The primary reason I wanted to interview Zarrar was that her paintings compelled me to confront the question, Who am I? — not merely as an exercise in self-exploration, but as a question whose answer required me to negate the binaries imposed upon me: beauty and ugliness, purity and impurity, life and death.
Zarrar challenges these with remarkable courage, compelling her viewers to confront the most abject aspects of themselves — the parts they have been conditioned to find repulsive. Her work gestures towards a world in which ugliness can coexist with beauty, the animal with the human, and death with life.
SARAH KHAN: What was your earliest painting, and what motivated you to pursue an artistic career?
HANNA ZARRAR: I have been drawing for as long as I can remember, ever since I learned how to hold a pencil. I remember a teacher asking me what I wanted to be when I was in second grade, and I told her I wanted to be an artist. I had an innate feeling that I could never develop the same level of interest in other subjects as I did in art.
As for my earliest paintings, there are so many. I have an extensive collection of drawings from my childhood and teenage years. I have always gravitated towards imaginative rather than observational drawing. However, when I began studying art during O and A levels, I had to learn it; I could no longer avoid it. Before that, I would build scenarios in my head and draw them.
SK: Where do you draw inspiration for these imaginative drawings? Do they perhaps come from dreams?
HZ: Looking back at my childhood, I would describe myself as an avid reader. I used to read Enid Blyton, whose stories were full of imaginative worlds and scenarios. Her writing encouraged me to create fantastical places of my own, and I think that was one of the reasons I was pulled toward drawing.
SK: As a writer, I have always been intrigued by people choosing particular mediums to express their art. I think the choice of medium becomes especially important in visual art. I noticed that you often use pen on canvas and woodcut techniques. Why these particular methods?
HZ: I do not use pen on canvas as much as I use etching. Until recently, most of my work was centred on printmaking. If you have seen me working with pen, it is probably because I simply enjoy drawing, even in my everyday life.
Before joining the NCA, I was already familiar with printmaking and interested in exploring it. My interest deepened when I encountered Zarina Hashmi’s work and saw how she approached the medium. I also loved the idea that you could title a work and produce multiple copies of it. In my second year at the NCA, we had to choose our majors from painting, miniature painting, printmaking, and sculpture. I chose printmaking because I enjoyed its rigorous and laborious process. You can never entirely predict its outcome; you have to experiment extensively. Since there are relatively few printmaking facilities in Pakistan, I also felt that this was my opportunity to learn a skill that I might not otherwise have the chance to explore. Ultimately, drawing is the foundation of my practice.
SK: I also noticed that you use sanguine a lot as a base color for most of your paintings.
HZ: Before discovering sanguine and brown ochre, I did not have a good relationship with the HB pencil because I found its finish too shiny. Then I discovered sanguine, a color that closely resembles that of flesh and has been used by many old masters. One of my strongest inspirations for using it came from Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical studies, which I found extraordinary. Because my work explores the idea of flesh, I feel a particular affinity with this color. It feels raw.
SK: The mention of flesh brings me to one of the most interesting aspects of your work – the themes you explore. The one that stood out to me the most was metamorphosis. Your figures often seem to transform, with recognizably human features giving way to non-human forms. Could you tell me more about your interest in transforming familiar images into unfamiliar ones?
HZ: I think I can trace this back to my fascination with the horror genre. My mother is from Zaida, a region in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that is considered spiritually active. Growing up, I constantly heard stories about possession. Paranormal experiences were frequently discussed within my family, and we would often hear about someone who had supposedly been possessed.
I was fascinated by the idea of possession. When I was seventeen, [for about a year] I went through a phase in which I repeatedly drew scenes of possession and depicted something entering the human body. That was when my interest in the unfamiliar and obscure first began to take shape.
I have been drawing strange things throughout my life. In my second year at university, I discovered an extraordinary manuscript called Ajaib al-Makhluqat. I was fascinated by its depictions of unusual animals and flowers that were entirely unfamiliar to us. It is a collection intended to stimulate the imagination and reveal the wonders of creation. Discovering it was a transformative moment for me.
I have always been intrigued by questions such as how we know our gender and what roles we are expected to perform when we identify with a particular gender. Throughout my life, I have struggled with the discomfort of defining myself and reconciling my identity with my physical appearance. I also think about the world itself and how it has been changing throughout its existence. This includes the transformations that occur within our bodies, the disconnect that can emerge between the body and the mind, and the ways we navigate the world through our changing perceptions of it.
