Sofra e Agdh: Irtiqa

Yasmeen Zahra Salman, an accomplished artist and dedicated art educator, calls Karachi, Pakistan home. She holds positions as adjunct/visiting faculty at prestigious institutions like Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture and Beaconhouse National University. Yasmeen’s role as Head of
Art at The CAS School, Karachi, reflects her commitment to nurturing creativity. Simultaneously, she’s pursuing a PhD in Education from the Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development. Yasmeen’s artistic journey is grounded in drawing, a continuous exploration across diverse mediums that infuse her creations with an unceasing spirit of inquiry. Her vivid use of color transforms her pieces into living dialogues that reveal themselves over time.

The summer of 2023 has been an unusually reflective and retrospective time where yasmeen spent a significant part of the summer at home in Karachi. It provided her with a rare opportunity to look at her older works at length, rethinking the concerns that gave the impetus for the germination and development of its concept and evolvement of work. On reflection, summers have always been a significant harbinger of pivotal occurrence(s); A time of positive change, birth and celebration. One piece in particular, Once Upon a Time (2002), made yasmeen revisit and recall the inception of its iconography, concept, as well as the preceding summer as it was elemental in the development of the concept. How both the imagery and the idea has evolved for her over the years. The inevitable growth and changes brought, as an artist and as a partner, a shift in the focus and goals.