‘Masnavi: Lores Across Lands’ opens at Ojas Art on November 23, bringing together 17 artists from across the world to explore how folklore continues to shape contemporary imagination. Featuring 60 works rooted in miniature painting traditions, the exhibition, curated by Khushboo Jain, traces how ancient folklores migrate, transform, and illuminate our present.
Folklore is humanity’s earliest form of storytelling: a vast collection of parables, allegories, and shared wisdom that predates written language. Across cultures, folk narratives carried moral lessons, cosmologies, and emotional truths long before they were written down in illuminated manuscripts, painted on walls, and sculpted into stone. From the Buddhist Jataka tales to the fables of the Panchatantra, from Rumi’s mystic verses to Bulleh Shah’s poetry of rebellion, folklore has always been the fertile soil from which entire artistic traditions have grown. It has informed classical dance and theatre, devotional poetry, miniature painting, and even contemporary cinema and graphic art. Ojas Art's year-end exhibition ‘Masnavi: Lores Across Lands’ traces this worldwide, interconnected lineage into the present, positioning folklore as a living pulse flowing through generations.
Curated by Khushboo Jain, the exhibition borrows its title from the classical Persian poetic form: long narrative poems written in rhyming couplets, often steeped in themes of love, humanity, and spiritual contemplation. In a similar spirit, the show presents its artworks as an unfolding series of visual couplets, each artist responding to personal histories and inherited stories while drifting into a shared river of imagery.
Miniature painting serves as the connective tissue binding these diverse practices together. Historically, musawwari provided a visual home for oral tales, giving shape to epics, romances, and devotional stories circulating across courts and caravans. Here, the miniature becomes a contemporary site of experimentation, allowing artists such as Khadim Ali, Amal Lin, Sujay Sanan, Zafar Ali, Olga Lobanova, Laila Tara, Samantha Buckley, and several others from across South Asia, Turkey, Canada, Australia, South Africa and the UK, to engage with inherited narrative forms while addressing migration, identity, ecological anxiety, and socio-political upheaval.
Jain’s curatorial vision emphasises folklore as an evolving, adaptive form—one that absorbs the urgencies of each era. Director Anubhav Nath describes the exhibition as a “constellation of connections” — a reminder that stories remain among the most enduring bridges between cultures.
“In its attempt, the exhibition also turns its gaze to the present, looking at folklore as an evolving tradition and how the socio-political narratives and experiences of today will eventually shape the lores of tomorrow. To that, musawwari (miniature) painting serves as the exquisite ground for this encounter, a revered tradition where oral tales and written narratives historically found their form.”Khushboo Jain, curator
Accompanied by a dedicated publication, Masnavi follows Ojas Art’s 2024 presentation Mussawari, extending the gallery’s ongoing engagement with contemporary miniature art. In its gathering of global voices, the exhibition functions as both archive and prophecy — an invitation to reflect on how ancient stories survive, migrate, and continue to illuminate our shifting worlds.
'Masnavi: Lores across Lands', curated by Khushboo Jain, is on view at Ojas Art, 1AQ, Near Qutub Minar, Mehrauli, New Delhi, from November 23, 2025, to January 11, 2026. Learn more here.
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