Nadira Husain’s work unfolds through visual languages shaped by questions of post-migration, transculturality, and cultural hybridity. Rooted in painting, her practice expands into spatial and multimedia constellations, often incorporating craft-based techniques such as textiles and ceramics.
Drawing from her own multicultural background, she appropriates and reconfigures symbols and stories from disparate cultural frameworks. References to Mughal miniatures collide with European comics, while theriomorphic figures drawn from furry subculture enter into dialogue with Sufi Islamic thought. These encounters unsettle linear readings of history and resist fixed cultural identities. Her approach embraces plural and entangled art histories, challenging Eurocentric canons and proposing a decentered, relational understanding of visual culture.
Her paintings function as dense fields of accumulated memory. Through association, repetition, and pattern, they absorb and transform cultural baggage, staging image-making as an ongoing construction of memory. The works both reveal and resist the viewer’s gaze: surfaces saturated with information, constructed in translucent layers, dispersing focus and refusing a stable center. By flattening foreground and background, perspective, and scale, Husain dismantles inherited formal hierarchies and abandons the notion of a dominant subject. Many works extend into spatial installations, further destabilizing the idea of a single viewpoint and inviting embodied, shifting forms of perception.
Alongside her artistic practice, she served as Guest Professor at the Berlin University of the Arts (2021–2024), co-teaching with Marina Naprushkina. From 2017 to 2025, she has been a lecturer and mentor at *foundationClass at the Berlin-Weissensee Art Academy. She is also engaged in self-organized collective initiatives grounded in anti-racist and intersectional practices.
Berlin (DE), Paris (FR), and Hyderabad (IN) are the primary cities where she lives, works, and continues to shape her visual vocabulary.
Represented by
PSM Gallery
office[at]psm-gallery.com
Contact
nadira.husain[at]gmail.com
2023
• Boobs in the Arts-Fe:male bodies in Pictorial History, edited by Juliet Kothe and Natanja von Stosch (D/E), 28 8 p., Distanz, 2023
2022
• Manzil Monde – Nadira Husain, catalogue accompanying the solo exhibition of the same title at Institut Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt Museum Künstlerkolonie (D/E), essays by Jamila Adeli, Sandra Bornemann-Quecke, Philipp Gutbrod, Nadira Husain, Carolina Maddè and Barbara Muhr, paperback, 152 p., DCV, 2022
• Wie es ihr gefällt, portrait by Elke Buhr (D), monopol - Magazin für Kunst und Leben, issue 02/2022, February 2022
• Schaut, wir sind an der Oberfläche, Review by Katharina J.Cichosch, taz am Wochenende, 2/3.07.2022
• Nofretete in Adidas, by Katharina Deschka (D), Frankfurter Allgemeine, Nr. 146, 27.06.2022
• Menschen, so blau wie Schlümpfe, by Katharina Deschka (D), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Nr.145, 25.06.2022
2020
• Nadira Husain, monograph ed. by Nadira Husain and Maria Isserlis, texts by Leeza Ahmady, Sonia Recasens, Haytham el-Wardany, paperback, 204 p., Bierke, 2020
• Krishna und die Schlümpfe, portrait by Kito Nedo (D), art – das kunstmagazin, July 2020
• Verhext und zugeschlumpft, Review by Julia Meyer-Brehm (D), gallerytalk.net, 9.11.2020
• Que(e)r durch die Kunst, Review by Sophie Jung (D), taz Berlin, 7.11.2020
• Point de Vue, 6 min. video portrait shot in Husain’s studio, produced by The Office for Visual Arts of the French Institute of Germany, 5.11.2020
• Migration Pride, 4 min. video with Nadira Husain about her triptyche painting as commissioned by the Stadtmuseum Berlin, 10.9.2020
• Summer Academy Salzburg, 1 hour lecture by Nadira Husain about her artistic practice, 18.8.2020
2019
• Body in Pieces, catalogue accompanying the group exhibition of the same title at KAI 10, Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf (D), curated/edited by Julia Höner, essay by Kerstin Schankweiler, 112 pages, Spector books, 2019
• Nadira Husain, review by Chloe Chu (E), artasiapacific - Contemporary Visual Culture, Issue 113, May/June 2019
• Digression Batarde, Interview by Sonia Recasens (F), possible - revue critique d'art contemporain, No. 4
2018
• Dissolved Binarities, interview by Seda Pesen (E), KubaParis – Zeitschrift für junge Kunst, June 2018
• n.b.k. Mess with your values, catalogue accompanying the group exhibition of the same title at n.b.k. Berlin (D/E), curated by Marenka Krasomil & Michaela Richter, essay by the curators, 144 p., Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2018
• Nadira Husain « Pourquoi je suis tout bleu », review by Marie Chênel (F), La belle revue, 2018
2017
• Prix AICA France de la critique d’art, 7 min. lecture (French) by Timothée Chaillou about Nadira Husain’s work
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Interview with Nadira Husain, by Sarie Nijboer (E), Bpigs, 6.10.2017
• Nah und Fern, catalogue accompanying the triennale Bingen 2017 - Skulpturen am Rheinkilometer 529, Bingen (D), curated by Lutz Driver & André Odier, essay by Britta von Campenhausen, published by Gerda und Kuno Pieroth Stiftung, 2017
2016
• Inside to outside to inside, essay by Jens Hoffman about outsider aesthetics (E), Mousse Magazine, Issue 54, June 2016
• Nadira Husain, review by Roy Brand, Artforum, April 2016
2015
• Nadira Husain, portrait by Raimar Stange (D), Artist Kunstmagazin, Issue 102, February-April 2015
• Nadira Husain - Feature Furry, exhibition catalogue with texts (D&E) by Elke Keiper, Yasmina Lahjij und Eva Scharrer, 40 pages, Waldkraiburg (D): Städtische Galerie Waldkraiburg, 2015
2014
• Beugen, Strecken, Wahrnehmen, review by Raimar Stange, Frieze d/e, Issue 16, September- November 2014
curriculum vitae
