Hafsa Nouman works across painting, printmaking, and architectural installation to turn domestic objects into living archives of memory, migration, and belonging, tracing how inherited traditions persist, evolve, and vanish under the pressures of displacement. Lara Xenia speaks with the artist about her artistic trajectory, Sufism, her love for mangos and anar, and grappling with canvases as archaeological sites.

Figure 1: Hafsa Nouman, گیس نہیں آ رہی ہے , *Gas nahi arahi* (*Is there no gas coming [in the house]),* acrylic on canvas, 18 × 12 inches (45.72 × 30.48 cm), 2021. Photo: courtesy the artist © Hafsa Nouman

Lara Xenia: If you could have a dream exhibition, where would it be?

Hafsa Nouman: Oh, that's a really good question. I am not sure if I have seen a space exactly like it, but in my mind, my dream exhibition is in a circular room with an oculus so light can revolve and oscillate. There would be a total of five rooms; one a square and the four circular, all with dome-like ceilings. I’ve always wanted to go to the Pantheon, especially at night. Imagine being inside it with shifting light, rain, and a full moon. I think that this space reminds me of Phuppo Khaldi’s house in Lahore. She was my mother’s aunt. It was a pre-partition art deco beautiful house with high ceilings and circular rooms.

LX: That'd be gorgeous. Tell me about Lahore and what drew you to art.

HN: I was born in Lahore, Pakistan. I grew up in Lahore in its various neighborhoods. My grandfather and father are both professors. Education was always the main priority in my family. After the partition, my grandfather lost a lot of family, and the family was displaced. When they settled in Lahore, they lived in cramped, small rented spaces. Even still, my grandfather insisted that his children receive the best education that could be provided. The commitment to learning has defined every generation of our family. In fact, our lineage traces back to the Bannu Hashim, an Arab tribe. Most of my ancestors were scholars and teachers, and migrated from Arabia to Central Asia. My Dada (grandfather) told me that one of his ancestors was a soldier in Babur’s army, and through him we came to the bare sagheer (the Indian subcontinent) [laughs].

Figure 2: Hafsa Nouman, *T ehar Jao*, 2024, oil on paper on wood panel, 29.5 × 41.5 inches (74.93 × 105.41 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist, Pat Garcia, and Palo Gallery © Hafsa Nouman

From the ages of six to nine, I lived in Beijing while my father completed his PhD in physics. Those years were formative for me, and I got to experience life without class distinctions there. And Amma, my mother, would make us watch a lot of movies and cartoons and always found a moral in those stories and made sure we, my younger sister and I, were aware of it. In Beijing, though I was marked as a foreigner, I didn’t really feel like one. Returning to Pakistan made me really aware of economic disparity, especially because I attended a private school on financial aid. My parents and grandparents surrounded me with a lot of love and support and didn’t let me feel self-conscious as in hindsight I could have had as a child. Initially, my father strongly opposed my desire to become an artist because he insisted that art was an unstable and somewhat malicious profession. At one point, I even considered becoming an ambassador, a diplomat. But ultimately, I applied to Lahore’s prestigious National College of Arts (NCA), which has a 2% acceptance rate and a reputation for shaping top artists. My father had his hesitations about me getting in, but I earned a merit scholarship and was first on the admission list [smiles]. My grandmother insisted I attend, and even threatened to stop speaking to my father if he refused to let me [laughs]. She passed away in October of last year. She was extremely strong, such a force, and a visionary. Never made me register the lack in my life. It takes great strength to not feel that and prevent others from feeling that way. Dadi was a brave woman.

LX: That’s incredible that your family has a scribe history and that you also attended that university! What was it like for you?

HN: NCA was difficult because it has a notorious hazing culture, but I found supportive peers and extraordinary mentors such as Fatima Haider, who had studied at SAIC and saw my practice clearly before I could articulate it myself. Another key influence was a Yale PhD candidate Maliha Noorani, who introduced me to modern South Asian, Latin American, and Arab art. And of course, Rabeya Jalil, Saulat Ajmal, and Laila Rahman were always such pillars of support. Through Maliha, I came across manifestos of Shakir Hassan Al Said. His radical experiments with language and calligraphy profoundly shaped how I think about art as a space for transcendence. And I do have to give credit to my art teachers in school, Khushbahkt, Amra Khan and Butool Waheed. Their encouragement and critique filled me with immeasurable resilience.

