Art on a Postcard for War Child UK

About 

Naira Mushtaq is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator based in London. Ms. Mushtaq received her masters from Central Saint Martins with distinction as a recipient of International Vice-Chancellor Scholarship. Her practice explores the deconstruction and re-framing of the vernacular, found photographs and film archives focusing on history, memory and social commentary stemming from a desire to understand memory. Ms. Mushtaq is currently a Senior lecturer in painting at Camberwell College of Arts. 

Education 

Central Saint Martins -MA Fine Art 

National College of Arts - BA PAINTING 

Select Exhibitions/Awards 

Ms. Mushtaq has been a recipient of Muse Residency Award 2021-2022, Bridgeman artist award, 2019 Carpenter's Wharf Studio Residency award 2019, London, INKSTER PRINT residency 2019 and SANAT artist residency award, 2014, Pakistan. 

Her recent projects include "The Landscape of one's own "-Vermillion Partners , Through a Glass, Darkly- Niru Ratnam ,2022 , Muse Residency Show,2022 ,Darbari Duniyah and Aluminum Theater for Art Night London 2019, Bringing the Spice at Raven Row, London. 

Ms Mushtaq has co-published a paper titled "The Sky Drew Some New Lines", read at Urban Heritage Activism Conference at TU Berlin, and published in the book" Things don't exist until you give them a name" Berlin. 

Statement about AOAP Submitted Artwork   

My practice is focused on history, memory, and social commentary stemming from a desire to understand grief and memory and how memories are formed as affect. 

My practice examines these questions by looking at the socio-political and cultural context. In most instances, this comparison's backdrop is my home country of Pakistan - the concerns in conversation are broader. Which memory is being remembered, who is it being remembered by, and the context of remembrance. How one memory merges with another, the multiplicity and singularity of memory, what narratives we tell, what we choose to remember, and what is the value of the narratives that we choose to remember if at all.  

Drawing from these areas of interest, I examine memory as a form of the impalpable archive while the tangible photograph or sourced materials aid to its inaccuracy, a palimpsest of truths and half-truths. By engaging in the stories, memories, spaces and objects that relate to my family history and the histories of the immigrant settlers, this practice-led research aims to merge personal and political- and resituate the works in the decolonial canon by situating the idea of the archive to the emotional. My research sits on the precipice of decolonial scholarship in academia and the impact of personal histories in contemporary arts. 

My work comments on more than loss and memory; it talks about exile and longing and the constant state of displacement. The fate of many resting in the hands and on the whim of those in power and the realisation that dissent is always met with erasure. 

You must not reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any works. In doing so, you endanger our relationships with artists, and directly jeopardise the charitable work we do. Anyone found doing so will be subject to legal action.