Mehreen Hashmi is a Karachi-based visual artist and curator with a Fine Arts degree from the Indus Valley School. She has curated exhibitions, including the Karachi Art Summit, and has exhibited her work globally. She has received multiple honors and actively promotes cultural exchange and public art projects in Pakistan and Europe.
About the artist
Mehreen Hashmi is a Karachi-based visual artist and curator with a Fine Arts degree from the Indus Valley School. She has curated exhibitions, including the Karachi Art Summit, and has exhibited her work globally. She has received multiple honors and actively promotes cultural exchange and public art projects in Pakistan and Europe.
Voices, chaos of thoughts in my mind, emotional warfare in my heart, and the mental travel between sanity and insanity, all get a visual depiction in my work. I make work to celebrate my resilience, explore my emotions, and visualize myself as an entire person. It all speaks to the audience in the end as self-portraits. My work has evolved with time and ongoing healing while accepting the dysfunctionality of my mind and nerves. What is healing, though? Does it cure to the fullest, and I will lose my series of thoughts which has been my closest companion? Although it’s more than chaotic thoughts. I am a person who is interrogating my unorthodox identity in an orthodox society. It narrates a paradigm between survival mode as an effect of the triggered stage and days earned after sanity with my resilience. I explore the metamorphosis of my emotions and vulnerability with the optimism of healing. Mentally, I live in a world that cannot be translated; it can be dreamed of or touched through visuals, and it serves as my catharsis. I have created my language to communicate with this prudent world; which feels peculiar for the world. It is an intimate story told through symbols of self-portraits, figures, and flies depicted as ordeals. Sunflowers are a symbol of hope, healing, and resilience. It captures my moments between hope and despair of belonging and human connections with my surroundings.
