i am happy to share the news that i received the pollock krasner art grant 2022 for my book sculptures. i have been working with books conceptually and as material for over a decade, this frees me to develop ideas just the way i want to. it also provides a connection for life with the wonderful lee krasner and jackson pollock as radical artists who support each other, thank you pollock krasner foundation new york and all supportive friends !
Saba’s works, whichever genre they may belong to, carry with them that element of the first strike. It can be a smudge of charcoal, a dash of colour in a layered space of different tones of white and off white. It can be colour emerging from layered applications of different tones or it can be a flash of light in a web of shadow. For the discerning eye these formal characteristics give one the feeling of the light at the end of a tunnel, which provides a visual arousal of hope even in the darkest of surroundings. This comes out sharply in her video where we see reflections on the Dal Lake with the flow of the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz recited by Zehra Nigah, evoking a profound sense of empathy with the human condition.
This element of hope is reflected in the powerful undercurrents that characterise her work irrespective of the medium she uses. Sweeping lines, whorls and the flow of a liquid motion give us the confidence that if running water can cut through stone over time, how much easier is it for motivated people to do the same if they are determined to reach their goal ?
Indeed, while the mere promise of motion in a visual illusion in two dimensional space can inspire one, it is the intervention of elements of concrete spaces that become forms in her art and awaken memories in every one of us. The locations vary from New York, Chicago, Paris, Salzburg to Srinagar, Kochi and Colombo, allowing one to enter the basis of her experience and blend one’s own perception with it and this gives us yet another dimension through which we can appreciate her work.
This exhibition reflects the joy and empathy inherent in non-figurative art while not losing the individual character and concrete references of each work as a moment in the life of the artist. It reflects both the present and its germination in the experiences of her past and also in the future in the eye of the viewer. All this is transparent in Saba’s works and reflects the depth of what one can appreciate through her art. This is, in essence, its value.
Suneet Chopra, Art Critic & Writer
by Punam Zutshi
Saba Hasan’s show lays no claim to a central theme. It simply says ‘Mixed Media works by Saba Hasan’ on the invitation on an evocative image of nine texts that lie in wraps on wooden prayer book stands, speaking of sanctity. The light streams in on them greedily, artfully , recruited to the larger design of the installation, bringing the outside in….
So you enter: a book sprouts in military precision a border of nails… not quite a bed of nails but something that ensures that we are in the realm of violence and vulnerability… crucified and bound over and over… treated like a block of wood rather than a body, a corpus of paper… nailed shut… over killed as with a surfeit of last nails in a coffin … except that the coffin hides its secrets… Or is it that the books bristle, threaten to draw blood, lacerate, wound…
The books burn or get burned, grow fossilised, get enbalmed, bound tightly … subject to the vagaries and the aggression that is visited on the earth, even the self… Are these not eternal books yielding secrets? Are these false or meaningless?
Or are these caught in a dance of violence… even as the earths furrows run deep, swampy and ravine like… books are not trod in the mud like mad… but they are the object of mainly man’s aggression or discernment?
Is it wrong to connect too much? Wrong to think of a whole (deny the presence of gentler pieces that should not be drawn into this ineluctable train of meaning?) a sequence, as a journey past forests and leaves and mystical storms creating disquiet ? The rites of spring demand the sacrifice of books grown old? Even as I proclaim that sound, the oral is sacred, shruti not smriti…I cannot deny the place of smriti, the written..are we too sequestered in the attitude that raises a book that we drop, to one’s head as an act of apology to the goddess… does this prevent one from renting the veil to reveal meaning/ meanings?
A book is given a burial, it is shrouded, the chattering brooks, the books of nature yield up their meaning and pebbles, to be collected or incarcerated?
Where are the acts of God, which the acts of man ?
Is this a fight for authenticity, for a fierce negation of the redundant? Or is this a medley of cacophonous shrieks and wails?
Clearly the disquiet reaches a crescendo… it needs dispelling, the forest needs clearing, to forge forward to the light that tradition can obscure ?
