Wardha Shabbir’s earliest memories are tied to her mother’s garden, to trees, shrubbery, and acts of care. Deeply rooted in her home city of Lahore, her practice is informed by the garden city’s histories, ecologies and cultural density, while also strained by its environmental degradation, political instability, and social precarity. These are not circumstances observed remotely, but emerge from the rhythms of daily life. As she states, “I’m someone who is actually, literally living these conditions and experiencing them every day.”
Elaborately defined tree forms populate Shabbir’s work, each one standing in for a body. Trained in miniature painting at Lahore’s renowned National College of Arts, Shabbir was educated within a historic lineage defined by discipline and precision. Her work honours traditional techniques, while persistently interrogating and expanding their boundaries. Initially, the medium offered both protection and possibility: its small scale, portability, and perceived acceptability allowed her to work discreetly within restrictive cultural frameworks. Art, she recalls, “was like my peephole, my escape route, my oxygen tank.” Over time, what began as a pragmatic choice became a site of deep conceptual inquiry, as she questioned what miniature painting could mean in the present moment and how it might evolve to hold contemporary experience.
The traditional subjects of foliage and organic geometries have developed into a rich symbolic language, carrying lessons of resilience and survival. Shabbir’s plant life adapts to our times, taking on imagined qualities, becoming composites drawn from nature. Many of her paintings include a dark, tendrilled form, drawn from the Urdu concept of mukhi. Referencing the black bud of the sunflower, mukhi conjures the beginning of something, the shape of becoming, a profound well of possibility. In Shabbir’s lexicon, it acts as a void, a volcano seen from above and a womb, a symbol of feminine power and boundless potential. The emergent petals reach outwards like the many arms of the Hindu goddess Kali Mata, endlessly capable of managing multiple responsibilities, as many women and mothers do.
In The Symphony of Silence (2025), the mukhi traces a path through the composition, like wildfire or a parasitic creeper. Referencing satellite imagery and wayfinding, Shabbir’s cartographies trace movement, migration, and her own personal journeys. These routes are not merely navigational but existential, suggesting how one moves through life’s challenges. “There is infinitude in a person’s isolated journey,” she notes, and her compositions reflect this expansiveness. Other paintings, such as Return to Source (2025), construct immersive worlds she describes as “sacred savannahs”. Overflowing with dense vegetation, each one is filled with meticulously rendered details that reward a similarly slow and careful approach to looking. Indeed, Shabbir sees her role as an artist as going beyond imagery, to “hold the finger of the viewer and bring them into your world,” generating experiences that unfold with time.
This sustained engagement with world-building has led naturally toward sculpture. Imagining her plant forms from every possible angle, she began constructing them in three dimensions, rather than depicting them on paper. For Home Is Where My Leaves Are (2026), Shabbir’s research spanned two years and pieced together more than 300 organic references drawn from life, photography, and historical botanical illustrations. Taking their cues from real plants capable of adaptation amid extreme conditions, these forms propose alternate modes of being. Elements such as banana leaves, womb-like cavities, fossils, fungi and flowers combine into speculative plant mutations, each adding their own narrative layer. Fragility becomes resilience; dependence gives way to self-sufficiency.
Rendered in a glossy, unapologetic red, this bronze sculpture is a bold act of self-catharsis. For the artist, daily rituals of drawing and mark-making function as coping strategies, ways to process fear, uncertainty, and responsibility while continuing to evolve. Ultimately, Shabbir’s work is driven by hope: a belief in endless possibilities for adaptation and transcendence. Through her imagined ecosystems, she offers visual propositions for how to survive, transform, and persist within these intersecting times.
‘The classical configuration of the meeting of cultures is that of East and West.’1
Such formulations alter their labels with regularity. We have run through ‘Third World – First World’, ‘Developed, Underdeveloped and Developing World’, and the more recent ‘Global South and North’. The representation of geographical territories through a historical, cultural or colonization lens can often end up being reductionist and insubstantial. The multiple contexts in which the artist today lives, thinks, learns, and works calls for a far more nuanced critique of their oeuvre.
Wardha Shabbir’s practice is dense with complex cross fertilisations. It reaches back into historical processes, concurrent with lived contemporaneity. Denying the specifics of identity, yet firmly rooted in her geographical origins, Shabbir benefited from the discipline of traditional methods of art making. She was trained in the hallowed conventions of materials and methods embodied in the art of the illuminated manuscript. B.N. Goswamy once described this tradition as ‘a great floral carpet that lies rolled up, but can be spread out endlessly, revealing new things with each mellow unfurling.’2
There are echoes of this narrative in Shabbir’s painting practice, offering as it does a gentle unfolding in parts, embracing manifold natural worlds, both familiar and ingeniously imagined. This chimerical abundance is carefully orchestrated by geometric structures which insist on order in the face of impetuous beauty. The artist describes this as ‘internal logic’ in which the unfolding demands more space—expanding boundaries which in turn mutate and blur the lines of the rigid rectangle, not forsaking beauty but adding new dimensions.
