My first impression of Lariab’s work was that it felt strangely familiar – like stepping into a conversation I didn’t realise I was already part of. Later, when we spoke, that sense only deepened. Her art doesn’t try to keep the viewer at a distance; it pulls you in, asks you to participate, to wrestle with its paradoxes and silences.
She inhabits a space where disciplines blur – where science brushes against philosophy, where faith and imagination speak to each other across centuries. Based in Islamabad, she moves fluidly through her roles as a visual artist, a writer, a curator, and a community builder.
Lariab Ahmad completed her BFA with distinction from the National College of Arts. She has exhibited her work and shared her writing internationally, with projects and features in the UK, Canada, Sri Lanka, India, Brazil, Turkey, Iran, and the US. She runs her studio, Her Pink Wine, alongside a community project focused on amplifying underrepresented voices. Beyond her artistic practice, she contributes through mentoring, university talks, and serving as a juror. She has also pursued training in project management and leadership with Google and McKinsey.
A ARAIN: Lariab, your work is a beautiful amalgam of fiction and nonfiction – as if each piece is being narrated from a different dimension. Do you view those two as separate ontologies or as interdependent modes of perception? How do you navigate this interplay of two worlds?
LARIAB AHMAD: Thank you for your kind words. I enjoy Sci-Fi. My comfort is seeing unusual alien worlds and imaginative interpretations of life on this planet. I watch and read a ridiculous amount in this category, which is why I mix fiction with reality. To see the world for more than is apparent, we have popular theories like the Matrix or Stimulation, and then we have these amazingly mysterious phenomena, such as black holes. People try really hard to make a reality the things they dream about. Dreaming has been the fuel for life, so I see fiction and nonfiction as fundamentals of existence – different dimensions influencing each other, perhaps even dictating.
My minithesis and thesis set the foundations, blurring the line between what is above and under the waters – the ripples in one dimension generate waves, disturbing the waters in the other. It is so human to attempt to organise ambiguity. We do have the physical laws, but at its core, this universe is uncertain. We wish for absolute equations that could explain everything, but we don’t have those, so the pursuit makes sense. And so there’s always a relationship between fiction and nonfiction, like an unaltering ancient dance between a muse and its altar, or between a bee and a flower; they need each other because they cannot exist without each other.
I dream, therefore I breathe. We have nonfiction, because we have fiction. We invent because we have not made it a waking reality yet. Sometimes I do get carried away. One of the joys of being an artist is the ability to make your own story, staying within the physical laws of nature but also surpassing them, a little bit at a time. The sleeping poet is always working. We never switch off. Everything in this world that we consider beautiful is something we dreamed about, whether it’s freedom and justice, or colours and paintings. Everything from there to here and in between, that we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell, is something that humanity at some point, on a collective and individual level, considered a sensation that had to be realised, that was once fiction.
AA: Was being an artist a childhood dream, or did it gradually develop over time? What is your first memory as an artist?
LA: I didn’t have a particular profession in mind as a child, but I had quite a few ideas of what I wanted to be. We have one childhood to be carefree in, and I had the privilege to pass that time without worry. I used to draw, but that is something every kid does, I guess, every human is born creative. In pre-med, the flower illustrations were my favourite, not so much the animals and insects. I have a mild insect phobia, so the zoology lab was dreadful (I was OK with the frog and got pretty good at dissecting it). The botany cross-sections were pretty, clean and pleasant.
Socio-economically, careers and degrees are evaluated according to their perceived income potential. I have always been anxious, and not wanting to wake up every day and question my life played a key role in making this choice. I pursued the arts because I wanted to follow joy. It is how I make sense of life.
After pre-med, I took a gap year and walked into an art academy where I started life drawing without any intention of admission at first. So, the first memory and answer to why I became an artist is under a microscope in that botany lab. Of course, I love the sciences, and they mingle with my visual practice, and there are parallel practices involving building projects and working with teams, and art is where I let go.
AA: You have an artwork titled ‘I don’t know why the caged birds sing’ – what was the inspiration to have your take on Maya Angelou’s book I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing? What does the caged bird symbolise to you?
LA: As a descendant of the colonised, now looking at indigenous communities that have been taking care of this planet, treated unjustly, I’m starting to think the key to progress is not giving in to despair, because if we do give in, we have nothing to look forward to. I was not in a good place when I made this painting in Faisalabad. I added the word ‘don’t’. As a new graduate, I experienced how capitalised and toxic the world is. I was a year into exhibiting, and I got that access because I was a graduate of NCA, but the students who were not graduates of mainstream universities didn’t get that, even though their work was up to par. People making amazing things were limited to the margins through no fault of their own, really. That’s how I got into curating. Back then, I didn’t know why caged birds sing. And at that time, it wasn’t necessary to have the answer; instead, I just put my head down and worked towards it. This was one of the first works I produced while also curating. It’s a pretty depressing title. But it’s our responsibility as the not-caged birds to listen to the songs of the caged birds and do away with these cages. So the painting is built around a bent figure with X’s as eyes on a yellow background.
