Aiza Ahmed

October 7, 2025

Aiza Ahmed (b. 1997, Lahore, Pakistan) is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. She received her BFA from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (2020) and MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI (2024). Her work has been exhibited internationally, with recent presentations including a solo booth at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, NY; a two-person exhibition at Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and a three-person show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, VA. Additional group exhibitions include the RISD Museum, Providence, RI; The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA; and VM Art Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan, among others. Ahmed’s first New York solo exhibition will open at Sargent’s Daughters in October 2025. She is the recipient of the Graduate Commons Grant Fellowship, the RISD Fellowship, the Edith Stone and Walter King Memorial Prize, and the David R. Bean Prize in Fine Arts. She has participated in residencies with William Kentridge & the Centre for the Less Good Idea at Brown Arts Institute, Providence, RI and The Macedonia Institute, Chatham, NY. She is currently artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects, New York, NY, and The Arts Intensive Study Program led by Wael Shawky at Fire Station, Doha, Qatar.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your practice?

I am an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video. Observing relationships both real and imagined, I often weave humor and performance into my practice to construct theatrical narratives that unsettle fixed ideas of nationhood, masculinity, and belonging.

As a Pakistani woman whose life has spanned multiple geographies, I navigate a long-distance relationship with my homeland — both intimate and estranged. My work frequently returns to the history of the 1947 Partition and its ongoing legacies. These ruptures leave me with a desire to excavate the past, to time-travel into moments I did not directly inherit, to trace my ancestry and the silences within it. Through this process, I try to connect past and present while imagining alternate futures.

Where does research sits in your process – are there particular source materials you are drawn to or are actively looking at now?

Yes, my practice is deeply research-based, and I see research as both an anchor and a generative tool for making. Recently, I’ve been delving into the history of muslin, a material I’ve been using more frequently in my work, which carries with it layered histories of colonial violence, women’s labor, and ancestral ties to Dhaka, where muslin was once most renowned. I’ve also been researching the Wagah–Attari border ceremony, staged daily between Amritsar and Lahore, twin cities split by Partition, as a way to think through performance, nationalism, and masculinity.

I often draw on cinematic lineages as well, including the legacy of the iconic Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, whose works probe class, performance, and shifting social orders in ways that resonate with my own concerns. Alongside this, I return to more intimate sources: family archives, oral histories, and conversations that carry fragments of memory across generations. Institutional collections, such as the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection at Brown University, also shape my process by offering access to visual records of empire and conflict. In weaving together these threads – personal, archival, cinematic, and performative rituals like the border ceremony – I seek to process these narratives while opening space for porous, alternative readings of history.

Can you talk a little bit about even how you’re choosing your materials for these works? Is that an important element for you?

Muslin is central to my practice – a fabric deeply tied to the Indian Subcontinent’s colonial history and to women’s labor. Once the prized export of Bengal, it was decimated under British rule, carrying with it both tenderness and violence. In my installations, muslin is stretched, painted, and draped, evoking the fragility of skin, but also the resilience of those who crossed borders carrying only what they could hold. I’m drawn to its duality: porous yet protective, ghostlike yet tactile. Its translucency becomes both mirror and veil, conjuring haunting and intimacy, while its lightness introduces moments of levity. The fabric also ties me personally to my paternal ancestry in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where muslin was most renowned.

Alongside muslin, I work with wood, a material historically bound to male-dominated craft traditions in South Asia. I carve directly into wood with power tools, asserting my own presence through each cut. The grooves I inscribe echo the Line of Control, the contested border between India and Pakistan, while also referencing the act of drawing itself, stretched across surface and space.

I was struck by an interview where you were talking about the importance of staging and bringing the background to life. Can you tell me a little bit about how you’re thinking about this and even puppetry as another medium in your practice?

Yes, staging is central to how I think about my practice. I’m drawn to what usually sits in the background – the apparatus that frames a performance but rarely gets noticed. The characters I depict often operate like props, curtains, or fragments of a set. They aren’t the celebrated figures of history, but rather the minor actors who make the spectacle possible, or stand-ins for the absence of those pulling the strings.

This is where puppetry becomes an important reference for me. Puppetry is both playful and unsettling; it makes visible the tension between control and vulnerability, presence and absence. I’m interested in that gap: who is controlling the puppet, who is being animated, and what remains hidden?

Thinking through staging, props, and puppetry allows me to build immersive worlds where fact and fiction intermingle. It’s a way of animating archival fragments, memories, and histories into a kind of theater—where humor and grief, the political and the personal, can share the same stage.

Can you expand a bit about the figures within your practice? Especially the masculine aspects of them and the way you render them. If there is a line that connects those bodies of work, how would you describe that?

Yes, the figures in my work are deeply tied to how I think about masculinity and its performances. In many ways, my practice plays with a kind of role reversal within art history: traditionally, men painted women, but in my case, as a young woman, I am painting men. That shift immediately alters the dynamics of the gaze. It reflects my own navigation of public spaces, where direct eye contact with men can feel charged or unsafe. In refusing that exchange within my figures, I shift the terms of looking and reorient the power dynamic.

The sources for these figures are varied and imagined – border soldiers, characters from Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room (Jalsaghar) and other films, uncles at family weddings or gatherings, invented composites, and observed gestures. What unites them is the staged quality of their masculinity. In The Music Room, the zamindar (a feudal landlord) desperately clings to his dignity through rituals that have long since lost their power. At Wagah, the soldiers’ synchronized rigidity and hyperbolic choreography project dominance, but it’s a spectacle of control that also reveals its own fragility the moment the performance ends. Both, in different registers, show how masculinity is often fragile, deeply anxious, and reliant on performance to mask insecurity. One is melancholic, the other pompous, yet both betray vulnerabilities, whether of a fading aristocracy or of partitioned nationalisms still trying to assert sovereignty.

I think of my figures as psychological portals – ways of unpacking the male psyche, its anxieties, and its complexities.

How do you think about that sort of comedy or comedic aspect in your work? How important is that for you to play that line between seriousness and levity?

For me, comedy in my work developed quite naturally. It emerged through my process of blind contour drawing, which often led to unexpected forms and serendipitous renderings. Over time, these distortions became a language of exaggeration and humor that now carries through my figures. Looking back, I had a real “aha” moment when I realized the impulse was always there: as a child, I was obsessed with drawing caricatures and studying political cartoons. That early fascination feels like it has been quietly guiding my hand all along.

In the studio, I become the puppeteer: I paint, cut, stage, and choreograph the movements of my often-male figures, reversing the power dynamics that have long defined both art history and daily life. I distort and exaggerate them – elongating forms, flattening them into wooden reliefs, or rendering them smaller than life-size. Their supposed authority is destabilized, softened, or made ridiculous. Humor, in this way, isn’t just an aesthetic choice; it’s a way to process the material, critique power and masculinity, and create an entry point for viewers.

Levity is essential because it draws people in and allows heavier themes, like histories, politics, and grief, to surface. Comedy and seriousness coexist in the work, generating a rhythm that makes reflection and critique feel alive and approachable.

Aiza Ahmed

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