Statement
Zehra Marikar is a 24-year-old multimedia artist, curator, creative practitioner and entrepreneur whose art interweaves her reflections on home and identity. She works with multiple mediums to explore how culture and geography shape notions of the self. Zehra uses narrative and metaphor to deconstruct ideas on identity politics. She is interested in using materiality as a bridge between the past and the present. Zehra creates art that explores the sensitivities of human relationships with humour, addressing the challenges of complex familial dynamics in an accessible and playful manner. Zehra hopes to build intimacy with her audience by creating art that not only invokes nostalgia but also acts as an anchor around which relationships and conversations can flourish.
Zehra primarily interrogates the female body and its place in our world. She desires more nuanced and human depictions of the female body, particularly the brown female body. The different forms of Zehra in her work are used to convey varying issues and ideas of living in and as a female body. They also serve to depict the process of girlhood to womanhood. Zehra’s family appears in her work to explore how external factors both dismantle and aid the process of becoming. Zehra has been greatly influenced by Frida Kahlo, Micheal Armitage and Nadia Waheed, female artists who use self-portraiture to interrogate the self in relation to the world.
Mixing realism with monstrous and fantastical allows her to express desires and emotions that normally go unsaid and to break the silence expected of women, breaking a silence through the visual.
Zehra is keen to express and convey the nuances of her South Asian identity, but refuses to be solely defined by it. The visual references to India are pieces of memory that construct her conscience. Her child surroundings have influenced her aesthetic and she has built upon it to create a distinct style. Hundreds unnamed artists adorning walls to matchboxes to trucks to religious sites have all made their mark in her artistic practice.
Zehra oscillates between past nostalgia and future utopian dreams, using fragments of the past to express change in her life inspired by Linda Nochlin and Catherine McCormack.
London