LX: Are you interested in any spiritual doctrines as well? I’m just curious because you mentioned transcendence.

HF: Yes! I think a lot about Sufi ideas because they focus so much on the idea of calming your nafs, your ego, and also phenomena like nature as the ground, and the possibility of transcendence through a single gesture. I come from a Sufi household that’s not overtly very religious, but those ideas have still shaped me. I wanted to create a surface where the past, present, and future collapse. During my third year of undergrad in COVID, I was reading a lot about archaeology, and I thought, “What if I treat my surface as an archaeological site?” Around then, my grandmother,on my mum’s side, passed away, and it was my first real experience with loss. I call her Bibi.

I wanted to create a surface where the past, present, and future collapse.

LX: I love that concept, and also studied Sufi manuscripts a bit. I’m sorry about your grandmother.

HN: Thank you. It was really hard. That loss in a lot of ways coincided with and paralleled what was going on in Lahore. Lots of old neighborhoods were being destroyed for “development.” The IMF pushes for infrastructure development projects, always at the expense of domestic spaces, vulnerable communities, and traditional echo systems. Traditional methods of making bricks were getting replaced by standardized European ones, which obviously didn’t suit the climate, so suddenly, people needed more air conditioners and to expend more energy. An entire ecosystem was disrupted overnight, and people were left displaced and unable to afford housing. I was watching this all unfold right in front of my eyes. I remember feeling really angry and restless. Almost willing myself to grow up quickly and have more agency. And even in our own neighborhood, we suffered from water shortages and sewage blockages, so we had to leave. That’s when I started thinking a lot about houses, walls, and the idea of not belonging. My grandmother’s house embodied that for me. She spoke Farsi. A fun fact: she was a distant relative of the family of Ahmed Shah Durrani, the guy who stole the Peacock Throne from India.

“What if I treat my surface as an archaeological site?”

LX: That’s really jarring. I’m sorry you witnessed that firsthand. Is this your grandma's house?

Figure 3.1: Hafsa Nouman, برسات اور آم., oil on canvas, 2021, 48 × 36 inches (121.92 × 91.44 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist © Hafsa Nouman

HN: No I am not. Bibi’s family was from Afghanistan. And yes, I made this house from my memory by constructing different photographs together, which I had access to for the first time at her funeral. I made this in my third year of uni in Lahore at my new house. We had just moved, and we were sending photos on WhatsApp for months. (Pointing to a work) I was interested in Minimalism in relation to my work, and was, and still am, cautious about using that term myself. At the same time, it felt like an honour for my professors to acknowledge it as being inflected with that. It made me feel like I was onto something. After that, I started making more of these sanded walls. [Pointing to another painting] This is also one of the paintings I made. It’s the sehan (terrace) of the house I grew up in.

Figure 4: Hafsa Nouman, بی بی کا گھر *[detail]*, 2022, oil on archival paper, 15.5 × 11.5 inches (39.37 × 29.21 cm). Photo: courtesy of the artist © Hafsa Nouman

LX: Oh, wow. And who are these figures? I like the erasure of the figure and the furniture here. What was the concept behind its origin?

HN: One of them is my mom. The others are my sisters, two of them are my younger cousins, and then one of them is myselfI. It was a monsoon day in August, and we were eating mangoes in the rain. I didn’t want the focus to be on the figures because we all have memories like this growing up. Those spaces no longer exist for us because of the rapid development, and every family has a similar story. I wanted the viewer to insert their own figures into a day like this. I am just painting the ground for your own figures to exist on.

LX: I love how you included a fleeting deflated basketball in the backyard. That conjures a lot of memories for me.

Figure 3.2: Hafsa Nouman, بی بی کا گھر *[detail]*, 2022, oil on archival paper, 15.5 × 11.5 inches (39.37 × 29.21 cm). Photo: courtesy of the artist © Hafsa Nouman

I wanted the viewer to insert their own figures into a day like this.

HN: Yes, and it was deflated by being in a puddle of rain, and the color almost captures that feeling. Rain is translucent and feels like it is washing everything away. This painting was a turning point. I was painting so much, and there comes a point when you are so in sync, and nothing gets lost in translation between the tip of your paintbrush and your eye. It was such a moment when I painted this. It was just coming out. I was painting in a trance-like state in a small corner of my bedroom which I shared with my sisters. I wasn’t even sure what some of the colors were! I thought the shadow was blue, but in the morning, when I took it into the sunlight, I realized I had used purple, and it made complete sense.

