Beloved - Fiza Khatri

Art Basel Hong Kong

26 - 30 March 2024

Fiza Khatri’s paintings and drawings depict intimate portraits and gatherings of human and nonhuman inhabitants of their community and are informed by the artist’s experiences in feminist and queer space-making efforts in Pakistan. Imagined compositions include friends, lovers, animals, and plants in domestic interiors, outdoor gardens, and bodies of water. As fictions, Khatri’s paintings create temporal openings for living otherwise and performing alternative life-worlds, uninhibited by the material conditions of reality. Atmospheric marks of an airbrush are layered with the tactility of a paintbrush to alternately dissolve and sharpen boundaries between forms. This approach calls attention to integrated and severed relationships between a figure and their environment to suggest a condition relevant to their place in the world.

Anchoring Fiza's immersive display at Art Basel Hong Kong is a seven-panel painting called Beloved (2024). Beloved is an installation of paintings of garlands arranged to hide letter forms spelling the word ‘beloved’. While the word is illegible, its presence infuses the space depicted with a reverent anticipation of a meeting or a gathering. Across South Asia, garlands are used to mark ceremonial moments including celebration and mourning. Flowers adorn bodies, homes, gravesites, and shrines to consecrate significant moments and spaces. The term ‘beloved’ appears in Sufi poetics to refer to the object of one’s desire, God, and sometimes, as in the case of Sindhi Sufi saint Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai’s Risalo, even the self. Ultimately, all of these subject positions are interchangeable. Here, the space is adorned with this word-spell in preparation for a sacred moment of union between a lover and their beloved. The space features a yellow curtain, a recurring motif in the artist’s work, in reference to a particular site of gathering in the artist’s hometown Karachi.

The word-painting is flanked by portraits and scenes of precious gatherings between friends and loved ones on either side. The figurative work emphasizes relationality with and between the subjects depicted. A constellation of portraits made from observation index close encounters between the artist and their subjects. Multi-figure scenes stitched together from imagined, recalled, and perceived moments reflect a longing to sustain presence. Most figures either regard one another or ruminate more internally while sharing space. The paintings emphasize the markmaking of the artist, creating intimate surfaces through a tender touch.

Art Basel Hong Kong

26 - 30 March 2024

Jhaveri Contemporary

Fiza Khatri’s paintings and drawings depict intimate portraits and gatherings of human and nonhuman inhabitants of their community and are informed by the artist’s experiences in feminist and queer space-making efforts in Pakistan. Imagined compositions include friends, lovers, animals, and plants in domestic interiors, outdoor gardens, and bodies of water. As fictions, Khatri’s paintings create temporal openings for living otherwise and performing alternative life-worlds, uninhibited by the material conditions of reality. Atmospheric marks of an airbrush are layered with the tactility of a paintbrush to alternately dissolve and sharpen boundaries between forms. This approach calls attention to integrated and severed relationships between a figure and their environment to suggest a condition relevant to their place in the world.

Anchoring Fiza's immersive display at Art Basel Hong Kong is a seven-panel painting called Beloved (2024). Beloved is an installation of paintings of garlands arranged to hide letter forms spelling the word ‘beloved’. While the word is illegible, its presence infuses the space depicted with a reverent anticipation of a meeting or a gathering. Across South Asia, garlands are used to mark ceremonial moments including celebration and mourning. Flowers adorn bodies, homes, gravesites, and shrines to consecrate significant moments and spaces. The term ‘beloved’ appears in Sufi poetics to refer to the object of one’s desire, God, and sometimes, as in the case of Sindhi Sufi saint Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai’s Risalo, even the self. Ultimately, all of these subject positions are interchangeable. Here, the space is adorned with this word-spell in preparation for a sacred moment of union between a lover and their beloved. The space features a yellow curtain, a recurring motif in the artist’s work, in reference to a particular site of gathering in the artist’s hometown Karachi.

The word-painting is flanked by portraits and scenes of precious gatherings between friends and loved ones on either side. The figurative work emphasizes relationality with and between the subjects depicted. A constellation of portraits made from observation index close encounters between the artist and their subjects. Multi-figure scenes stitched together from imagined, recalled, and perceived moments reflect a longing to sustain presence. Most figures either regard one another or ruminate more internally while sharing space. The paintings emphasize the markmaking of the artist, creating intimate surfaces through a tender touch.