SK: You mention gender – I noticed a similar ambiguity in some of your self-portraits. There seems to be a deliberate departure from conventional beauty standards and traditional expectations of what a woman or a man should look like. As a writer, I also try to transform my own image through unfamiliar characters, and I imagine that doing so visually must be a very different experience. What did creating these self-portraits allow you to explore about yourself?
HZ: Interestingly, you call them self-portraits because I do think of them that way. At the same time, I feel very seen right now because no one has ever described them to me in those terms before. Usually, people look at them and ask, “Who is this scary-looking person?” A significant reason I represent my figures the way I do is that I have come to realise that, at our core, humans are animals. Sometimes, our bodies operate beyond our control. That is why I deliberately depict features such as body hair and bodily fluids. I have never wanted to present an idealized or beautified version of things. I want to represent them as they appear to me. For some, that can be frightening, but to me, it is simply part of everyday life. I think it is entirely normal to resist fixed definitions and exist somewhere along a spectrum of ambiguity.
SK: One of the main reasons I was drawn to your work was your deliberate focus on depicting ugliness. For last year’s International Women’s Day, you chose artwork that represented ugliness and rejected society’s expectations of female beauty, expectations that often reduce women to their appearance and restrict their identities to narrow standards of attractiveness. That work reminded me of my own research on izzat and its relationship to ideas of beauty and purity. Julia Kristeva, one of my favorite philosophers, explores our aversion to what is considered unwanted or disturbing through her theory of abjection. I see a distinctly Kristevian element in your work. You compel viewers to confront their own ugliness and consider the possibility that it is something we must learn to accept. There is an abject dimension to our existence that we continually deny in order to imagine ourselves as pure, elevated beings. Could you elaborate on your focus on ugliness and what you hope this confrontation allows viewers to recognize?
HZ: I was also reading Kristeva and thinking about these questions. I was so troubled while reading her work because I kept asking myself why we reject the abject. Eventually, I revisited my old sketchbooks, and looking through them, I saw I had already been exploring abjection without consciously recognizing it at the time. In the year leading up to my thesis, I returned to these questions and realised that I could not understand the concept of beauty. I had struggled with it for a long time. How do we define beauty? How do we define ugliness? If you are perceived as a woman in Pakistan, it can feel as though there is no way to escape scrutiny. Whatever you do, you risk being torn apart by society’s judgement. I have always found it absurd that people insist women remove their body hair. I could never understand why we perform these elaborate, often painful rituals to appeal to some imagined ideal, whether that ideal is associated with God or something else entirely.
I also kept returning to the idea that we are animals with limited life cycles. We eat, sleep, and defecate. How, then, do we detach ourselves so easily from the reality of our existence? The women around me, in particular, often seemed to be denied the freedom to exist simply as human beings. We are taught to work against our own nature, to doubt our feelings and experiences, and to distrust our relationship with our bodies, which we know remarkably little about.
All these things make me deeply angry at the world, and that anger is reflected in my work. I am also fascinated by how women who are supposedly possessed are represented. There is a very particular vocabulary used to describe them: their hair is unkempt, their voices sound masculine, they scream, become angry, curse, and crawl. In horror narratives, a possessed woman is almost invariably portrayed as irrational or insane. We are conditioned to perceive women as frightening and unstable when they depart from the behavior society expects of them.
SK: I think these perceptions are also connected, to some extent, to the history of hysteria and witch trials.
HZ: Exactly. I was reading about those while developing my work. I also think about how possession by a jinn or another entity can push a woman towards the limits of what is considered acceptable feminine behaviour. After an experience of possession, there can be a profound sense of discontent within the body. I personally know several relatives who have experienced what was described as possession, and I have noticed a certain peculiarity in them afterwards. I can only speculate about the reasons for these changes, but I wonder whether they reflect what happens when someone loses their sense of stability in a world that is constantly working against them.
SK: I think when you encounter a world that differs entirely from the one you have always known, you experience a persistent dissonance with the apparent normality of everyday life. Everything we have constructed as normal can suddenly appear abnormal.
Your work challenges the idea that both beauty and ugliness possess an essential, fixed quality. Whereas the two are continually intertwined in our lived experience. I saw this particularly vividly in your painting for International Women’s Day. The woman’s womb contains a flowerpot, while a tail-like creature emerges from it. There are also stars in the composition. What does this hybridity between ugliness and beauty signify for you? How do you bring these two concepts together?