Figure 5: Hafsa Nouman, *Scared of the Descent*, 2023, acrylics on canvas, 18 × 12 inches (45.72 × 30.48 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist and Pat Garcia © Hafsa Nouman

LX: That’s beautiful. I also love this one. What compelled you to include a sliver of carpet-like patterns in your canvases? How does this fit within your larger practice?

HN: Everyone struggles with such a sharp contrast in my practice because I would make very representational paintings and then make these as ‘abstracted’ counterparts [laughs]. I was thinking about all of these while I was making the house paintings. They are all derived from wrought iron patterns and wall textures found in domestic spaces. It becomes an overarching practice.

LX: Is this imprinted?

HN: I would first make the wrought iron pattern and remove it, giving myself an emboss. Then I layered the surface and built up the canvas until the white emboss was buried under many layers of paint.

LX: It’s very much to the point of losing an element of your home while retaining a part of it and keeping it within the wall. What is your courtyard’s relationship to the mangoes?

HN: Whenever it rained, we would go to the terrace or the courtyard. There was a mango tree, and growing up, we used to say it “rained mangoes” at my grandparents’ house because they would fall everywhere…on our heads, on the floor…it would leave permanent mango stains on the walls and floors. I was thinking about that memory and how it still comes back when I see certain textures on modern walls. That’s when what gets called geometrical abstraction entered my work.

LX: That’s so funny that the mangoes are what sparked your geometrical abstraction. It reminds me, culturally, of when we eat anaar. I forgot how to say it in English right now.

HN: I love anaar. Yeah, like pomegranates! I've made so many works about anar as well, by the way.

Figure 6: Hafsa Nouman, *Breaks Open; Janat ka dana*, 2026, oil on canvas, 8 × 12 inches (20.32 × 30.48 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist, Pat Garcia, and Palo Gallery © Hafsa Nouman

LX: I grew up doing that too, like taking an anaar, pressing it, and eating it directly. I understand what you mean about sitting outside…it’s a special moment to eat with your family like that.

HN: Exactly. Even now, I take the anaar, open it, and start eating it like this (gesturing to taking a bite). I’ve also tried putting it in the fridge, then under hot water and tapping it. It just comes out. If you put it in the fridge, cut it, and then put it in warm water, it expands, and you just tap it with a spoon.
For my undergraduate thesis, I made pieces of walls with paint coming off.

Figure 7: Hafsa Nouman, *Raining Mangos at Bibi’s*, 2022, 84 × 60 inches (213.36 × 152.4 cm), acrylic on canvas. Photo: courtesy the artist © Hafsa Nouman

This one was from my final review, where I defended and talked about my work. It was incredible; everyone said they didn’t have the language to discuss my work, which was exciting. They told me I would add something to art history, and that made me really happy. I want my work to be integrated into a form of postcolonial art, as a different take on Minimalism. Minimalism is Western-centric in its coined meaning, and I want my work to disrupt that. I don’t even want to categorize it that way; it has its own place, and I just need to build the language around it. Which I understand will take time.

LX: I get that you didn’t want to label it. What’re your takes on the philosophies of representation and abstraction?

I want my work to be integrated into a form of postcolonial art, as a different take on Minimalism.

HN: It’s always been a vested interest of mine. That came from miniature paintings, and always thinking about the viewpoints you’re looking at and what the work is trying to convey. It’s not about a moral concept, but about the subliminal meaning and the hidden aspects that are trying to be uncovered. The thingness of the object, pointing inwards and pointing outwards at the same time.

Figure 8: Hafsa Nouman, *Reverberation*, 2025, oil on paper, 16 × 12 inches (40.64 × 30.48 cm), diptych. Photo: courtesy the artist © Hafsa Nouman

Even back then, I was more interested in how thinking in abstraction can result in a work that looks representational. When you touch something, it is an embodied experience, but you cannot see the point of contact. You rely on the sensation, and when you depict that sensation, it becomes an abstraction.

LX: That’s wonderful. You have an entire series of white walls with the embossed elements. Why did you choose to mount them in corners like icons or grids?