Art Basel Hong Kong

26 - 30 March 2024

Jhaveri Contemporary

Fiza Khatri’s paintings and drawings depict intimate portraits and gatherings of human and nonhuman inhabitants of their community and are informed by the artist’s experiences in feminist and queer space-making efforts in Pakistan. Imagined compositions include friends, lovers, animals, and plants in domestic interiors, outdoor gardens, and bodies of water. As fictions, Khatri’s paintings create temporal openings for living otherwise and performing alternative life-worlds, uninhibited by the material conditions of reality. Atmospheric marks of an airbrush are layered with the tactility of a paintbrush to alternately dissolve and sharpen boundaries between forms. This approach calls attention to integrated and severed relationships between a figure and their environment to suggest a condition relevant to their place in the world.

Anchoring Fiza's immersive display at Art Basel Hong Kong is a seven-panel painting called Beloved (2024). Beloved is an installation of paintings of garlands arranged to hide letter forms spelling the word ‘beloved’. While the word is illegible, its presence infuses the space depicted with a reverent anticipation of a meeting or a gathering. Across South Asia, garlands are used to mark ceremonial moments including celebration and mourning. Flowers adorn bodies, homes, gravesites, and shrines to consecrate significant moments and spaces. The term ‘beloved’ appears in Sufi poetics to refer to the object of one’s desire, God, and sometimes, as in the case of Sindhi Sufi saint Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai’s Risalo, even the self. Ultimately, all of these subject positions are interchangeable. Here, the space is adorned with this word-spell in preparation for a sacred moment of union between a lover and their beloved. The space features a yellow curtain, a recurring motif in the artist’s work, in reference to a particular site of gathering in the artist’s hometown Karachi.

The word-painting is flanked by portraits and scenes of precious gatherings between friends and loved ones on either side. The figurative work emphasizes relationality with and between the subjects depicted. A constellation of portraits made from observation index close encounters between the artist and their subjects. Multi-figure scenes stitched together from imagined, recalled, and perceived moments reflect a longing to sustain presence. Most figures either regard one another or ruminate more internally while sharing space. The paintings emphasize the markmaking of the artist, creating intimate surfaces through a tender touch.

Art Basel Hong Kong

26 - 30 March 2024

Jhaveri Contemporary

Fiza Khatri’s paintings and drawings depict intimate portraits and gatherings of human and nonhuman inhabitants of their community and are informed by the artist’s experiences in feminist and queer space-making efforts in Pakistan. Imagined compositions include friends, lovers, animals, and plants in domestic interiors, outdoor gardens, and bodies of water. As fictions, Khatri’s paintings create temporal openings for living otherwise and performing alternative life-worlds, uninhibited by the material conditions of reality. Atmospheric marks of an airbrush are layered with the tactility of a paintbrush to alternately dissolve and sharpen boundaries between forms. This approach calls attention to integrated and severed relationships between a figure and their environment to suggest a condition relevant to their place in the world.

Anchoring Fiza's immersive display at Art Basel Hong Kong is a seven-panel painting called Beloved (2024). Beloved is an installation of paintings of garlands arranged to hide letter forms spelling the word ‘beloved’. While the word is illegible, its presence infuses the space depicted with a reverent anticipation of a meeting or a gathering. Across South Asia, garlands are used to mark ceremonial moments including celebration and mourning. Flowers adorn bodies, homes, gravesites, and shrines to consecrate significant moments and spaces. The term ‘beloved’ appears in Sufi poetics to refer to the object of one’s desire, God, and sometimes, as in the case of Sindhi Sufi saint Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai’s Risalo, even the self. Ultimately, all of these subject positions are interchangeable. Here, the space is adorned with this word-spell in preparation for a sacred moment of union between a lover and their beloved. The space features a yellow curtain, a recurring motif in the artist’s work, in reference to a particular site of gathering in the artist’s hometown Karachi.

The word-painting is flanked by portraits and scenes of precious gatherings between friends and loved ones on either side. The figurative work emphasizes relationality with and between the subjects depicted. A constellation of portraits made from observation index close encounters between the artist and their subjects. Multi-figure scenes stitched together from imagined, recalled, and perceived moments reflect a longing to sustain presence. Most figures either regard one another or ruminate more internally while sharing space. The paintings emphasize the markmaking of the artist, creating intimate surfaces through a tender touch.