Zulekha Mandokhail is a visual artist from Quetta and an MPhil student at Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. She works mainly in charcoal and oil, blending grotesque and opulence in surreal, emotionally layered portraits. Her art explores discomfort, distortion, and richness through materials that let her build tension and texture. Her thesis included large-scale works, earning her a gold medal. Fieldwork is key to her process—she photographs overlooked, broken places and transforms them through memory and dreams. Her portraits mix real sites with inner worlds, shaped by her recurring dreams of her ancestral home and life in Balochistan. These dreamscapes, full of loss and longing, reflect personal and collective trauma. Influenced by early training with Hazara artists, she paints twisted, imperfect figures that speak of survival, not despair. Her award-winning work challenges norms, showing beauty in decay and the political power of emotional truth. Following Cesar A. Cruz’s words, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,” Zulekha creates raw, unflinching work that speaks when words cannot. Her practice continues to evolve through research, field visits, and dream journaling—always rooted in uncovering what we’re taught to ignore.
About the artist
Zulekha Mandokhail is a visual artist from Quetta and an MPhil student at Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. She works mainly in charcoal and oil, blending grotesque and opulence in surreal, emotionally layered portraits. Her art explores discomfort, distortion, and richness through materials that let her build tension and texture. Her thesis included large-scale works, earning her a gold medal. Fieldwork is key to her process—she photographs overlooked, broken places and transforms them through memory and dreams. Her portraits mix real sites with inner worlds, shaped by her recurring dreams of her ancestral home and life in Balochistan. These dreamscapes, full of loss and longing, reflect personal and collective trauma. Influenced by early training with Hazara artists, she paints twisted, imperfect figures that speak of survival, not despair. Her award-winning work challenges norms, showing beauty in decay and the political power of emotional truth. Following Cesar A. Cruz’s words, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,” Zulekha creates raw, unflinching work that speaks when words cannot. Her practice continues to evolve through research, field visits, and dream journaling—always rooted in uncovering what we’re taught to ignore.
Zulekha Mandokhail is a visual artist and researcher whose practice explores the grotesque as both method and worldview. Working between Quetta and Karachi, she creates emotionally charged, large-scale charcoal and oil paintings that merge trauma, dreams, memory, and decay. Her work resists singular narratives—figures are fragmented, spaces collapse, and beauty coexists with rot. She conducts fieldwork in overlooked, decaying sites—dump yards, storerooms, ruins—and fuses this documentation with a rich archive of recurring dreams. These layered, hybrid images blur the line between the personal and political, revealing what is often ignored. For Zulekha, painting is an exorcism—a confrontation with erasure, shame, and survival. Her materials mirror this tension: oil offers opulence and depth; charcoal gives distortion and rawness. Her portraits are not idealized but wounded, tangled in waste and ornamentation. Influenced by early training with Hazara artists and rooted in Balochistan’s charged landscape, her work challenges viewers to see discomfort as truth. Guided by the idea that “art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,” she paints to disturb, to remember, and to reclaim what has been cast aside.
