Unfolding Identities is a show presenting practices related to the consideration of the domestic interior, further expanding thoughts in the scope of memory and repetition.
The artists engage with fabric, paint, and drawing, exploring what is left behind—residues of touch, pauses, and inherited traces, which absorb histories of migration and everyday life. The projects negotiate a point between movement and pause, signifying a home as a complex, porous space where identity is made.
Amna Qamar, Graphite, watercolours, embroidery on bukrum, Size variable
Amna Qamar’s mix media works are shaped by the artist’s habitual movement through familiar spaces. Rather than documenting walking as an event, the work registers its aftereffects, layered marks, stains, and lines that settle into the fabric like residues of time and touch. Fragile yet insistent, the surfaces hold traces of shifting routes, pauses, and moments of waiting, evoking a fragile state between motion and stillness. Fabric absorbs repetitive, meditative, and performative gestures.
Zehra Fatima Qazi, 24×36 inches, Acrylic on Canvas
Zehra Fatima Qazi’s three dreamlike paintings unfold as layered, almost double-exposed visions of interior spaces. Familiar domestic settings appear suspended between recognition and imagination, as if remembered rather than observed. Working with brightly coloured acrylics, Qazi builds overlapping planes of paint that blur spatial boundaries, creating the sensation of moving through another world that is nonetheless rooted in the intimate architecture of everyday life. The layered surfaces suggest accumulation: of time, memory, and emotional residue, where one space bleeds into another. Each canvas allows viewers to drift between fragments of interiors that feel both deeply personal and quietly uncanny.
Three Worlds, 2025, 11.7 x 16.5 inches, Pen and ink, colour pencil, marker on parchment pape
Iman Ahmed’s work uses fabric and upholstery as a lens through which migrations, contemporary social struggles, and the continual re-finding of identity are explored. Centered around drawing rooms and domestic patterns, the work reflects on how textiles operate as carriers of memory, class, and belonging within Pakistani households. Upholstery then holds traces of movement, aspiration, and inherited taste.
By bringing together textiles and patterns from three different regions alongside a European chair, the work points to the layered ways in which South Asians, and Pakistanis in particular, construct identity from multiple, often contradictory sources. Colonial legacies, regional craft traditions, and global influences coexist within the intimate space of the home. The domestic interior depicts migration histories and social negotiations and they quietly unfold, stitched together through fabric, pattern, and everyday use.