Laila Pathan is a Pakistani-American visual artist who grew up in Pakistan. In 2015, Pathan moved to New York City to study art at Columbia University. After graduating, they worked in education and arts publishing in Pakistan while maintaining a studio practice. Pathan’s work has been featured in group exhibitions such as Phases (Dear Artists Project, 2021) and La Officina (El Sur, 2022) in the United States and Mexico, respectively. Their work is also part of private collections in Pakistan, Malaysia and the United States. They are currently pursuing a Masters in Fine Art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, with an anticipated graduation date of August 2024.

Artist Statement
Fracturedness has always been a part of me-- no city, no lover and no language has ever been ‘home’ to me. I experience my body, my identity and my geography as uncanny and fragmented. My body bears the marks of my experiences a queer survivor of sexual assault, plus several generations of migration, rupture and loss of identity from the colonization and partition of India, where my grandparents were from.

I create containers for the ambivalent and unnamable emotional residues and charges that impact bodies, spaces and memories that come from fractured intimacy, longing and belonging. My identity as both immigrant and survivor are fundamentally embedded in my very approach to figuration and narrative. These perspectives cannot be shown, seen or told and heard, they can only be felt, touched and approximated, as if viewers were presented with pictures they can only see through or only see from within.

I seek traces of intimacy, friction, enunciation or agency; this very search itself creates a search on the canvas. There is friction between these selves in their intimacy and interdependence; between belonging and disorienting surroundings, through uncanny happenings and intense and ambivalent affects. The search for belonging, the longing for union, the rendering of haunted but innately innocent and sacred bodies always casts shadows. Sometimes, however, the rich darkness that has sometimes lived in my own body reflects points of light that pronounce that we are still here, we are still searching, and we are still waiting. In those moments when I am scraping, repainting, casting, breaking, distorting, piling on, I am really digging through a tunnel you cannot see connecting us to a very important and beautiful place.

Other bodies in my work include my God and nature, and I create them with a superstitious but spontaneous energy that helps me follow what the works and the bodies in them demand. The self in these works interacts with a spiritual force that is just as sticky and reproductive as the core of any lover. Even though something is given up, namely control, a light is produced in these exchanges that reflects those points of light back onto the darkness in the body.