We reach a sanctum now (is it the sanctum?) A serene arrangement of a magic square of nine invitations to read together, pray together … every reader her or his own mediator? an akhand path? Almost upanishadic if we could visualise the teacher and his students sitting in a forest clearing….. Ramchandra Gandhi the philosopher reminded us that upanishad literally meant ‘ sitting close ‘…
Are the books under wraps a sign of stillness, could the books really be ‘dummy texts’? I do not think so… There is nothing to suggest stagnation. The artist has placed this installation in an inner space, a space that is a counterpoint or even a place one arrives at world weary, book weary, to dispel disquiet…
The light plays magically…and while I said invitation earlier, I might actually say that the space is bathed in presence of a comradely engagement where the plenitude of meaning.
text copyright Punam Zutshi
artwork images copyright Saba Hasan
A wonderful dialogue as the closing event of my solo show at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, where i was in conversation on my art practice with Roobina Karode the Director of KNMA and Meera Menesez an independent art writer, moderated by curator Neha Tickoo, January 10,2026.
roobina karode director knma, meera menesez art write, saba hasan multimedia artist
meera menesez art write, saba hasan multimedia artist
kiran nadar museum of art solo show
2025-26
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/plumage/saba-hasans-whispered-continuum-at-knma/
Award winning artist Saba Hasan is one of those multidisciplinary artists who is constantly wound up in the web of her own artistic odysseys. From catching the shades of light with her camera at Deer Park in Delhi to chasing abstract tenors at Manhattan in NY, to watching fishermen selling fresh catch during sunsets at Goa, her engagement with life and the living have created its own dynamics.
One’s gaze falls on a cement grey book on the wall with gold leaf flecks. The book of Night 2013, was part of the NGMA Women’s Day show in 2021 in which there were masters like Arpita Singh, Zarina Hashmi , Arpana Caur, Jayashree Chakravarty, and Jayasri Burman all ensconced in a room of leading lights amongst women artists. From this iconic work to many other groups , Saba’s finesse is seen in the manner in which she layers vintage and contemporary materials into three- and two-dimensional works about the power of identity as well as the scenic sentiment of belonging.
Whether we look at the groups of books, the burning books on the screen of one of her films, or the singular studies we can sense that Saba seeks to fill in the gaps of recorded history, even as she silently focusses on often-omitted experiences of humans amidst divisions of social and cultural events that scar us through the years.
Saba’s art blends techniques of collage, painting, sculpted books with handmade paper , making visible the presence of historicity , sparking a visual and verbal conversation that questions binaries such as art and craft, history and memory through the crucible of her own imagination.Fractured and fragmented landscapes come to mind in her paintings and collage renditions on the walls. Her brilliance at evocative textures create corollaries of conversations that sift and sieve through time. She sifts and sieves through the prism of time in poetic cadences of creams and tensile smoky browns. Mystical Storm and other works are riveting with a rare resonance.
From the trio of ageless, sculpted books at the entrance to the little corners and walls each section of this unveiling is one that beckons and draws us into an immersive sojourn that goes the print, to imagine and inhabit the margins, the silences, and the gestures that traditional displays often overlook.
Saba’s work has been followed by Chief Curator Roobina Karode for more than three decades and this culmination is one of a translation of the lexicon of language in terms of time and tide.
Over the years Saba has always drawn from personal memories as well as stories passed down through generations of her family , a distinguished lineage of writers and authors and seasoned intellects. She has said in an interview that she has out of habit meticulously layered a variety of materials in her work, which began with textual elements, poetic references, her mother’s letters and transcripts of her translations of authors like Mahasweta Devi and some feminist Urdu writing extracted from Rashida Jahan and Ismat Chughtai. The book she has used in her work, Book in a Smashed Box is the feminist Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai’s book titled Ziddi.
Whether we look at the groups of books, the burning books on the screen of one of her films, or the singular studies we can sense that Saba seeks to fill in the gaps of recorded history, even as she silently focusses on often-omitted experiences of humans amidst divisions of social and cultural events that scar us through the years.
As an artist of deeper measures Saba approaches reading/creating her odyssey as an embodied, relational act. In this sequential culling through fragmented visuals in video, embered texts, sonorous sounds, sculpted book forms with indentations, that hold both tenderness and urgency, this exhibition invites us to read through tactile passages of reflections, rhythms, and repetition.