HZ: I think it signifies [the idea of] perfect for me. Like death, which is so beautiful and ugly at the same time. You die, you get buried, you get eaten by worms. But the beauty of it all is that your body is providing nutrients to the earth’s soil. You become a part of the world through your death. Much of my work explores the transformation of one thing into another, evoking the passage of time and the cycle of death and rebirth.
When I draw the body, I think of it as a series of interconnected points: this part connects to that part. I try to make these connections appear slightly mechanical, so that the body does not look entirely natural or fleshy, but also somewhat skeletal.
I think the human body, particularly its flesh, encompasses both ugliness and beauty. If you look at someone’s skin, for instance, you might find it beautiful. But if you cut into it and look inside, you might be horrified by what you find.
The same applies to childbirth. There is beauty in the birth of a baby, but there is also something horrifying about the placenta and the blood. They emerge from your own body. Ugliness and beauty coexist in the most fundamental aspects of life: birth and death.
SK: Recognizing ugliness is a bold act precisely because it forces us to confront our own vulnerabilities, which humbles us. Perhaps this is why people struggle to confront such ordinary aspects of existence, including death.
I have so many questions about your thesis, The Pool of Eternity. One of the most interesting aspects of your thesis showcase was your decision to include pages from your artist’s book, which documented your artistic process and were often accompanied by short texts. It was almost as though you were attempting to visualize metaphysical concepts, such as the soul, cosmic distance, and time, translating abstract ideas into visual forms. Do you also read philosophical works on metaphysics to help you explore and develop these concepts in your practice?
HZ: I really like the way certain texts communicate ideas. My first introduction to metaphysics – although I have barely scratched the surface of the subject – came through Clarice Lispector. She is my favorite writer, and I keep returning to her work. It often feels as though she is not addressing anyone in particular, not even herself, but rather something beyond either of them.
It is a strange experience because you might or might not grasp what she is saying. I think I did, in some way, but I find her work almost impossible to explain. I do not even know how to talk about it. Her writing is so inexplicable that the work seems to speak for itself. She was my biggest inspiration during my thesis. In fact, I had a print titled ‘A Breath of Life,’ after her work of the same name.
It is a story in which a creator, a writer, creates a character and then enters into a conversation with her. She responds to him, and their dialogue develops into an ongoing exploration of the relationship between the creator and the created, and the kinds of conversations that might take place between them. This really got me thinking about God. I began asking myself how I could communicate what I see and how I might articulate my observations through my work. I was also interested in how ancient religions operated, so I began reading about them and exploring the stories they told. I was particularly fascinated by Sumerian and Aztec myths. I paid close attention to the language in which these stories were written and preserved, as well as the way their sentences were constructed. The language seemed to express an absolute truth, as though there were nothing beyond what was being stated. I wanted to develop something similar because what I want to communicate through my work also feels like an absolute truth to me. I began constructing my own language, drawing inspiration from these ancient texts. I was also interested in the language used in metaphysical philosophy. If you read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, for example, the phrasing can sound absolute, almost like that of a religious text.
As for the artist’s book, the process began with a conversation with the head of my department. She told me that she was interested in the symbols appearing in my work but did not understand what they meant. She encouraged me to study my own practice more closely. I spent about two days examining my work, and began to recognise that I had been using recurring symbols, [especially] the bed and water.
I began to ask myself how I could find the words to talk about water and this strange sense of knowing how the universe was constructed. How could I articulate these ideas and the intuitions that seemed to underpin my work?
SK: Some of your pieces seem to re-conceptualize a myth from its point of origin, incorporating themes of the egg and severance. I’m curious about how the declarative quality of these religious texts influences your understanding of humanity. How do you translate that understanding into your work through symbols such as the egg?
HZ: I would not say that reading these [myths] has fundamentally changed my approach to or understanding of human nature. However, it has changed how I understand our immediate surroundings, our exchanges with one another, and our individual experiences of reality.
SK: Another recurring symbol I noticed in your work is the serpent, particularly in Serpent Lord. The serpent has such a rich history in visual art and mythology, where it is often associated with chaos and rebirth, as in the myth of the Ouroboros. Are you exploring the idea of rebirth through it? I understand that your symbols emerge intuitively, but once you have created a work, do you reflect on why you imagined a particular symbol in that context?
HZ: My interest in serpents developed largely because I was reading about their history. At one point, my teacher suggested that I read the Quran for my work, so I began exploring it. There is a passage concerning the expulsion of Adam and Eve that mentions women experiencing menstruation, men balding, and the serpent losing its legs. I began thinking about how rich the history of the serpent is, and started researching what it represents and why it appears so frequently. In my work, it functions as a messenger of nature, much like Godzilla, as a restorer of balance.
