Bio
Mamoona Riaz is a visual artist, art educator and a creative practitioner with professional experience ranging over various fields. She received her BFA degree from National College of Arts with Distinction and the prestigious Haji Sharif Prize and her M.A/M.Phill degree in Art Education from Beaconhouse National University with the prized UMISAA scholarship. She is also a finalist of the highly coveted Sovereign Asian Art Prize for 2021.
Over the period she has worked in the curatorial capacities with Satrang Gallery and the art gallery at NCA, Rwp. She is consultant of Foundation Art Divvy and has worked on several notable exhibitions and projects with them. She also serves as Art Editor for an international publishing literary journal Papercuts. Riaz continues to serve her alma mater and has been teaching at NCA as a professor of Miniature Painting and other courses designed specifically for newer ways of learning and pedagogical practices alongside working on various side projects and commissions.
With her professional portfolio she is focused on her art practice and has been continuously working and exhibiting her work at important national and international platforms, notably Art Central, Soho House, Hong Kong, Rossi & Rossi, London, N.M Dubai, Lahore Biennale 01 among others. Her work is in many private and permanent collections of eminent national and international art collectors.
Artist Statement | I, too, am a part of this history | Cultivating Wastelands
Connect – Disconnect
Continuity – Discontinuity
Memory – Erasure
Placement - Displacement
My comment is on how the divergence from one space to another works, and how, within us, fragments of each encounter manifest in behavioral changes
Artist Statement | Knowledge of the Ancients
Connect – Disconnect
Continuity – Discontinuity
Memory – Erasure
Placement – Displacement
Home - the idea of a home; a place, an emotion A place is significantly what we associate ourselves the most with as places are what we call home- a city, country or continent. Homes are socio-cultural, socio-political references to our lives, even. Or home is a only a sentiment attached to a place. How the divergence from one space to another works, and how, within us, fragments of each encounter manifest in changes. These encounters are with the patterns we most interact with, the maps of the places we live in, of the houses we call home or the cities. With time the patterns of these maps become one with us as and are etched within our memory. Maps are like living organisms and our interaction with spaces is like an ongoing conversation, as the maps become the patterns for us that we live in, we continuously change these maps and they keep evolving with our every single move to become new patterns. A city grows; it houses homes of millions of people. The growing needs of people through urbanization and infrastructure planning making the area to stretch beyond the perfect planning making it into an urban jumble sprawling into a concrete clutter but still beautiful to live in. The continuous conversation of the traditional and contemporary is what defines my work at the level of its ideation and making. The discipline of miniature is defined by its detail oriented layered paintings and the delicate motifs, with their roots and philosophies embedded in socio-cultural history of the times. The discipline of Miniature is visual history of socio-political and cultural dilemmas, which is defined in my work through the maps of various times and events. The parallels between the delicacy and detail of layered 2d traditional miniature techniques are transformed into 3d overlapping of paper cuttings and drawings. My interest in patterns comes from the basics of miniature painting discipline along with Islamic art and illumination, where meticulous details, measurements and labor-filled making are the key. The patterns from traditional miniature art and Islamic art are converted into my personal derived patterns. Currently I am exploring the pattern of ‘shamsa’, which principally is a symbolic pattern rooted in philosophy and spirituality and derived from Indo-Persian illumination manuscripts. It notably represents the one point everything in the universe converges towards. The pattern of Shamsa converted into a ‘mechanical-shamsa’ made from cogs and gears, symoblizes the machine like cities and how life is directly dependent on this forever-ongoing-nonstopping strides making life and our connection with the places we live in a continuous cycle directly affecting our identity. Its a depiction of forever ongoing machine which a city is. I work with the maps of places I live in a given time- trying to understand my relation with the idea of home. Of mine and also of all the people living in this city because this map is the single commonality we all share on the ground and the memories of living in this city and seeing it grow into a different being every day is what we share in its intangible form and spirits.