Shazia Ahmad: A Year, A Garden, A Feeling (COVID19 Diary)
November 2021
Curated by Victoria J. Fry
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, where she lived until the age of eighteen, Shazia Ahmad is a painter, printmaker, and diorama-maker in Canada. After a long break, in which she pursued other professional interests, she returned to fine art in 2016. Shazia graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Studio Arts (Painting and Drawing major) from Concordia University in 2019 and was a finalist for the Prix Albert-Dumouchel in 2018. She was also awarded the Guido Molinari Prize in Studio Arts and the Earl Pinchuk and Gary Blair Undergraduate Award whilst at Concordia. Shazia is the recipient of a 2019 Canada Council for the Arts Explore and Create grant and has exhibited her work in Canada, the United States, and Spain. She has a previous double major undergraduate degree in Art History and History, and she completed her BTEC Foundation Diploma from Central Saint Martins in 1999. Shazia is currently the 2021-22 Don Wright Scholar at St. Michael’s Printshop in St. John’s, NL, Canada.
Website: www.shaziaahmadcrohare.com
Instagram: @silvsiara
ARTIST STATEMENT
Memories are fragile things. The beginning of the story reveals a room of possessions. This chair has seen a variety of uses: bums, clothes, towel racks, history. The painting is a map of remembrances. These possessions, reminders of past journeys and experiences are cheap trinkets that grow in value over time. This cushion has been on many a bed, sofas, chairs, chewed on by many pets. Nostalgia makes it invaluable. What experiences are embodied by these objects? How do these spaces become home when filled with them?
My work speaks to the centrality of reminiscence and the passage of time as an accumulation of history. I chronicle journeys through time and place, paying tribute to intimate relationships that develop over the course of these passages. Thus, the concept of family transcends blood. Intimacy is expressed through character interactions in domestic settings. Born in Karachi, Pakistan to a Pakistani father and a Chilean mother, my practice and research interests are centred on the notions of home and belonging, tied to the broader theme of otherness due to my interfaith and unique mixed-race background. Moreover, I pay tribute to my Pakistani heritage by merging elements of the country’s material culture with personal imagery in my visual vocabulary. My practice comprises painting, printmaking and domestic microcosms encapsulated in handmade dioramas.
Having a hybrid identity finds its manifestation in my work through the amalgamation of my colour palette, patterns, and themes. Integral to my practice is the sumptuousness of Pakistani motifs, textiles and carpets, domestic items that have surrounded me for the entirety of my life. My nuanced relationship to this identity is nostalgic, harking back to a past I try to hold on to as the memories of it recede. These remembrances are expressed through a vibrant limited colour palette in reconstructed repetitive elements of both domestic interiors and exteriors. These works, very much about confinement during the pandemic, are also about reaching out to touch a past which can never exist again. There is not so much an absence as a yearning.
A Year, A Garden, A Feeling (COVID19 Diary) similarly to my past work, is personal and semi-autobiographical. It is my response to a pandemic that everyone has experienced at the same time, though not necessarily in the same way. Domesticity is integral to my practice; thus, my work serves as a continuous pandemic diary.
My own exploration of where exactly I belong, straddling two different cultures and religions as I do, whilst living in a third culture, is something I continue to examine. More than a year of confinement has brought forth these themes in my work. Thus, I am memorialising the small things, the domestic details, the quiet moments that emerged in the horrific tragedy of the COVID19 pandemic. Moreover, this time has allowed me to experiment with vibrant, electric colours I have used separately throughout my oeuvre in one body of work.
IMAGES FROM OUR VIRTUAL EXHIBIT
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