We pause between the spaces as well as places where meaning isn’t fixed, but felt, sensed, or quietly called into action. And as we walk back and gaze once more at the trio of books kept at the entrance we marvel at the medley of meanderings, that silently celebrate the language of the lexicon within realms of human expression.
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
Several domains comprise the basis of Saba Hasan’s oeuvre: knowledge, memory, and the metaphysical. These domains have been defined and shaped over Saba’s interregional, multicultural early life. She has been trained as an anthropologist, and has an instinctive understanding of the interrelation of a culture’s language, belief, and perceptions. She stitches together video, sound, sculpture, photography, and the art of the book to examine the mechanisms of truth formation, inheritance, and imposition. Saba has spent over three decades working across different art media and building a philosophy, and has a profound understanding of the ecosystem of the intersectionality of art.
Books are the center point of this inquiry. For Saba, books are more than just containers of knowledge; they are pulled subjectively, distorted, and longed after. They are embedded with the complex histories of how human beings construct meaning. She turns books into sculptures, totems, and meditations. Often, she transforms them through burning, layering, wrapping, and reshaping into objects that embody fragility and resilience. Across various media, she constructs her own language from the amassed materials, natural textures, and a personal syntax of signs and movements.
As an artist who has exhibited internationally and received major recognitions including the Raza National Award for Painting in 2006, the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022, and The Mannheim Arts Festival Best Art Film Award 2023, Saba continues to push quietly yet insistently against the limits of human knowledge. In the following conversation, Saba reflects on her relationship with books, the evolution of her personal alphabet, the power of transformation and the emotional truths she hopes viewers will carry with them.
a very thoughtful introduction to my work by neerja srinivasan of Platform interview link
https://www.platform-mag.com/art/saba-hasan.html
artist pic courtesy KNMA
kiran nadar museum of art , delhi
october 5-january 10
“Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé: “The Book: Spiritual Instrument”,1957 (translation by Sylvia Gorelick)
This exhibition of Saba Hasan’s book sculptures is an unhurried invitation to encounter how ordinary objects such as books can be reimagined. Saba begins with the very familiar, the personal, handy structure of a book as her passage between strife and peace and as an instrument of gradual catharsis. Using old and distressed books as her core material , she enacts various inventive as well as mundane processes upon them in radical gestures of conversation, and transformation. By folding, burning, cutting, or layering these books with other organic or inorganic materials, she embodies them with philosophical and meditative ruminations that extend beyond the fundamentally formal making of a book. Her instruments are elemental and often deeply political, such as her use of fire, which flows over and layers her work, leaving ash in its wake.
Saba’s preoccupation with the structure of the book is an attempt to fragment the authority of written language. The title of the exhibition — jo ġāyab hai, aur hāzir bhi (that which is Absent but also Present) — comes from the renowned poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s oft-cited revolutionary nazm Hum Dekhenge (We Shall Bear Witness). Resonating with the timeless nazm, where Truth (“An-Al-Haq”/ I Am Truth) wears a garb of duality (“jo mai bhi hun, aur tum bhi ho”), of rumination, and of ambiguity, her sculptural vocabulary crystalises this very essence. She scales, twists and morphs the semiotics of the indoctrinated absolutes of our lived realities. Echoing the spirit of the poem, she too invites gentle erasures and slow departures of the text and its promises. In her hands, the palpable form of the book tends to become the very ground for the (dis)contents of her reflections to take surface, simultaneously retaining a mindful nonchalance towards the definitive printed subject matter of each book.
She states: “Book as material I have always loved and understood, its fragility holds great powers of subversion. So is with the passage of time, cycle of life, significance of natural elements, conflict, preservation, rebellion, survival, the deep interconnectedness of humans with each other and the earth.”
It is with great care that this curatorial exegesis has brought together few of Saba’s early works and her video art to provide a peak into her preoccupations for ‘jo ġāyab hai, aur hāzir bhi’ at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. The book-sculptures have never been displayed all together previously. Hence the endeavour has been to contain the impact of their humble but potent manifestations as a testament to the lingering residue of silences, and to the irrevocable loss imbued in utterances.
