While she was the celebrated modernist artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990) to the world, for artist and curator Sasha Altaf, she was her beloved aunt, Nain khala. Full of stories and a devotee of Indian classical music, Nain khala was exactly like her works, which engaged with lines. “If we didn’t keep our pencils straight, she would ask us to do so; if our plaits had a hair sticking out, she’d tell us you must stick it in,” she remembers fondly.

The curator truly realised there was so much more to her aunt only when she turned an artist herself, and headed to Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU), Baroda, where Mohamedi taught. “Her ex-students and artists would tell me all these stories. At MSU, I discovered who Nasreen Mohamedi was.” This continuous process of awe-inspiring discoveries about her khala has now led Altaf to curate Autobiography of a Line, an exhibition that traces the reception of the poetic image in Mohamedi’s photographs, prints and paper cut-outs, for the first time in India.