Artist, Nilima Sheikh: Construction Site was the seventh painting in the series, Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams.
I painted Construction Site soon after visiting Srinagar in Kashmir, when I had the privilege to accompany restoration architects on visits to several historical sites. It was gratifying to experience this positive act of rebuilding sites, which had been through time and neglect.
Keeping Srinagar in mind, I bring in other accounts of devastation, of building and rebuilding by referring to historical paintings for inspiration. Though they carry the memory of where my visual quotations come from, I also like the characters, motifs, and objects that I borrow to play new roles within my paintings.
In the center, at the bottom of the painting, is the narrator from the traditional Bhānd theater telling the story. On his left, graveyard diggers prepare a site to lay the dead within a garden.
The great Persian painter, Behzād from the 15th century, leads me through the making of this painting. I'm inspired by his great building sequences in the Zafarnama manuscript.
As your glance moves up to the center, the buildings and sites of Srinagar lead to 14th-century Florence, to an adaptation of the devastated chapel painted by the early Renaissance painter Giotto.
And then your eye moves upwards, where the rising, fleeing demon, borrowed from the 15th-century Turkish artist Siyah Kalem, carries away his loot. In the bottom margin are work-people’s tools, laid out as they might be in the paintings of a 19th-century manuscript about the professions of Kashmir.
When I was researching and preparing to paint the series Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams, I found accounts from history, myths, travelers’ accounts, journalists, and discursive writing that I wanted to share with my viewer. I enjoy this collaboration of word and text with the visual. They do certainly complement each other, but they also extend the meaning that what can’t be painted can be said, and the other way around.