Visual Artist
Born in Anantnag Kashmir, India
Lives and works in Hangzhou, China
Recent Artworks
In this recent series of works that are part of a greater selection, the main point of focus is the erasure and disappearance of space and subject, and the momentary contemplation of something set to be lost or on the brink of erasure. Much of the visual language I employ here is culturally specific, with certain elements of Kashmiri culture that are rooted in a collective memory of the past. In these series of paintings, I present visuals of Kashmiri life, mostly from the rural landscapes and urban spaces, that are offer a suspension from the present time to observe the Kashmiri quotidian that leans into earlier ages and eras of Kashmir and its history. From an ancient hilltop temple in my village build around 589 AD to a site from a bazaar from the 90s, I explore notions of being as they relate to the Kashmiri subject at the present tracing the path back towards a forgotten history. Here I attempted to retrieve a human fragility within the frame of each painting, with imagery that emerges from the rural spaces that compose most of Kashmir, with its mountains, its water bodies and its sparse fields— all of which are subjected to an unmediated change that makes it difficult to determine what will be preserved within memory and what will be lost to forgetfulness. Traces of the indigenous Kashmiri since ancient times to the present abound in these recent works that attempt to create a temporal thread that binds one era and one subject to another era and another subject altered by time and circumstance.