Exhibition Details

Aicon is pleased to announce Healing Wounds, the first solo exhibition of Veer Munshi (b. 1955, Srinagar, Kashmir) in New York. Forced to leave Kashmir in 1990 following the rise of Wahhabi radicalism, Munshi settled in Delhi, where he has since established himself as an artist whose political works depict the anguish of displacement from home and separation from one’s culture. The works on display also highlight the artist’s incorporation of traditional Kashmiri crafts like papier-mâché and Kari-e-Kalamkari in contemporary practice.
Healing Wounds builds upon Munshi’s earlier series, Shrapnel, to create what the artist calls an aesthetics of counter-violence. The monochromatic forms in Shrapnel were based upon the fragments of bombs, cars, and buildings following eruptions of extreme violence both in Kashmir and abroad; coiled springs, broken pipes, and jagged metal debris float in all directions around people in various states of distress. For Healing Wounds, Munshi stitches these shrapnel fragments together to create delicate, almost lace-like backdrops for finely detailed polychrome paintings. The jagged edges are softened and yet remain visible—the wounds are healing, not healed.