All artists react to violence, only a few live to express this experience through their craft. Kashmir-born Veer Munshi, whose show Encounter concluded in Delhi’s Visual Arts Gallery this week, and his family, was forced to flee their home in the Hindu-dominated Barbarshah area of Srinagar in 1990, during the peak of militancy.

Munshi, who studied painting at Baroda’s MS University, decided to reject landscapes on a belligerent impulse. Innards of war engines and shrapnel soon became anchors of his past in canvases.

“It’s as if I am still in my jeans, my shoes tied up and about to break into a run. That unsettled feeling persists,” says the artist, now 51, and a Delhi resident.

But this frontal stance of his earlier works has steadily distilled into a more poetic imagery after coming into contact with people in conflict zones from other parts of the world. In 1996, Munshi attended a Human Rights workshop in Geneva, which helped him to sympathise than become a reactionary. “I began to understand the mind of the minority,” he says.

Incorporating found objects, wooden sculptures of crows and even photographs of beardless Iraqi boys from newspapers, Munshi began to evolve a new visual vocabulary. One of his exhibited works, Winds of Change, contrasts the luxuriant lotus-filled Dal Lake with a forest of helmets in war fatigue fabric. For his sculptural piece, Missiles of Faith, he used quivering iron grills, twisted tridents and a tossed-down boat to mirror the confusion of faith in a hostile world .

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