Shazia Ahmad
Shazia Ahmad combines painting and printmaking with microcosms of domestic life, which she materializes as hand-crafted dioramas. Her work, oscillating between miniatures and large-scale worlds, illustrates how memories and the passage of time accumulate to form diverse narratives. Through her creations, she tells stories of journeys across time and space, paying tribute to the intimate relationships that develop along the way.
Born in Karachi to a Pakistani father and a Chilean mother, Shazia Ahmad navigates two cultures and religions while living within a third. Her work is an exploration and a quest for belonging, where she honors her Pakistani heritage by blending elements of the country’s material culture with images drawn from her own visual vocabulary.
As an artist with a multicultural and multi-faith background, this hybridity is reflected in her work through a vibrant color palette, rich patterns, and recurring themes that shape her universes. Her relationship with this identity is both nostalgic and nuanced: she clings to the past even as her memories fade. She expresses these memories through recurring, reconstructed elements, featuring domestic objects and depictions of flora interpreted over several days and under different lighting.
Her practice has evolved from monotypes and watercolor to a continually expanding series of paintings and screen prints. Her palette, composed of magenta, fuchsia, and ecru, is particularly distinguished by the central presence of blue, which brings a deeply personal and introspective dimension to her work. These colors evoke both authentic and altered memories, serving as a bridge to connect with her identity and heritage.
Shazia Ahmad is a painter and printmaker of Pakistani and Chilean descent, based in Brossard, Quebec. Through her work, she explores themes of home and belonging while reflecting on the broader concept of otherness, shaped by her interfaith and mixed heritage. Her works have been showcased both in Canada and internationally, including at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022), The Rooms (St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, 2023), and Unit1 Gallery in London (UK, 2022). A recipient of several prestigious grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the City of St. John’s, she was also awarded the Don Wright Scholarship in 2021–2022.