Comprising of seventeen small works on manjarpat fabric, created in 2020, during the Covid-19 lockdowns, each work is rendered in a style typical to the artist’s recent works including visual and conceptual motifs that set this particular series comfortably in her larger practice. The body of work is defined by a subdued colour palette and includes motifs borrowed from the architecture of a home in small-town Aligarh, Hamid Manzil. Many of the works are populated with text; in most cases, these texts are illegible, but combined with all the other visual elements, function as a mise en scène for the stories of Hamid Manzil that the artist narrates.
In tracing out the elements of Hamid Manzil in her artwork, the artist builds a memoir. The jharokhas, roshandaans, doorways, architraves, and many other structural details of the building are reiterated here as elements that take the artist and the viewer on a journey in time through a building that the artist once called home.
Hamid Manzil was the hostel where Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai stayed for three years during her days as a student at the Aligarh Muslim University. The building itself, its architectural details, and surrounding environs including a mango orchard all created an ambience within which Arshi found her affinity towards Urdu poetry, philosophy, and romanticism - in Arshi’s words, “seems as though Ismat aapa wrote Lihaaf in Hamid Manzil”.
About the artist
Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai is a Weimar-based artist of Indian origin. Arshi was born in Najibabad and lived in India and Afghanistan before moving to Germany, where she is currently based.
Ranging in scale and medium, Arshi’s work covers a variety of themes. Critiquing the position, agency and lack of it, of the Muslim woman, Arshi produces work that incorporates words and visuals in a manner that might be reminiscent at times of fragments of ancient texts, and of very personal journals at others.
Arshi gained her Undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from the Aligarh Muslim University, Uttar Pradesh, and her Graduate degree from the Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India.
An Inlaks Fine Art Awardee in 2019, Arshi is now a recipient of an 2022-2023 Artist Fellowship at Bauhaus University in Germany.