I created Serpent Lord because I wanted to study the serpent. I wanted to place it before me, cut open its body, examine its organs, and discover where its message resides — which part of it carries the message of God.
SK: This reminds me of the role of Satan in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita. You cannot really categorize him as purely evil; he is almost a jester.
HZ: Yes. I think the book also helped me understand Satan as a trickster. It might seem like a small detail, but inspiration can come from anywhere.
SK: Do you see yourself exploring representations of the human figure through imagined futures? You might, perhaps, combine ancient figures and creatures with newly emerging forms of life. How do you imagine humanity, or the very concept of the human, changing in the future? And how might you express these transformations in your art?
HZ: That is funny because it is precisely what I am working on right now. I am developing a new series of works, and I recently showed them to a friend who made an interesting observation. She said that my work now feels as though machines have been possessed by an ancient entity, since my figures are becoming increasingly mechanical, constructed from different components of metal. She remarked that they seem unnatural compared to my earlier work. Interestingly, there is also a concept called divine machinery, which explores the idea of the divine being trapped within a machine or on the internet. Many people have been exploring this idea recently. I think it could interest me, although I have not yet investigated it in depth.
Looking ahead, I would like to move toward more sculptural work. I am becoming increasingly interested in working with metal, as well as exploring theatrical possibilities through sculpture. I am fascinated by the kinds of theatrical effects one can create with sculptural forms. I only hope I can find the resources to pursue these interests.
SK: What is it about metal that fascinates you?
HZ: I am drawn to the sound of it. Ideally, I would like my sculptures to produce that sound.
If I could realize my ambitions on a larger scale, I would want the sculptures to move. I want them to sound like enormous, armored structures in motion. I particularly enjoy the sound of the house when it moves in Howl’s Moving Castle, with all its metallic creaking and clattering.
I am also interested in the coldness of metal. I would not want to work with new metal but with scrap metal. I want to explore what I can construct from discarded materials and whether I can develop the skill to make metal appear organic in some way.
SK: Transformation runs throughout your practice, whether you explore it through rebirth, death, beauty, ugliness, machines, or metal. It reminds me of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical concept of becoming, in which one is never simply a fixed being or a subject frozen in time, but is constantly in the process of becoming. It is almost as though existence is an ongoing action rather than a fixed state of being. Why does transformation fascinate you so deeply?
HZ: I believe we are constantly changing. We can never be entirely certain of our relationship with reality, and I do not think we can become too comfortable with our everyday existence.
SK: That is beautiful. I think this realization can also humble us because it forces us to acknowledge that everything around us is constantly changing. A leaf grows green, eventually turns yellow, and falls. Birds migrate from one place to another. There is so much happening around us all the time.
HZ: Even the life cycles of insects can be extraordinary – some live for only a few days.
It makes you wonder how we can even begin to measure a life. I also want to add something about time. I was speaking to a friend a few days ago about how the future feels like the past to me. When I imagine the future, it somehow resembles the past. My relationship with time is rather unusual. I do not see it as a fixed force that defines the world, but as something that is constantly shifting. Perhaps that is another reason I explore transformation.
SK: Modern society measures time through clocks and numbers, which impose an abstract structure on it that does not necessarily correspond to how we experience it.
How do you hope people experience it when they encounter it?
HZ: People can take whatever they want from my work and interpret it in their own way. Once you put something into the world, it no longer belongs exclusively to you. I cannot imagine having something definitive to say to everyone who encounters my work. I also enjoy the fact that I cannot fully communicate its meaning to everyone. I cannot tell people, “This is exactly how you are supposed to interpret my work,” because I want to preserve something private between myself and the work. There is a certain pleasure in knowing that some meanings remain accessible only to me. It is a kind of secrecy, and I am comfortable with that.
I also think that the more you explain a work, the more you risk diminishing its meaning. The words we currently use to describe art can feel inadequate, and I want to keep my distance from them. I do not want to rely on terms such as liminality or other familiar theoretical vocabulary simply to explain what I am doing.
I [also] have my own ambitions as an artist. I want to be able to continue making art for the rest of my life. I think that is what I am here to do. I do not have any particular expectations beyond that. Ultimately, I make art to understand the world, to understand myself, and to understand God. That is all.
Sarah Khan (b. 2001, Karachi) is a graduate from Habib University in Comparative Humanities, with a focus on philosophy and literature. She is a writer and a researcher, currently working as Assistant Manager of the Oral History Project at the Citizens Archive of Pakistan.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE