Nadira Husain's comprehensive work is brought together in this monograph for the first time in its breadth and complexity and shows over 100 works from the past six years.
Husain works with painting, drawing, objects, sculptural techniques and various printing processes, handling the materials and working methods equally. In doing so, she undermines conventional approaches and procedures with her practice, she also challenges culturally determined or gender-specific thought patterns. The confluence of different spaces of experience, the feeling of being in between, are lived experiences of a global and political society and not a contradiction for her.
The book also contains numerous exhibition and installation views which emphasize the importance of staged rooms and the expansive wall and object installations for her work. There are also texts by Sonia Recasens, Leeza Ahmady and Haytham El-Wardany in the respective original languages Farsi, Arabic and French, but also in English translation.
Nadira Husain (born 1980) is a French artist of Indian origin based in Berlin. Her work explores visual forms related to issues of post-migration, transculturality and cultural hybridity. Her practice begins with painting, where she draws on heterogeneous interpretations of art histories beyond the Eurocentric perspective. By appropriating symbols and stories from different cultural registers connected to her own multicultural background, she follows logics of assemblage, connectivity and relationships in form and narrative. References to Mughal miniatures meet European comics and join anthropomorphic beings from furry fandom who immerse themselves in Sufi Islamic culture. In the flattening of fore- and background, perspective and scale, Husain's paintings eliminate inherent formal hierarchies. Her paintings often unfold into spatial installations where the notion of a centre is swept away.
Besides her art practice, she works as a guest professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-teaches with Marina Naprushkina since 2021, and is a lecturer and a mentor at foundationClass at the Berlin-Weissensee Art Academy since 2017. She is regularly involved in self-organized collective initiatives and projects that are grounded in anti-racist and intersectional ethos in the field of art.
