Self-Portrait: With Monkey Puzzle Tree

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.