AA: ‘Side Effects’ seems to hint at unseen and uncertain consequences. What is the cause of the side effect? And why did you choose to frame this work with AI? Was it for the purpose of aesthetics or to align with the theme of the piece?
LA: This painting was made as part of a pair, ‘Side Effects’ and ‘Instinctively Fearful’. Humans lean towards certainty, the seen. As a visual artist, I give form to the unseen through ordo ab chao – order from chaos. Inseparable opposing forces. Our behaviour can sometimes turn a little melancholy, influenced by the fluctuating seen and unseen. This action and reaction loop makes our personalities. As we move through life – with feelings, thoughts, experiences, dreams – these forces become stronger. And though we are generally aware of them, these forces are not always accessible to us, even though they are within us, a cunabulis ad sepulcrum. From cradle to tomb. The AI frame was an aesthetic decision. This was when I started playing with an intelligence artificially created. I wanted to see how it could frame my work. It’s not something I do with my paintings, and the first time I decide to do it, I leave it up to someone else. The frames were added much later, years after production.
AA: You’re an artist and a writer, and you’ve made art in various mediums – oil, canvas, on wood panels, even digitally. So does the creative inspiration come along carrying its medium, or is that a deliberate choice you make?
LA: There is a central theme to my work. The expressions and compositions may vary, but the concept is outlined in my concept document that traces how I got here. And it keeps evolving, I update it with the latest reads and developments in relevant fields. For example, Nietzsche’s eternal loop is a recent layer. In an infinite universe, does every possible combination of forms repeat itself? I, a paradox moving through the fabric of space and time, am the only constant. My statement is never the same, and the concept document defines these changes as layers. Mediums are what I like, they are efficient and convenient. I won’t necessarily paint a texture that I can apply directly, like I would paste artificial grass instead of painting grass. Or use wallpaper instead of replicating realistic clouds. When I don’t feel like making a visual, I write. Medium comes after the concept, what works will be added, and what doesn’t will be subtracted. It is a messy process, trial and error. A lot of layers, if you ever decide to chip away at any of my earlier paintings, there will be a completely different one underneath.
AA: In ‘I Have Two Strangers’, what is a stranger to you? A fragment of the self or an external presence that shadows your life or memory? And what is the concept of self to you?
LA: I am a storyteller. I prefer poetic titles that are stories within themselves, and I like approaching them as narratives of their own. The strangers here don’t have an exact correlation with me; these are simply two questions I don’t have answers to. All the other paintings discussed in this interview are self-portraits; this one, created for a show just after graduation, does not include me. When we comment on ‘self’, we also talk about identity. Being the creator of this work, and from a personal perspective, identity has two aspects similar to awareness. The collective and the individual together make a whole. I do talk about how miraculous psychological processes can mutate and cease simultaneously. And then, there is the controversy of ‘this is’ and ‘this is not’.
As a viewer, you see forms that are clothed and maybe being broken. They can be shadows of each other. To what extent can the difference between what you perceive as ‘this is real’ and ‘this is not’ cease to exist? I speak of a field where forms have no objective meaning, existing only to be torn apart. The very idea of a form confines its reality. It is a transgression of what can be real. This work isn’t about me; it can be a general commentary on the self and its form. I have not arrived at a conclusion on this yet, but for the sake of a spirited conversation, we can pose to your readers: For a person, does the self have just one form or different forms talking to each other?
AA: In your letter, ‘I don’t have all the answers’, you write to ‘Dark and Light’ as a singularity – as if, instead of being in contradiction, they move in harmony, like oppositely charged particles in an atom. Is that how you experience inner paradox, not as conflict, but as motion in orbit? And does your creative process emerge from that same dance between opposing energies?
LA: It is a love letter. I view love letters as milestones: how you see yourself is how you will see me. I am political, therefore there is sadness inherent in my work about the current horrors that consume our planet – the genocides, famines, starvations, health and gender inequality, education barriers, child labour, climate injustices, and so much more. I have delayed writing this for a while – not for the lack of inspiration – but credit here goes to Saint Levant for putting his music out there, pushing us to express ourselves with courage. Obsessed with his work these days. Turning to the remarkable phenomenon we call singularity, this is an active area of research. Another question we pursue. Like a child drawn to a red button. There is so much mystery around it. What’s out there is what’s inside us. Like networks of energy in the universe, your heart expands and contracts. Imagine such intense and infinite density and gravity that everything collapses into one. I speak of love in the same way; neither clean nor well-behaved. Consider yourself living in the nuqta under ب, then within you, there is intense infinity, not a neatly-tied bowtie, but a crumpled paper. There are storms and calm rivers. No conflicts. You are sharing this nuqta with all of us, and not just humans. The calls of birds, plants, animals, and the stars. Light and dark – the primal forces we all drink from. We all swim in. Rarely conquer. Often drown in them. Sometimes in solitude, other times with millions standing with you. That’s what it’s like to live in the nuqta under ب. All in motion. I will not assign pure logic to singularity, or to the concept of light and dark, or to what makes one rise in the face of love.
A Arain is a writer from Pakistan.