Romessa is a contemporary visual artist and printmaker, as well as an art educator, hailing from a Pashtun tribal family in Pakistan. Born in 1986 in Lahore, she specializes in printmaking and holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, completed in 2009. She furthered her education with a master’s degree in visual arts from NCA in 2014.
Romessa’s career has been marked by significant achievements, gaining international recognition early in her independent practice. While pursuing her post-graduate studies at NCA, she showcased her work in the exhibition Resurgence and Subversion at Fourth. Eye Gallery in Canada in 2012. Soon after, during her MFA midterms, she was awarded an artist residency grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund through the New York Foundation for the Arts. This opportunity led to a successful three-person show in Chelsea, New York. After completing her MFA, she returned to Lahore and began teaching as a visiting faculty member at NCA. She was also invited by the Indian government, along with four female colleagues from NCA, to collaborate with Indian artists for an exhibition at the Indian National Council of Arts in Delhi.
She has also used other artistic forms, such as performance art, to comment on sociopolitical constructs and the role of women within power dynamics. Her performance, Weaponization of Everything, was featured at the Karachi Art Biennale at Amin Gulgee Gallery. Over the years, she has exhibited her work on various national and international platforms, including in Canada, the U.S., Dubai, India, the UK, and Singapore, and she hopes to expand her audience in the future.
This work is a tribute to Allama Muhammad Iqbal’s poetry on womanhood in “Aurat,” where he famously quotes, “Wajood-e-Zan se Hai Tasveer-e-Kainaat Mein Rang.”
Romessa aspires to celebrate her vision of womanhood through this piece.
This piece is a depiction of a microcosmic vision of a woman’s body encapsulated in a macrocosm.
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