New Delhi, July 4 -- 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.

F...