Figure 9.1: Hafsa Nouman, *Ode to the Present* [detail], 2025, oil and acrylic on canvas, 78 × 72 inches (198.12 × 182.88 cm), accordion diptych. Photo: courtesy the artist and Pat Garcia © Hafsa Nouman

Figure 9.2: Hafsa Nouman, *Ode to the Present* [detail], 2025, oil and acrylic on canvas, 78 × 72 inches (198.12 × 182.88 cm), accordion diptych. Photo: courtesy the artist and Pat Garcia © Hafsa Nouman

HN: I think for me, the corner was important. No shape exists without a corner except the circle. Any square, cuboid, or other shape has corners. We are not physically in any space without corners, whether 2D or 3D. The corner is the contact between two opposing points, like your fingers touching. For me, corners are about expanding and contracting. You cannot see the point of contact when you depict a corner. You perceive the shape and the mold of it. I also love this one and the others. I will quickly show you three that are interesting.

LX: The others are really spectacular.

HN: Thank you. Last summer, I got a travel grant to go to Egypt. It helped me think a lot about the meaning and significance of the horizon line. I was dealing with the problem of representation in terms of the neoliberal reception of entering work through the artist’s identity. That frustrated me because it was lazy and I found people tried to confine my practice into what they believe a Muslim Pakistani female artist “should” be making. I had a studio session with a well-known artist who asked about my experience living in Pakistan and whether it was very oppressive. I said no, and then she asked me about whether I would wear a burqa, which was shockingly funny. I told her that I wear the same clothes I do here, but because it’s hot, I wear salwar kameez for comfort. This was the first time I had to contend so explicitly, in my studio, with such an audience. I spoke with Jennifer Pronolo about this, and we just shook our heads at neoliberalism. This and a couple more such incidents made me think about what would happen if I made a reflective wall painting, and the viewer had to contend with their identity and self rather than mine.

I thought that if the figure in the painting is the reflection of the viewer, the reflection of the viewer operating as the painted figure, then it is about them contending with themselves in the present, which is not neutral. With the global state of affairs right now and the constant erasure of voices, the urgency to act is in the present. I want the present to feel immediate. I realized I needed a surface that projects the present rather than painting it.

Figure 10: *The Byzantine and Chinese painters vie in a trial of skill*, fol. 322a, from the *Khamsa (Quintet) of Nizami of Ganja*, 853 AH/1449–1450 CE, attributed to Shiraz, Iran, ink, paper, leather, 10.25 × 6.69 × 1.75 inches (26 × 17 × 4.5 cm). Gift of Alexander Smith Cochran, 1913 (13.229.3)

I saw a Persian miniature painting that was beautiful. It showed Alexander going to China and holding an art competition between a Greek and a Chinese painter. The Greek painter made the most realistic painting anyone had seen. The Chinese painter polished the wall until it became reflective, so the painting of the Greek artist was mirrored in the polished wall of the Chinese artist. That is representation, and in this case, it is not about fidelity to a real image but about the real, which is always in transience. Identity, whether it’s Pakistani, South Asian, or any identity, is not fixed. It is always in transition.

LX: Interesting, tell me about this apricot series and how this relates?

Figure 11.1: Hafsa Nouman, *What is the Desired Fruit?* [detail], 2024, oil on canvas, 16 × 12 polyptych. Photo: courtesy the artist and Sydney Mieko King © Hafsa Nouman

Figure 11.2: Hafsa Nouman, *What is the Desired Fruit?* [detail], 2024, oil on canvas, 16 × 12 polyptych (40.64 × 30.48 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist and Sydney Mieko King © Hafsa Nouman

Figure 11.3: Hafsa Nouman, *What is the Desired Fruit?* [detail], 2024, oil on canvas, 16 × 12 inch polyptych, (40.64 × 30.48 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist and Sydney Mieko King © Hafsa Nouman

I started making reflective paintings. One was inspired by an apricot tree. I saw compositions of a stone, a dried apricot, and the crushed seed. The desired fruit was the almond inside the apricot seed, not the apricot itself. For me, that represented life. That painting was about colonial desire, but also about stages of love, like the body, flesh, and effort needed to reach the pulse of the fruit. There are four elements to the painting, the dried apricot, a stone, the crushed seed, and the almond represented by the charged void, as Rachelle Dang, my professor at Yale, used to describe it.

