Zarina Khan

During my time at the RCA, I wanted to challenge myself into working out a unique language within painting, to paint with the knowledge I had acquired during my undergrad learning traditional techniques in order to step into the less traditional, the less formal and more of the unknown; to find my way through paint and create a language I could express myself in.

Within my paintings there are partly imagined characters based on, detailed and vaguely reported femicide cases in news paper articles, female representation in miniature paintings and certain protagonists from films. To me, they are beings with stories that I question and try to uncover through an open lens.

But before getting into their narratives there was a brownness to the bodies I was trying to achieve with a color that embodied notions of home. The Brown madder color used so voraciously across most of my paintings started to become a pre-existing palette inspired by Pakistan's landscape that I injected with more meaning and free associating keywords such as patriarchy, violence, bodies, mark making, censorship, and home.

It seemed that mark making and this color said things for me I was not yet ready to say myself and I still struggle with that, I struggle to dig deeper into the violence that takes place upon and within bodies existing in certain lands. The brown madder oil pastel censors my own self sometimes and I struggle to not censor myself within these paintings. To stay with the violated forms, to endure and maybe to empower.

The canvas gives space for these forms to exist on; the silhouettes emerge from the blotches of paint and brushstrokes fighting on the surface. This balance between abstraction and figuration, between “unconscious impressions” and “a deep awareness of the immeasurableness of the painted mark” is particularly important as it allows freedom for the forms within a broader context; to exist outside of the cultural and patriarchal systems, to exist in a new emerging world.