Self-portrait with a Multilingual Tongue

Amna is a Cork-based, Pakistani-born visual artist. She works for Backwater Artists and is a member of Sample-Studios and Art Nomads. Her art examines themes of identity, displacement, and religious symbolism associated with her dual heritage. She recently exhibited with the 40th EVA International Platform Commissions in Limerick that travelled to The Dock, Leitrim, and Sirius Art Centre. Her recent projects include a solo show as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival (2022) and participation in exhibitions at the IMMA and RHA (2021). She was the Cork County Council Creative Producer Resident (2021-22) and the SIRIUS/Create Resident (2022). Her work is part of the Arts Council Collection. She was awarded Arts Council Bursary (2020-2024), Next Generation (2021), Agility (2021), and Professional Development (2020). She holds an MA in Art History from UCC (2020) and an MA in Art from Punjab University, Pakistan (2001). She has worked as Program Organizer with the Pakistan National Council of the Arts; Curator with Alhamra Arts Council & PhD studio-based researcher with PURAF, Punjab Uni 2001-07. Annually, she organizes the Basant/Kite Festival with the support of Cork County Council and Creative Ireland to celebrate and promote South Asian identity in Ireland

Amna’s proposed body of work for the EVA platform commission is a series of performative self-portraits that explore the mourning of the self and sense of home, reflecting on the human experience of displaced citizens residing in various parts of a multi-cultural world. In her work, she tries to express this duality of cultural experience of home and new home by creating self-portraits through traditional Indo-Persian miniature techniques combined with questions of identity, estrangement, and loss, which she interprets through performative guises and self-portraiture. For her as an artist, the self-portrait series allows a multiplicity of identities and conflicting experiences. This proposed body of work aims to consider a search for utopia through this process of self-exploration and to reflect on the challenges that she faces in an in-between space. This large series of 43 works will include paintings, lightboxes, some small sculptures, and video.