The geometric order in Shabbir’s painting recalls architectural space, constructed by the artist with trapezoids, cubes and rectangles. These might be compositional devices. They could equally be mental spaces that give pause to the fertile riot of colour and foliage, creating incisive encounters, both major and minor, with rhythmic patterns and tranquil intervals. Each space is simultaneously diminutive and ambitious, mythical and representational. The renditions are flamboyant, almost phantasmagorical, yet delicately rendered. Never repetitive, always incomparable, these lyrical portraits of greenery evolved, according to the artist, as ‘each dot leads to another. As I draw and imagine, the drawing itself decides where to go as it reveals itself.’3
The city of Lahore where Wardha Shabbir was born and brought up, and in which her career was shaped, is steeped in multiple architectural legacies from the Mughal era, the British Raj and the contemporary built environment. Shabbir revels in this diversity. Once known as the city of gardens but now sadly overbuilt, it is still primarily a green city served by a canal where
citizens bathe in the scorching summer. But there is also an unexpected wilderness in some of Lahore’s parks, perhaps an archetype of the source of the artist’s visual métier. The artist remembers the era before digital maps arrived in Lahore, when she navigated the city by referring to its majestic trees more often than the street signs. The seasons of Lahore which altered the colours of its vegetation, the quality of light at dusk and dawn, have intuitively influenced the artist’s palette.
The overpowering desire to occupy space, to experience expansion in a powerful material, leads the artist to a tactile, spectacular presence. Delving deep into inexhaustible reserves of imagery, Shabbir aligns her ‘dots’ to move with purpose into the third dimension. She states it was to impel the viewer to experience expansion into both space and the overpowering forceful substance of bronze. This new form is still connected to its origins in nature, yet defiant in a new arrangement: assertive, mesmerising and fiercely beautiful. The artist in this role is the protagonist who mines both memory and contemporary consciousness, inviting them into a conversation across cultures, as demanded by visual exigencies.
The fearlessness which inhabits Shabbir’s work is unusual because of the proscribed roles assigned to women artists in South Asia. Their practices are laden with traces of compliance and victimhood. Not that gender undertones are entirely missing in Shabbir’s imaginings. The layered intricacies of flora and fauna allude to the repertoire of pattern and aesthetic ideation which are reminiscent of inherited embroidered garments. Shabbir once said all the trees in her work represented someone she had met, a ‘lived, assumed experience’.4 And there are subtle implications: some trees are firmly embedded in the ground, flourishing yet immobilized; others float free, uprooted and equally resplendent, yet independent of their environment. Shabbir reminds us of the artist’s role as a magician who has the strength to defy cynicism, gently leading us to a place of wonder and healing in a turbulent world. She fills the world in unexpected ways, signalling both change and continuity.
1 Faiz, F.A., 1911-1984, (2005). Culture and Identity: Selected English Writings of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Ed. Sheema
Majid. Karachi: Oxford University Press, p. 49
2 Goswamy, B.N., (2014). The Spirit of Indian Painting, Close Encounters With 101 Great Works 1100-1900. Delhi:
Penguin Books, p. 3
3 In conversation with the author, February 2026.
4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/sonyarehman/2022/04/28/connecting-the-dots-in-her-beloved-city/
In the past two decades Pakistani contemporary artists have gained great recognition and international accolades turning the spotlight on their homeland. At HBL, we deeply value art as a foundation of cultural identity and heritage. As an institution, we took it upon ourselves to support and sustain the arts in Pakistan. Our journey began with the creation of a collection featuring works of renowned contemporary Pakistani artists and expanded the collection by supporting young and mid-career artists. Building on this foundation, we reinforced our efforts by collaborating with various institutions and organizations to encourage art and cultural activities across the country.
Art has created many facets for humankind to contemplate and interpret the conditions of its existence and evolution. Wardha Shabbir, through her bold and ingenious art practice is among those artists who have challenged the norms of society and its traditions, to make international audiences understand the wider role of art. We at HBL, are pleased to have helped to support her career as a young artist. With her participation in 61st Venice Biennale 2026 titled In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, she has marked a major groundbreaking milestone as a female artist from Pakistan, at the world’s prestigious art biennale. Wardha Shabbir’s presence as a Pakistani artist in the main Arsenale and Giardini, among other 111 artists from around the world, has truly positioned her as an impactful global artist.
We at HBL are pleased to be associated with Sabrina Amrani Gallery and Wardha Shabbir for the ambitious project that has been proposed. We share this pride being Pakistanis, with a strengthened determination and pledge to continue supporting the growth of a harmonious, competitive nation that leads, creates, and inspires.
Chairman
HBL
Koyo Kouoh invited us to slow down, to listen carefully, to those small worlds full of life that we so easily walk past. In Wardha Shabbir's world, that invitation becomes unavoidable. Her paintings demand time. Rooted in the discipline of miniature, an exigent medium valued in fractions of a millimetre, they refuse the passing glance. To look is to enter, and to enter is to stay.
Working from Lahore, Shabbir engages in hyperlocal studies, closely observing how nature and urban experience converse with one another. Her architectures, woven enclosures and layered spaces, are never left intact. Plants invade them, envelop them, reclaim them. The garden becomes an extension of anatomy; roots and branches take the place of limbs, trunks rise where bodies once stood. Young branches support older ones, the fragile leans on the sturdy, and yet the powerful sometimes builds itself upon the powerless, a mirror of every ecosystem, from Lahore to Madrid to Venice.
But Shabbir does not stop at the botanical. Her hybrid specimens blur every boundary between the human and the vegetal, figures dissolved into trees, bodies that flower, architectures consumed by their own gardens. Against the anxious noise of this century's technological acceleration, she proposes something quietly radical: a future where nature has not been overcome, but has overcome. Where the plant absorbs the human, and the human, in turn, dissolves back into the earth.
Shabbir's work is alive, growing, evolving, breathing, with no room for melancholy. It celebrates coexistence, the beauty of what persists and proliferates. And like a minor key that finds joy even in sorrow, her practice reminds us that life, together and entangled, is always worth celebrating. Her gardens are a kind reminder of the weight of our responsibility towards the living, no matter its form and provenance, to protect it, to nurture it, to care.