about the artist

nadia hussain

drawing. people. narratives.

Nadia (Batool) Hussain is a visual artist, art educator and sometimes, a curator, living and working in Islamabad, Pakistan.  Her work is usually focused on the experience of the body, which she uses to identify the world around her.

Her work began as an exploration of the randomness of nature; at times, rendering our bodies dysfunctional and therefore vulnerable – and yet paradoxically evoking the brute strength of our essentially animalistic, almost obsessive need for survival. She had hoped that it would then perhaps be possible to demystify love, desire and other such abstractions as functional necessities.

At the same time, it reflected an attempt to understand issues of identity and feminity in this environment. She had hoped to discover some element of truth from experiences and from nature itself. However, with time, it focused more on the raw and sometimes humorous nature of emotions and narratives representing her experiences. The process is ongoing, and from needing to understand the nature of things, she started looking for narratives and had encountered a need to look beyond pretensions, creating characters, self-portraits and stories that best represent situations.

Her visual inspiration has come from comic books and graphic novels as well as paintings and films. She is also fascinated by the body and the way it is structured. This tends to sway from purely clinical and anatomical, to something that is more emotional and perhaps spiritual. She believes that she can draw parallels between these two extremes by using one to identify the other.

She also collaborates with other artists, teaches painting and drawing - and writes and blogs, to facilitate art practice in her community.