KNMA at 15: a museum in motion

Despite the absence of a building, the private museum has gone from 500 works to over 15,000, expanded its scope beyond just exhibitions to theatre and more

Weeks before she set a new record for Indian art by buying a lost M.F. Husain painting called Gram Yatra in a Christie’s sale for ₹119 crore, Kiran Nadar was sitting in the conference room of her museum’s Saket outpost, musing about how her art collecting style had grown. “When I’m collecting an artist, I try to make it in-depth,” she said with a smile. “Be it Husain or Souza or Raza, if I had 10 works then, I have 50-100 works now.”

It was the opening day of the major retrospective on the poet-painter-critic Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh, and the museum was abuzz with activity — getting louder as the artist himself stepped in. Of the over 100 works being shown as part of Worlds Within Worlds, several are borrowed but a significant chunk come from Nadar’s personal collection, including Sleepless City, which was the first work she acquired, and Kaavad, the most prominent of his works.

“The way he draws intimacy in rooms, the way he brings out the colours of nature always takes me by surprise,” she had said earlier with a smile, herself resplendent in a sapphire blue suit. Now she added: “I had no art background, so this is all self-learnt. My interests have become more varied. For someone who started with 500 works and has grown that into over 15,000 in the last 10-12 years, this is a huge leap.”

It’s a busy season of big moves for the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, now in its 15th year. Just days earlier, the second edition of their Legacy series — a series dedicated to honouring enduring Indian families in the performing arts — took off at the Triveni Kala Sangam in Delhi with acclaimed sarangi maestro Murad Ali Khan from the Moradabad Gharana in concert and conversation with author-composer Anish Pradhan.

This was preceded by the first ever KNMA Theatre Festival at Sunder Nursery, where 13 plays explored the idea of the “power of vulnerability”, including folk ritualistic performances such as Beesu Kamsale and a contemporary reimagination of The Arabian Nights.

And not too far away now is the launch of the piece de resistance in KNMA’s long storied journey — the new museum designed by Ghanaian-British architect Sir David Adjaye — finally a physical home to call their own.

“We started in Noida in 2010, with a show called Open Doors,” recalled Nadar. “My collection wasn’t especially huge but I knew I wanted to open a museum. We quickly realised that Noida was the wrong place for footfalls. In 2011, we opened KNMA in Saket in a mall, because we thought we’d get the footfalls that came to the mall, but unfortunately this mall never got populated the way it was expected. We had to work to build that up.”