[{"id":24875,"date":"2026-09-24T12:42:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T16:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/momus.ca\/?p=24875"},"modified":"2026-09-25T18:36:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T22:36:14","slug":"not-just-a-relic-asking-who-gets-to-be-contemporary-at-knma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/momus.ca\/2026\/09\/24\/not-just-a-relic-asking-who-gets-to-be-contemporary-at-knma\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Just a Relic: Asking Who Gets to Be Contemporary at KNMA"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For much of its institutional life, folk art has occupied an uneasy position. Celebrated as a repository of heritage, it has often been denied the status of contemporary practice. Pata Dekhabo? (Shall I Show You a Pata?)<\/em><\/a> at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, in Delhi, challenges that relegation, presenting Pattachitra\u2014one of the oldest art forms in eastern India\u2014as a living tradition capable of transformation. The exhibition, which includes centuries-old art alongside recent work, resists framing authenticity as dependent upon a form\u2019s resistance to change. Here, the artists\u2019 engagement with contemporary realities becomes proof of the form\u2019s vitality rather than a departure from tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is something uncanny about encountering this itinerant storytelling convention in the Art Passage, a sky bridge connecting two Delhi shopping malls: Nexus Select Citywalk and DLF South Court, where the museum is located. At first glance, the setting seems to domesticate the work in Pata Dekhabo?<\/em>, reducing it to ornament. Yet the curators chose the bridge, rather than the museum\u2019s galleries inside DLF, for a reason. Patua artists, called Patuas or Chitrakars, historically worked in spaces of circulation rather than contemplation\u2014temple festivals, village squares, princely courts. The mall\u2019s accidental spectators reproduce these conditions in a more modern setting. Attention here is still provisional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title of the show poses a deceptively simple question: Shall I show you a picture? Traditionally, this was the phrase Patuas used as an invitation for the audience. But a pata has never been merely a picture. Pattachitra\u2014derived from the Sanskrit patta (cloth) and chitra (picture)\u2014is a scroll painting from eastern India (Odisha, Jharkhand, and West Bengal) and Bangladesh. The Patua was a one-person multimedia apparatus. They unfurled scrolls, singing the accompanying story, activating the painted surface through voice and rhythm. What emerged was an immersive, cross-modal encounter.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n\"Manasa-Mangal-4_2-301x1024\"<\/a>\n
Rani Chitrakar, Manasa Lakhinder Pata<\/em> (detail), 1940, Bengal Pata, Naya Village, Medinipur, West Bengal, India. Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, digital reproduction.<\/figcaption>\n