. These force us to deal with everyday life, be it class or gender divide. In this work, he has also created an image of Faradyun, a noble character from the epic Persian poem Shahnameh, written by Ferdowsi between 977 and 1010 CE. Its 50,000 rhyming couplets weave together 6,000 years of Iranian history. In the painting Faradyun strikes the tyrant ruler Zahhak with an ox-headed mace to free the world from tyranny and fight for justice. “I use it as a metaphor of resilience against the sociopolitical oppression in the times we live in,” explains Mahammad.
His layered art has been shaped by his time at Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, mentorship from senior artists and his experience in Delhi where he now lives. At Kala Bhavana, the Khoai landscape, characterised by tiny canyon-like gullies, and rugged hummocks carved into red laterite, became central to his way of seeing.
The works of artists Ramkinkar Baij and Benode Behari Mukherjee taught him how landscape could be transformed into an artistic language that connects the external world with inner experiences. In 2009, Mahammad assisted K.G. Subramanyan on a black-and-white mural titled Sada-Kalo and learned how design could function symbolically and become a language for interpreting contemporary realities.
Santiniketan’s pedagogy rooted in Tagorean philosophy taught him to see art and nature as inseparable. “Later, I found a similar reverence for nature in Islamic art and architecture, which helped me connect these two traditions at a philosophical level,” he says. Delhi’s archaeological sites, monuments, and Indo-Islamic architecture also influenced him, prompting questions of belonging and identity. The exhibition is an amalgam of all these influences.
On view at Anupa Mehta Contemporary Art, Mumbai, till 9 July.
Riddhi Doshi is a Mumbai-based arts, culture and travel writer.