About — Ajea Zahid
About
Ajea Zahid (b. 2000, Karachi) is a visual artist from Lahore, Pakistan, based in London, UK. Zahid graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore and is currently pursuing her MA at the Royal College of Art.
Zahid is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and the White Pube Grant and her notable exhibitions include Untitled Art Miami Beach – Miami; Frieze 9 Cork Street, 55 Eastcastle Street – London; Pristine Contemporary – India; Muscat Art – Oman; Tanzara Gallery; O Art Space; Gallery 6; and NumaishGah – Lahore. Ajea has worked as a member of the OSCH projects and has also taught as a visiting faculty member at the National College of Arts.
Her interests lie in the intimacy of the human condition. Zahid works from observations and memory to construct figures that sit somewhere between the deeply familiar and the unknowable. Using the visual language of drawing and painting, her surfaces attempt to locate an emotional truth in the way people exist among and in relation to one another.
Artist Statement
My practice is rooted in movement and observation. Early recollections of displacement meant renegotiating ideas of home and belonging — I learned to observe people and places I knew would be temporary.
In many ways, painting has become a way to hold onto the transient: to slow down the act of seeing and make sense of impermanence. It begins, for me, with sketches of observational lines — gestures of my immediate surroundings and people — an intuition that evolves naturally into painting, where the paint itself leads the direction of the work.
The figure has become a site through which I explore emotional and psychological tensions; a way to hold the intimate and the melancholy, capturing moments that are personal yet hint at something universal. I am drawn to small, often overlooked interactions that reveal something fragile about human connection — lingering, liminal scenes, suggestive of narrative but never quite revealing it. The work examines what it means to be together yet apart; displaced, but still belonging.