Figure 11.4: Hafsa Nouman, Installation view of *What is the Desired Fruit?*, 2024, oil on canvas, 16 × 12 inch polyptych (40.64 × 30.48 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist and Sydney Mieko King © Hafsa Nouman

[Points to canvas ] This is a dried apricot. This one is the stone. It is blue and luminescent. Then there is a blank surface, the void. This is the beginning of the work because the beginning comes from emptiness. Emptiness is also death, but it's also the beginning of life.

LX: I love that. I was curious about the orientation of your pieces in the room, and I find it interesting that you use mirrors. In Persian culture, mirrors are often associated with self-reflection and often appear in religious contexts, sacred spaces, or even weddings. I don’t know if Pakistani culture has a similar tradition, but I’d love to hear more.

HN: I don’t really know that much about it either, to be honest; I think it is more about the interiority of the experience of looking. An object that points outwards and inwards at the same time. The idea of mirrors is about ego or vanity, but also about self-reflection and introspection.

LX: Definitely. Are the oranges and other elements influenced by apricots?

HN: It is how light touches the surface of the apricot. I was trying to capture that moment when the light touched the surface. These are dried ones. So they are like sweet and sour at the same time, you know, but chewy.

LX: Did you literally inspect them and then paint them, or were you capturing just the essence of the colour?

HN: For this one, I had dried apricots from the Pakistani store. I placed them in front of the canvas and observed the light and their translucency.

LX: I can see it now. Can you take me through your thesis?

Figure 12.1: Installation view of Hafsa Nouman’s thesis exhibition, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2025. Photo: courtesy the artist and Pat Garcia © Hafsa Nouman

Figure 12.2: Hafsa Nouman, *Desire for Resonance - the dried Apricot (3)*, 2025, oil on canvas, 16 × 12 inches (40.64 × 30.48 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist and Pat Garcia © Hafsa Nouman

Figure 12.3: Hafsa Nouman, *Desire for Resonance - Seed of the Apricot (5)*, 2025, oil on canvas, 16 × 12 inch polyptych (40.64 × 30.48 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist and Pat Garcia © Hafsa Nouman

Figure 12.4: Hafsa Nouman, *Untitled ( blankness)*, 2025, oil on paper on wood panel, 16 × 12 inch polyptych (40.64 × 30.48 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist and Pat Garcia © Hafsa Nouman

Figure 12.5: Hafsa Nouman, *Desire for Resonance - the Leaf of the Apricot (1)*, 2025, oil on canvas, 16 × 12 inch polyptych (40.64 × 30.48 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist and Pat Garcia © Hafsa Nouman

Figure 12.6: Hafsa Nouman, *Desire for Resonance - the Apricot (2)*, 2025, oil on canvas, 16 × 12 inches (40.64 × 30.48 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist and Pat Garcia © Hafsa Nouman

HN: I went to the Kailash Valley in the Hindu Kush mountains, near Chitral. It’s basically northwest of Pakistan and it’s a very beautiful space because this whole composition starts from the meeting of two rivers. One river is made by glacier water, and the other is made by a hot water spring. They both meet together and create a different color, which eventually forms a larger water body that becomes the sea. Between the river and the sea, there is a landscape of apricots, fruits, and leaves, which I wanted to capture.

LX: That is so cool. You distilled it down to this. What inspired your choice of hues?

HN: This work is inspired by lapis lazuli, a stone long associated with the region and ubiquitous throughout the valley. During a week-long trip with my family, I found myself drawn not only to the landscape but to the way light moved across its surfaces. Later, while travelling through Egypt and Pakistan in the summer of 2024, I arrived at a realization that would become central to my practice: I was interested in reflection as a way of registering the present.

The idea crystallized in Alexandria, looking out at the Mediterranean. Water appeared simultaneously transparent, reflective, and opaque, shifting according to light and viewpoint. I became interested in how a surface could hold these contradictory qualities at once and how painting might capture a moment without fixing it entirely. The challenge was to construct a surface that appeared wet without actually being wet.

This led me to think about the layered construction of miniature painting. By replacing water-based ingredients with oil-based mediums and building the surface through successive translucent layers, I began to develop a reflective skin that could operate like water: simultaneously image, surface, and encounter. Through reflection, the work allows the present moment to enter the painting rather than remain outside it.

LX: I like the ripple effect. It kind of looks waxy from a phone. That’s really cool. What about Shadow of November?

