The walls of the Iqbal Library at the University of Kashmir have taken on a new visual identity. What was once an imposing architectural façade has been transformed into a monumental surface of colour, form and narrative, following the completion of four large-scale murals by a team of Kashmiri artists (ALIF) led by Munir Bukhari Senior Artist from Gujrat.
A project organized by Asian Paints and St+Art Indiaan organization tirelessly working to promote street art and street artists in India, the initiative brought together Kashmiri muralists Basharat Bashir, Nadeem Mushtaq, Fida Hussain, Tasaduq Hussain, Mudasir Gul and Suhaib Hakeem, alongside senior artist Munir Bukhari.
At the centre of the undertaking was an extraordinary artistic challenge: creating what the participating artists describe as the largest mural ever painted in Kashmir. Covering the expansive walls of the Iqbal Library, the work demanded more than the ability to paint on a large surface. It called for a precise understanding of architecture, proportion, colour, perspective and the relationship between an artwork and the people who experience it.
For the Kashmiri artists, the undertaking is the result of nearly a decade of sustained engagement with mural painting. Since beginning their collective journey into public art, they have taken their practice across different parts of Kashmir, transforming ordinary walls into visual narratives and bringing painting into spaces where people encounter it without having to step inside a gallery.
That experience became particularly valuable at the University of Kashmir. A wall of this magnitude behaves differently from a canvas. The artists had to constantly negotiate between the intimacy of individual details and the coherence of the larger composition, frequently stepping away from the surface to understand how forms, colours and figures functioned from a distance. The architectural scale demanded patience, precision and an ability to think of the painting as a single visual field rather than a collection of separate sections.
The professionally trained artists, each holding a Master’s degree in Fine Arts, each carries an individual visual language and artistic practice but the scale of the undertaking required those differences to become part of a shared vocabulary. Drawing, colour, composition and execution flowed between individual hands, gradually forming a unified artwork across the façade.
The presence of Munir Bukhari further expanded the collaborative dimension of the undertaking. Working alongside the Kashmiri team, the senior artist contributed his experience and perspective while becoming part of an exchange that crossed geographical and artistic boundaries.
Yet the significance of the murals lies in more than their physical dimensions.
A mural exists differently from a painting hanging inside a gallery. It belongs to the public. It is encountered by students walking to class, teachers moving through the campus, visitors arriving at the library and people simply passing by. Its audience is not a selected group of viewers but an entire community. The artwork becomes woven into the rhythm of everyday life.
This is precisely what makes public art particularly meaningful in a place like Kashmir. For years, professionally trained artists in the region have worked largely within the limitations of conventional exhibition spaces, while the absence of a strong gallery culture has often restricted the visibility of their work. Murals offer another possibility: they allow art to move beyond institutional walls and become part of the landscape itself.
Over the past decade, Kashmiri mural artists have steadily built a body of public work across the region, engaging with walls in towns, villages, institutions and public spaces. Their practice has demonstrated that large-scale contemporary art need not always come from outside the region. Kashmir possesses artists with the training, imagination and technical experience to conceive and execute ambitious public artworks of its own.
The Iqbal Library murals therefore represent not simply a new addition to the university campus, but another step in the evolution of Kashmir’s public-art culture. They stand as evidence of what sustained artistic practice can achieve when experience, opportunity and collaboration converge.
The artists expressed their gratitude to Asian Paints for sponsoring the initiative and supporting the creation of a significant public artwork in Kashmir. They also thanked St+Art India for inviting them to participate and providing a platform through which years of mural-making experience could be brought to an unprecedented scale.
For the artists, the completed walls are both a milestone and a beginning. After years of painting across Kashmir, they have now confronted one of their most demanding surfaces—and in doing so, opened the possibility of imagining even larger ones.
There is something fitting about the transformation taking place at the Iqbal Library. A place dedicated to knowledge now carries an artwork that can be read not from a single frame or fixed viewpoint, but through movement, distance and time.
The artists have spent years taking paintings to the walls.
At the University of Kashmir, the wall has become the painting—and the campus itself has become the gallery.
