From Nomad to Legacy: Owais Husain on his Father’s Enduring Vision

Q. When you first walked through this immersive experience in Doha, what were your first impressions of the exhibition? What memories of your father surfaced most vividly?

Owais Husain: Growing up in my mother’s house was to experience a living installation. There was a chaos of works, forever in transit and at different stages of progress standing against or temporarily mounted upon walls—walls that were already embellished with murals, spilling onto the ceilings as well. The installation was living because my father, amid his frequent travels, would paint over and change the murals time and again, while the traffic of paintings and drawings continued to populate our home between their creation and then becoming part of collections all over. We had no furniture, just the odd rug and cushions. So, there was more wall to experience.

The immersive at Katara Doha presented by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) and Qatar Museums is also a gesture to his prolific final years working at his local studio in Doha.

As so in its earlier avatar at the 60th Venice Art Biennale, the immersive exhibition has been a cinematic experience for me, of stepping through a time capsule—of walking through a less tactile but still a slice of virtual memory. Of an experience once lived that now rests somewhere in my subconscious present as an artist.

Q. Your own art deeply explores memory and identity. Do you feel your father would have appreciated this form of immersive storytelling?

Husain: The area between the marginalised and the displaced, between my early years spent in search of belonging and the later years in liberation of that search and an inherently persistent sense of flux—have all become central to my practice and evolution as an artist.

To a degree, my work has always mapped the emotional landscapes shaped by movement, displacement and inherited memory, influencing me to construct environments that envelop a viewer rather than confront them. Working across painting, drawing, poetry, film, sound and suspended forms has affirmed to me how space itself can become a narrative medium. 

Yes, I do believe my father would have been intrigued by this immersive experience.

Restlessly, he moved across multiple formats and mediums throughout his life, approaching each with the same curiosity, whether painting billboards in his early years or working with film later. Immersive storytelling, with its layering of sound, image, scale, and movement, carries something of that spirit. It collapses boundaries, much like he enjoyed doing—borrowing from mythology, popular culture, and everyday life to create his own visual language.

Q. What does The Rooted Nomadrepresent to you on a personal level?

Husain: For me, The Rooted Nomad echoes the paradox my father embodied—a man deeply anchored in the stories and symbols of the culture he grew up in, yet constantly moving across geographies. His life unfolded across so many landscapes: the small towns of his childhood, the artistic ferment of Bombay, and later the cities that became homes away from home. That pattern of movement inevitably shaped our sense of belonging.

It also mirrors my own lived experience. As someone who has travelled, lived and worked between places, languages, and artistic disciplines, I deeply relate to the tension between rootedness and transience. The exhibition becomes, in that sense, both a tribute and a mirror: it honours his journey while giving form to the condition of displacement that touched all of us. A reminder that roots are not always physical—sometimes they exist in memory, in story, in the act of making, even as the ground beneath you keeps shifting.

Q. In what ways do you see your father’s art speaking to a new generation of artists and viewers today?

Husain: Perhaps younger artists may respond to the fearlessness of his practice—the unapologetic scale, the ease with which he moved between traditions, and the way he allowed the folk and the contemporary to coexist in the same frame. He never shied away from complexity. He merged classical narratives with modernist vocabulary at a time when that was still a radical gesture, and that openness continues to feel relevant.

For younger viewers, especially those navigating hybrid identities or fractured geographies, his work offers a kind of permission. He demonstrated that an artist could engage with the world expansively, drawing from cinema, street culture, and history, without treating any of it as off-limits. His vocabulary still feels contemporary because it reflects a world that is fluid, contradictory, and in constant negotiation.

Q. How do you hope this exhibition will shape or redefine the public’s understanding of MF Husain?

Husain: The immersive facilitates people to encounter him anew, creating room for a more intimate reading of his worldview: the humour, the tenderness, the restlessness, the empathy that shaped so much of his practice. It also highlights how wide-ranging his work truly was. Painting was central to him, but his creative life extended to film, printmaking, murals, design and even poetry and calligraphy in his early years.

At the same time, I am optimistic that it helps restore some sort of balance to the narrative. He was deeply engaged with India’s cultural and spiritual plurality, as he came from a place of inquiry and not irreverence. If the exhibition can bring the focus back to his humanity, his curiosity, and his lifelong belief in art as a bridge between cultures, then it has perhaps achieved something truly meaningful.