Figure 13: Hafsa Nouman, *Shadow of November*, 2023, oil, graphite and tape on arches paper, 30 × 41 inches (104.14 × 76.2 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist and Pat Garcia © Hafsa Nouman

HN: Much of my work has examined wrought iron jaali patterns as sites where vernacular ornament becomes entangled with colonial systems of enclosure. Motifs derived from foliage and local decorative traditions were incorporated into fences surrounding official buildings and demarcated land, transforming familiar cultural forms into instruments of separation. I have always been struck by the contradiction they embody: they permit the gaze to pass through while preventing the body from doing the same. They are simultaneously ornamental and disciplinary.

After colonial rule, these patterns remained embedded within everyday architecture. I grew up surrounded by jaalis, admiring the intricate shadows they cast across walls and floors. Their beauty exists alongside the histories they carry.

This work responds to a particular image that stayed with me. During the bombardment of Al Shifa Hospital, one widely circulated video was filmed through a wrought iron window. That framing became inseparable from the act of witnessing itself. I translated the pattern into relief on a cement wall and projected its shadow across the gallery space using paper cutouts. The installation reflects on the experience of witnessing violence from a geographical distance while remaining implicated in the political and economic structures that enable it. The patterned screen becomes both a physical threshold and a metaphor for the mediated conditions through which contemporary conflicts are seen.

LX: That’s powerful to experiment with physical barriers like that. Can you tell me about Dissolving Horizon and how it’s hidden behind Landscape Oscillating? It is interesting that you bifurcate and orient it sideways.

Figure 14: Hafsa Nouman, *a Landscape, oscillating*, 2025, oil on canvas, 63 × 45 inches (160.02 × 114.3 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist and Pat Garcia © Hafsa Nouman

HN: If you look around, there is a small red painting and another work called Dissolving Horizon, just behind the painting. I was thinking about the notion of a book and what gets displayed in museums and special collections, and what never becomes visible. When we talk about colonization, whether its of Latin America or India, the texts still do not explicitly say things like “this person was racist or committed genocide or took over land.” It is still coded.

Figure 15: Hafsa Nouman, *Dissolving Horizon (Dissolving Horizon is hidden behind a Landscape, oscillating.)*, 2025, oil on canvas and oil on wood panel, 6 × 4 inches (15.24 × 10.16 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist and Pat Garcia © Hafsa Nouman

It was important to leave the book's pages blank and reflective because we often imagine these issues as belonging either to the past or to the future, when they are unfolding in the present. Indigenous rights continue to be violated, and immigration rights are being challenged today. I want to resist the idea that colonization is a historical event that has already concluded. Even within the so-called postcolonial world, globalization remains deeply entangled with imperialism. The reflective pages are therefore not empty; they make the present visible, allowing the viewer and their surroundings to become part of the work.

The reflective pages are therefore not empty; they make the present visible

LX: It was great to see your first solo show at Palo Gallery, Facsimile. What does “facsimile” mean to you?

Figure 17: Hafsa Nouman, *One Ubiquitous, Dadi ki chirya* (diptych), 2026, oil on canvas, 16 × 12 inches (40.64 × 30.48 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist, Pat Garcia, and Palo Gallery © Hafsa Nouman

Figure 18: Hafsa Nouman, *Chusa howa Aam*, 2026, oil on canvas, 8 × 12 inches (20.32 × 30.48 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist, Pat Garcia, and Palo Gallery © Hafsa Nouman

Figure 19: Hafsa Nouman, *Aam ki chaoun mein*, 2026, oil on panel, 8 × 10 inches (20.32 × 25.40 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist, Pat Garcia, and Palo Gallery © Hafsa Nouman

HN: I am so glad to hear that. I decided to treat the gallery space as a place of critique and learning to take the pressure off of being on display a little bit away. I see facsimile not as a faithful copy of an original, but as a form that emerges when the original can no longer be encountered on its own terms.

Raining Mangoes: In Conversation with Hafsa Nouman

I wanted to create a surface where the past, present, and future collapse.

“What if I treat my surface as an archaeological site?”

I wanted the viewer to insert their own figures into a day like this.

I want my work to be integrated into a form of postcolonial art, as a different take on Minimalism.

The reflective pages are therefore not empty; they make the present visible

One with Nature: In Conversation with Paulina Moncada