All artworks displayed in this exhibition are courtesy the studio of Saba Hasan, the text is by Neha Tickoo.
community art projects
https://www.instagram.com/p/DM5f4_wh7ON/?igsh=MTd0b2Nkbnh0bmtrdg==
just completed a studio workshop and art seminar in new york lead by the noted abstract artist pat lipsky called “Painting with an emphasis on 20 th and 21 st century discourse “, following an intense engagement with fine art photography and video art i have not painted for almost 15 years except for a few commissions so this has propelled me well on to a fresh journey towards a softer lyrical abstraction and using colour again for its beauty and emotive qualities.my friend the art historian elizabeth rogers thinks they are reminiscent of my videos and photographs of deer park, well one thing is certain, that work drew me back to colour.
“spring in new york” may 2025, oil on canvas, 3×5 feet #sabahasanart #oilpainting #colour #abstractart #abstractpainting #womenartists #artistsoninstagram #sharjahartfoundation #pollockkrasnerfoundation #deerpark #singaporeartmuseum #sabahasanvideoart
Born in paris lyrical abstraction is characterized by intuitive and relaxed manipulation of colour, spontaneous expression, illusionistic spaces and emphasis on gesture and light. In new york, it took a different direction from minimalism towards a new path: a freer expressionism. lyrical abstraction has marked the history of art, questioning the way of painting and the representation of forms with artists like george mathieu, joan mitchell, mark rothko leading the way. Today, this movement is still present, it is not just a style of painting, it is a philosophy, a state of mind, a freedom.
Connect ASAP
saba hasan, video a duet in blue, 2022
Ankan Kazi, Connect Art South Asia Perspective and Alkazi Foundation, 2022
The first week of the festival was dedicated to the theme of “Cartographies of Sensation,” with each film looking to build on the sensorial aspects evoked by filming the self and its surroundings. These elements, and the ones suggested above for the genre at large, were on exemplary display in Saba Hasan’s Water Suites (2021).
Running to about five minutes in length, the film plays out like a tone poem where Hasan builds on the simple but revelatory substitution of the pixelated screen with sheets of water. This analogue becomes the evocative, multiply-located source that allows the artist to suggest the various ways in which imaginary geographies bleed into each other. Disregarding the embankments of history and identity, these are carried over by those who inhabit multiple spaces, through the work of their memories of sensation. Like the flowing of water, the histories of spaces—as remote from each other as Budapest, Seychelles and Goa (where the artist lives)—are brought together in a series of suites under the sign of their common trysts with water.
As rainfall that is carefully observed in tropical jungles; or a fixed gaze that is focused at the wavering, dappled, David Hockney-like blues at the bottom of a pool, separated with distinct frames; or as the crush of brown sea waves beating against a rock, until we see the black Danube, lying supine and shiny under the night sky—the many forms of water and the equally various ways of seeing them are explored meditatively through the piece. The mounting tone of measured—but almost playful—dread that the background music conjures (composed by the artist’s son, Aman Hasan) feeds into the transitory nature of the water-images as well. As the screens dissolve into each other, the elemental substance of water becomes the layered site of inquiry for how water has shaped the human imagination. Its reflecting surfaces assume the shifting habits of regarding the transformative self before cinema itself was a formal reality. Perhaps this last formation is cited for its somewhat tragic passage into a fixed form supported by technologically-informed mechanisms of affect, so that the cinematic form becomes a simple precipitate of whatever new camera and filming technologies will dictate for it. In other words, a certainty is achieved—like an industrial standard—in the relationship between formal achievement and technical prowess. Hasan’s film revives one of the oldest analogues for the screen in the water surfaces she films, asking us to exchange our certainties for wonder.
saba hasan, video water suites, the black danube, 2022
a quick look inside my small but busy big city studio in south delhi, it’s on the roof of my house with a garden which i have planted and look after along with my artwork ! in winters i like to work outdoors in the sun gives my sculpture sun and easy drying time.
step in if you like and remember just yesterday i had a peacock visit me right here it flew in from the deer park across the road from my house. will post a pic of the peacock soon, meanwhile this is about what’s happening inside. enjoy ! http://www.sabahasan.com
saba salsabil 