Nadia Waheed Saudi Arabia, b. 1992

Nadia Waheed’s work is both allegorical and autobiographical at once. Her large-scale figurative paintings seamlessly reference both her own lived experience as well as broader themes of womanhood, cultural trauma, and the desire for selfhood unfettered by conventions, expectations, and obligations. The female subjects, often self-portraits, in her work clearly bear the weight of the, oftentimes contradictory, cultural pressures that fall on women.  They also demonstrate a quiet interiority or interrelationships with other women that gesture towards the space for a liberated self unbeholden to social norms and compulsions. Her experience of the upheavals of the pandemic resulted in her work turning even more determinedly to questions of interiority, spirituality, and the search for harmony amidst the clamour of neoliberal modernity. From explorations of nothingness that is the Buddhist nirvānā to the pursuit of balance between the material and spiritual concerns, her art represents women yearning for and discovering clarity and peace. Detachment is a recurring theme in Waheed’s work, symbolised by female figures that float, drift, and are unmoored from their surroundings. Yet, these figures are never fully free of worldly concerns - while Waheed obscures normative markers of racial and cultural identity, such as skin tone, the dupattas (the shawl women wear over their head and shoulders), mehndi, and braided hair announce their South Asian identity. It is this dance between the individual and the social her art captures with expressive grace.