[4] In response to the communal violence of the events, as well as to her sudden exposure to ideological assault as a Muslim, Hussain's art not only became more explicitly political as well as personal, but it moved away from traditional media towards installation, video, photography, and mixed-media work.
Hussain is cited as one of the foremost leaders in the development of conceptual art in India, and is credited with bringing the possibilities and merits of diverse media to critical and popular attention.
[9] According to curator and scholar Swapnaa Tamhane, Hussain made a distinctive shift from allegorical and figurative paintings to multi-media works in an urgent response to the politics of the day.
[11] Critics often reference this emphasis on materiality in the discussion of the social, specifically feminist, concerns of much of Hussain's oeuvre which acknowledges female corporeality as its starting point.
[12] Several of her video and performance-based pieces, for example, center on Hussain's own body – a tactic that positions her work at a unique juncture between the political and personal, the public and private.
In particular, she dons a burka, something that she never – nor members of her family – wore in their daily life as modern, educated, cosmopolitan Muslims – and plays with its symbolism, presence, signification, shape, and interrogates its meaning.
[14] Rummana Hussain's repetition or imagery and recycling of materials presented in non-hierarchical modes of display became part of a language she used to articulate the process of understanding her own identity and position.
She created the symbiotic feeling of both a mosque and a hospital with stretchers laid out resembling prayer mats, and blackened, rusted tools running around the perimeter, that appear to be an Urdu script but in fact communicate nothing.