Nerda Khara
Aboutthe work
I was taught to grind my own pigment and to build a painting in washes so thin that the paper keeps breathing through them. Some of these take a hundred hours.
The subjects move between two worlds: the courtly miniature, with its gold and its wide margins, and the people I actually live among — my sisters, my neighbours, children on a floor watching someone leave the room. Alongside the painting I teach, choreograph and write; the line of a brush and the line of a moving body turn out to be the same problem.
The practice
- Mughal miniature
- Opaque watercolour and gouache on wasli, built up in washes with a squirrel-hair brush that comes to a single point. Court scenes, processions and figures in the Mughal and Pahari manner.
- Portraits
- Faces at the scale of a palm: nine-centimetre tondos, family portraits, children. Painted from your photographs with the patience of a miniature.
- Cultural painting
- The people I actually live among: neighbours, children on a floor watching someone leave the room. Everyday life from South Asia, told on paper.
Exhibited, taught, published
- 2024“Visualizing Coexistence”, Rising Voices in Ethnomusicology — drawing as a research method
- 2023Assistant Professor, Fine Arts, National College of Arts, Lahore — elective: From Body to Brush
- 2021“To flou or not to flou, un Monde Nouveau ?”, Chapelle des Cordeliers, Clermont-Ferrand
- 2021Mèlange, Khaas Contemporary Art Gallery
- 2016Neo-Credible, Ejaz Art Gallery, Lahore
- 2012–16BFA, National College of Arts, Lahore — major in miniature painting