The freedom of distance: Pakistani artist Fiza Khatri on femininity and public space in South Asia

Fiza Khatri is a painter and curator based in Karachi. Her paintings explore themes of intimacy and caretaking, and call for the viewer to meditate on quotidian scenes from her lived experience of queerness. For Khatri, who was born in 1992, painting is a form of witnessing and of being attentive to the subjects and spaces of her domestic world, ranging from portraits of her friends to an excerpted vision of her mother in the kitchen, as well as tender depictions of her many pets.

Others of her paintings explore themes of femininity and codified space in South Asia through the motif of hair, offering images of the artist transgressing traditionally male spaces such as the barbershop.

Two of Khatri’s paintings present views of a bathroom sink crowded with tufts of her own hair, ritually cut by the artist herself as a way of reclaiming her body and identity from traditional South Asian expectations of gender.

Khatri’s new body of work, Sailoon and Other Stories, is now a virtual exhibition by Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai.

In this interview, she speaks to Diva Gujral about relationship of her work to the pandemic, to Instagram, and to the spaces available to her as an artist in South Asia.

Diva Gujral: Something that strikes me about…

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