Hafsa Nouman (b.1998) is a Pakistani visual artist based in New Haven, CT. She graduated with a distinction in Painting from the National College of Arts (2022) and is currently pursuing an MFA in Painting/Printmaking at the Yale School of Art.
Hafsa’s practice focuses on the deconstruction of colonial hierarchies embedded in patriarchal spaces- both monumental and domestic. Her critical focus is rooted in the relationship between ‘object’ and ‘desire’ which often results in visual excavations of architectural thresholds, such as doors, walls, and wrought iron patterns. Through those thresholds, Nouman creates a spatial logic that brings attention to the painted object’s histories, and material realities in a way that they can be re-embodied in the gallery space.
Currently, Hafsa is investigating the urgency for decolonisation in the present moment by creating reflective, transparent paintings. She is devising a different logic of representation through the material language of painting that reflects the immaterial desire to touch and hold. It is an exploration not just of the object onto which the desire is projected, but of the object that reveals the desire – the hand. The hand is the medium through which we touch, hold, make, and retain—capturing its gesture of touching, feeling, and holding in their relationality. Making one's touch through representation as the point of contact, the blind spot, the lived experience of a sensation. This conceptual play that exists alongside the embodied experience of touch, when represented by the strangeness of how it is painted and gets read as abstraction, is what Hafsa is invested in.