Like water, the ebb and flow of memory remains in a state of continuous transformation. As recollections of the past are altered by contemporary circumstances, they grow increasingly fragile and precious. With this knowledge, artist Khadija S. Akhtar attempts to chase and reimagine the ephemeral joy of what once was. The artist’s battle against depression leads to an intimate quest, seeking and depicting spaces of comfort, as a process of retrieving episodic memories, processing trauma, and questioning history.

In jewel-toned colours, luminous beasts reign free, gardens grow savage, breakfast trays of pastries with lustrous creams and sugar sit abandoned amongst portrait photographs, wild flora and fauna, and eccentric kitchen paraphernalia.

Through overwhelming frenzy and fantastic interferences, Akhtar underscores absence. No human presence appears to consume the honeyed bread or prune the riotous daisies, therefore the space appears ghostly, lost in time, as the world beyond is erased.

The artist finds cheer in alienation however, as she wades through layers of time and illustrates scenarios that combine history and the present, truth and fiction, pleasure and melancholy. Akhtar’s usage of objects, creatures and environments stem from the narratives of the past, but ultimately shed their skin and together form a new and transcended sanctuary. A safe space, which assures that there is splendour to be found in truly everything, even in times of sadness.

-Khadjia S. Akhtar

As history indicates, human mythologies, language, and aesthetics are shaped by our connections and interactions with the animal kingdom. Over the centuries, the animal presence in visual culture demonstrates the dynamic relations between man and beast, which exist in perpetual modes of flux, simultaneously forming and disintegrating with the passage of time. 

As urbanization removes the animal from quotidian reality, the natural world destructively shifts further into a sphere of novelty and wonder. Zoos and circuses flourish, profiting from the boundaries they construct between animals and the human world. Exhilaration and applause sanctions a perversion against nature, ill-mannered surveillance, and the fracturing of migratory journeys.

With focus on the natural human phenomenon to seek, and long for what isn’t in our belonging, Rabia investigates the wishful realm of desire that forms the undertones of mankind’s complex relationship with animals. Nostalgic dreams of flight and birdsong, the iridescence of feathers, the secrets of fluff and flesh, prompt a desperation to mimic, consume and possess. 

Within imagined spaces, where the politics of deceit, imitation, memory, and magic come into play, Rabia’s oeuvre navigates an inimical coexistence. Instigated by folly, the winged, scaled, and multi-colored creatures that are yearned for, are paralyzed, as humankind infiltrates the non-human realm.

-Rabia S. Akhtar