Me sitting on my building’s rooftop, smack dab in the middle of downtown’s construction and noise, and Iman on a screen in front of me, with a rather impressive bookshelf behind her, her cat as an occasional participant – this was the setting in which our conversation about evolution, humanity, politics, nature, and art took place.
Since her graduation in 2023, it has been exciting to witness Iman playing with ideas, pushing boundaries and reimagining people’s relationships with objects and with Earth. Her online presence is incredibly open and fresh, consistently drawing in viewers to slow down and reexamine their pre-existing notions about humanity and its role in the universe. She invites us to politicise art and take it into our lives and not let it remain just a spectacle.
An Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture graduate, Iman seamlessly engages in various forms of expression, including multidisciplinary art, illustrations, and writing. The context of her work appears naturally in her creations – Karachi, our gendered household spaces, family heirlooms, gardens, and the larger hegemonies of the world. She has exhibited her art at various institutions including the VM Art Gallery, Karachi Biennale 27, and Koel Gallery, Karachi.
LEENA ZAIDI: Something that I think is really interesting about your work is that so much of it is about the evolution of the objects, like décor or fabric with specific prints on them, on Earth – the change they undergo over time, and the way the Earth shapes them. What is it about these things – carpets specifically, in some instances – that draws you to them?
IMAN AHMED: In my work, I talk a lot about life and living and nature, but my interest in objects is always in the ones which outlive us. I think about our mortality compared to the mortality of these objects. They’re fascinating because they’re functional but also really symbolic: We walk on them; traditional families eat on them; we repair them when they get damaged or moth-eaten; we gift them on weddings. These same carpets see people’s funerals – they’re the places where people pray the final prayers. These carpets change contexts over a lifetime, and they’re passed along for generations.
If you study a carpet very closely, you begin to see stories that have accumulated in it over time – through the stains on them, sections where they’ve been repaired, places where the colour has become warped and shifted, where the carpet is torn. The meaning behind it changes. Maybe someone received a carpet as a gift on their wedding, but later it evoked sadness for them because they lost their partner.
This is what drives me to explore heirlooms, especially carpets. I think heirlooms become witnesses to human life because they survive longer than the people who make them, the people who pass them on, and buy and exchange them.
The materials from which carpets are made – wool, cotton, and natural dyes – are all deeply connected to the natural world. My practice began with the concept of grief and how humans inherently try to hold onto memories for as long as they can, through objects. South Asian families pass down objects to retain the memory of a family or a house that is no longer there. Recently, though, my work has extended beyond this, and I have been looking at the relationship between human time with other forms of time, such as ecological time, and carpets as heirlooms sit at the intersection of the two. They’re human-made but they’re also a product of the landscape, of movement, of animals, plants, and histories that have extended beyond when they were created.
LZ: That’s such an interesting answer, especially in the context of your piece ‘Hamesha/Eternity,’ in which you mention that humans are just a part of Earth’s journey. How has your work landed here, how did you develop this framing that humans are just a short chapter in the history of the Earth?
IA: Along with my studio practice, I teach history and geography for A Levels and at college level. These two subjects are really connected to my practice. I feel that art without context is craft or decoration. You need to have context to what you’re doing. To me, it seems that when we look at history and objects, at the most we look at things from human time, from our lifetimes and our contexts. But if you study Earth, you realize it’s existed for billions of years, and that nature on it has been created and destroyed, gone extinct and been reborn over nine times in the planet’s history. I feel that humans consider themselves separate from nature, like it’s a commodity, something that exists to be seen and taken inspiration from.
But we’re actually quite connected and we overlap in places, in gardens, for instance. But there is a kind of [human] domination visible in gardens, even in Mughal gardens, and those depicted in traditional Mughal miniatures. There are always curated figures present in them, such as the Charbagh and the fountains. If you look closely at a garden, though, you’ll see that it can never be completely controlled. There will be parts that have either decayed or overgrown. It’s man versus nature, where the two try to co-exist but there is a constant struggle. I think the role of humanity should not be to dominate but to understand that humans are just a small part of Earth’s history.
You must physically rub away an image to reveal what lies beneath it and see the transfer. Use too much pressure, you wipe it away entirely
LZ: In ‘Hamesha/Eternity,’ you mention that you had originally planned to paint the tree with “flowering pearls and pomegranates,” but ultimately chose to leave it barren. What led to that decision?
IA: That work was altered due to the Iran war. To me, the event was connected to my art, which is, essentially, about carpets and the stories they tell. Here, in this part of the world, the botanical depictions on carpets show paradise. In Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Islam, Judaism – the image of paradise is always of a garden, with pomegranates, milk, and honey. These evoke images of rebirth, renewal, bounty, and abundance. When I was working on ‘Hamesha/Eternity’ and war broke out, there was so much uncertainty. I realised that if the work was trying to depict eternity, there would have been too much resolution in a tree which was complete. It would have suggested an ending, or a moment where everything was fulfilled. With the war going on, I felt that eternity was not about abundance alone, but also about absence, waiting and transformations, and the cycles that continue beyond a lifespan.
LZ: Was the background of the painting also something you had planned from the beginning, or was it something that changed with everything going on?
IA: I think, when you start a piece, there is an image in your head, but it does change according to your context, or what you read or what you see. That particular painting was always meant to be a lone tree in a rugged landscape. I never try to depict a real place. It could be the mountains in Afghanistan, in Kandahar, it could be the Irani landscape, it could be the Karakoram. When discussing certain places and biomes we use vocabulary such as “rugged,” “bare,” as if there’s nothing there. So, I like to work with contrasts: I take rich, floral patterns which are never associated with barrenness or ruggedness, and I juxtapose them onto that landscape. It’s a way of creating conversation where traditional writing and research stops.
LZ: It’s so cool that you don’t just stick to what you had planned for the piece, but you really allow it to be impacted by the world around you.
IA: Yeah, I think it’s important to do that. Recently, there was a global discussion about whether art is political, or if art should be commenting on things that are happening, and how there has been a steady depoliticization of art for fear for the artist and their work, that it might be vandalized. But even if a piece is not screaming a message, I don’t think art is ever without one. There is always some idea driven by what the artist has experienced and what they see around them.
LZ: This is a broad statement, but South Asian art is very often inspired by nature and botany. I can see that in your work too. With your background in art, history, and geography, do you think that the relationship between art and nature has, perhaps, changed over time as our landscapes and the Earth have changed? How has your personal relationship with nature altered?
IA: South Asian art is very big in scope, but let’s work through this answer. The most interesting contrast – and again, my work does stem from my experiences – is that the place I work from, Karachi, is a city from where trees have been eliminated. We have a government which is the enemy of trees. A little anecdote: My neighbour despises trees. She can’t stand them. We have a tree in our garden, and sometimes its branches grow over to the neighbour’s side of the wall. So she just wants our entire tree chopped off. She wants it gone. She says it’s a mess.
This is something I’ve started noticing – people cannot stand what they can’t control. Nature can never be fully under control. Then you see the upholstery in people’s houses, the clothes they wear, which is commercial lawn, and it’s all about botany and floral patterns. These motifs are borrowed and worn, but people can’t stand the real thing. They fill their houses with nature, which is where the word “indoor garden” comes from. They have condensed nature and converted it into their textiles, making it is a big part of our visual heritage. Natural illustrations have always existed, even in Mughal manuscripts. Even when the British colonised, they made scientific botanical drawings of native plants.
William Morris is another important catalyst for my work. He was the founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement in England. He basically appropriated designs that existed in South Asia and repackaged them, turning them into pastel combinations and then sold them in England as exotic floral pieces. Even the word “nature,” I feel, is a blanket term, and depicting nature is a complicated thing.
LZ: I love your commentary on indoor gardens. We talked about Karachi not having trees and, in your piece ‘Urban Palaces,’ you really touch upon the lack of public spaces and green spaces in the city. Could you speak about that piece a bit?
IA: I recently completed a residency in Japan, in a city called Akiōta. The sole purpose of it was to try to understand how people live in Japan’s rural areas versus in our home countries, which was Pakistan for me. The jump for me was extreme, going from a highly urbanised environment to an area that left alone its green spaces.
There, I realized that the concept of heirlooms has more importance in urban areas – owning a carpet or a family souvenir – because you don’t own public space, you don’t have access to a shared, natural environment. So, people try to collect these objects and pass them on. That was one thing I really learned from the residency – that maybe cities really encourage heirlooms and the cycle of passing things down.
LZ: Going back to ‘Hamesha/Eternity’ for a minute, you have brought together conflict, the Earth, and art in one stunning piece. What drew you to create something that touches on all these rather major and heavy themes?
IA: That piece was created in the midst of a lot of political uncertainty. There was the Iran war, as well as the question: If a genocide is happening in a different part of the world, should it impact us? If politics is far away from our context, should they matter? This is the first time we’ve seen a global discourse about this. It’s not just in South Asia or Pakistan. To me, conflict and art are not separate because human conflict often emerges from the way we interact with land, resources, and the environment. Art, then, becomes a way of recording and questioning that relationship.
This painting thought about what remains after a conflict passes and how a landscape can continue to bear traces of the violence and resilience. The way land is spoken about, which is the theme of ‘Hamesha/Eternity,’ is very interesting. “The region is barren, there’s nothing there, there’s nothing to be harvested” – those are very common things said about rocky landscapes. Bringing conflict into it, rather than showing it as an event where the people are the most important part and where the suffering is what is most important, I was more interested in placing conflict in a larger time frame, showing how a war can become a brief moment in time.
I felt that eternity was not about abundance alone, but also about absence, waiting and transformations
LZ: Your framing of a lot of large topics is really interesting.
IA: Thank you! It has taken some time. My practice never started from such a broad worldview. It just began from my carpets. My father had passed away during my thesis year, and after that all his carpets he’d treasured, collected, and bought started wearing away. They were just falling apart. The colour bleached, they were turning white. They were also becoming moth-eaten. It was as if because his time has ended, all his belongings, his heirlooms started to slip away as well. We became custodians of the objects he left. That’s how it began, from an individual perspective of how these objects connect to us. And then it grew beyond from that image.
LZ: In your work, ‘Tending to the Indoor Garden,’ which is our cover art for the issue, you talk about how grief and hurt and anger are silent processes. Can I ask you to talk a bit about this piece in particular?
IA: ‘Tending to the Indoor Garden’ was a two-part work. It began as a performance art piece displayed at the Karachi biennale at their inaugural night. That was a performance art show titled Aaj Aur Kal, Yesterday/Today/Tomorrow. A lot of performances in that show were looking at today and tomorrow from the perspective of politics, love, or protest. I had a more introspective approach, focused on heirlooms. They unite all of us, because we all possess something from the past that we feel responsible for.
This work was an image of a carpet using a technique I have been developing called organic image transfers. It includes big prints that are hand-printed, so the process itself is very strenuous on the body. You must physically rub away an image to reveal what lies beneath it and see the transfer. Use too much pressure, you wipe it away entirely. This work was about examining the processes of grieving and simultaneously accepting that things wear away with time despite us trying to control them. No matter how much I tried to control the pressure with which I was rubbing at the carpet, it faded away in places, and it tore. Its context changed; it wasn’t the same carpet anymore. That’s what I try to explore about heirlooms – we try to hold onto them, but they change with time, context, and location.
In the next stage of that piece, I began to carve away at it [the carpet]. This is a prinmaking process called woodcut. I carved away at the places that had already been damaged, and I painted over missing spots in an attempt to talk about the silent process of grieving. The context of your life changes and you end up with an entirely new image, a new reality.
Leena Zaidi is a crocheter, a reader, an occasional writer and editor. She can be found surrounded by yarn and her friends.
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