Shazia Ahmad combines painting and printmaking to create microcosms of domestic life, which she materializes as handcrafted dioramas. Her work, oscillating between miniatures and large-scale worlds, illustrates how memories and the passage of time accumulate to form diverse narratives. Through her pieces, she recounts journeys across time and space, paying tribute to the intimate relationships woven along the way.
Born in Karachi to a Pakistani father and a Chilean mother, Shazia Ahmad moves between two cultures and religions while living within a third. Her work represents both an exploration and a quest for belonging, honoring her Pakistani heritage by merging elements of that country’s material culture with imagery drawn from her own visual vocabulary.
As an artist of multiple cultural and religious backgrounds, this hybridity is reflected in her work through a vibrant palette, rich patterns, and themes that construct her universes. Her relationship to identity is both nostalgic and nuanced: she clings to the past even as her memories fade. She expresses these recollections through recurring and reconstructed elements—everyday objects and depictions of flora—created over several days and under varying light.
Her practice has evolved from watercolor monotypes to a continuously expanding series of paintings and screen prints. Her palette—magenta, fuchsia, and ecru—is marked by the central presence of blue, which brings a deeply personal and introspective dimension to her work. These colors evoke both authentic and altered memories, serving as a bridge that connects her identity to her heritage.
Shazia Ahmad is a Pakistani-Chilean painter and printmaker based in Brossard, Québec. Through her work, she explores the themes of home and belonging while questioning the broader notion of otherness, shaped by her interfaith and mixed-race background. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, notably at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022), The Rooms (St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, 2023), and Unit1 Gallery in London, UK (2022). She is the recipient of several prestigious grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the City of St. John’s, and was awarded the Don Wright Scholarship in 2021–2022.
