Winner: The Fullstop Framing Company Award.
https://www.fullstopframing.com/
Highly Commended: ACAE Gallery.
My work emerges from a process that is both instinctual and uncertain, unfolding without a clear destination. I often don’t recognise what I’ve made until the end. Each piece feels like a collage of memories, bits and pieces of places I carry with me, woven together through instinct rather than intention. These aren’t just memories of places I’ve visited or lived. As a Hazara, my relationship to place is shaped by survival, not choice. For Hazaras, migration is forced—it is about escaping violence, displacement, and generations of persecution. I grew up in Pakistan with Afghan roots, and now I live in Australia, but I’ve always existed in between worlds, where belonging is fluid and uncertain. My paintings reflect that in-betweenness, landscapes that hover between the real and imagined, familiar but hard to place.
For me, place is never static. It is a fragmented construct, continually shifting, evolving, and reassembling through the lens of memory. Some places depicted are real, deeply tied to locations I have lived in or passed through, while others are composites of different memories, often blending and distorting into something new. In this sense, the landscapes in my work are not fixed but instead spaces of negotiation, where past, present, and imagined futures intersect.
One of the driving forces behind these paintings is my obsession with the night. In Quetta, where I grew up, the night offered a kind of safety the day could not. There was a collective exhale as the sun set, a shared relief that our men had survived another day without falling victim to targeted killings. The lights I paint are both literal and symbolic—representing the quiet comfort we felt as we saw the glow of homes, knowing that, for one more night, we were still here. Yet these lights also hold the weight of loss, acknowledging those who were not so fortunate. The night became a space where survival and danger coexisted, and my work reflects this tension.
