The Liberal Arts Experience
Oil on Canvas
Mount Holyoke College Permanent Collection
An exploration of my relationship with the western canon at Mount Holyoke College. During lectures, I often found myself torn between awe at the power of artistic and philosophical masterpieces and resistance at their deeply colonial and patriarchal histories. This duality appears in the painting’s composition.
Framed
Oil on Canvas
Private Collector from Mount Holyoke College Collection
Photography was a colonial medium to document and compartmentalise people from my village. In this painting, I look directly at the viewer from inside a mirror. The ‘frame’ shows a moment of play in my childhood, though it appears menacing at first glance. This was my attempt at reclaiming the camera and looking back.
Grandmother
Oil on Canvas
Permanent Collection of Professor Zayneb Allak
My mother’s mother was a widow by the time she was 30. She raised 9 children by herself. This painting is based on one of the only images I have of her – a scanned photograph from the 1980s. The smile in the image told me all I needed to know about her sense of hope.
Inheritance
Oil on Canvas
Mount Holyoke College Art Museum Permanent Collection
This is a visual representation of generational trauma passed from grandmother to mother to child. The paint is deliberately heavy and cracked in some places to mimic erosion. And yet, there is love and resilience in the gaze that looks directly at the viewer.
Lineage
Oil on Canvas
Private Collection
In this piece, I bring together motifs from Mughal miniature painting and modern portraiture. I paint myself as part of a larger matrilineal legacy, centering women in storytelling. I’m interested in reimagining tradition and reclaiming visual spaces for brown women from the Global South.
The Liberal Arts Experience
Oil on Canvas
Mount Holyoke College Permanent Collection
An exploration of my relationship with the western canon at Mount Holyoke College. During my time there, I co-founded a protest art movement called ‘Mount Holyoke Doesn’t Teach Me,’ a student led survey of what the students of colour think are missing from the college curriculum. The subject of this painting is my friend Guneet, whose grandfather hails from my village. Guneet has a Sikh mother and a Muslim father. Just like me, she accesses multiple modes of wisdom and knowledge through the amalgamation of histories that reside in her.
Framed
Oil on Canvas
Private Collector from Mount Holyoke College Collection
Photography was a colonial medium to document and compartmentalise people from my village. My own relationship with photographing my village comes with its hierarchies and ethical considerations. The subaltern is consistently ‘framed’ by the viewer. What if we instead give the medium of photography to the subaltern themselves?
Mardon Ka Shujra (The Lineage of Men)
Oil on Canvas
The oral tradition in my village only records the names of men. The lower castes, the Mirasis, the women are all excluded from the narrative. They record my fathers, grandfathers, brothers but never me.
Pakistan was Partitioned in 1947
Plaster, Ink, Colour Pencils, Acrylic
The following images are a sculpture series exploring my personal history intertwined with Pakistan’s colonial history. There are images of my grandfather receiving a prize for dog racing from the late Queen, carved sayings in Urdu and Punjabi and images of the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre 1919. The sculptures are casts of books and seek to imagine the space outside the canon.
Pakistan was Partitioned in 1947 (detail)
The Punjab Peasant
In the Beginning there was the Word
Jallianwala Bagh Massacre 1919
The Day of Freedom Comes but Freedom Never Comes
The Fields are Lined with Corpses
The Queen and my Grandfather
The Queen and my Grandfather (detail)
Arbitrary Lines
Arbitrary Lines (detail)