THE STRANGER IN THE MIRROR

As part of her research for 'The Subject is the Subject', London artist Naira Mushtaq looked at ethnographic documentation from the British Raj to build a counter-archive. They recall images we know and defamiliarises them. On display at an exhibition in Delhi.

- ADITHI REENA AJITH

WHO are we when we are seen through someone else's eyes—through a lens or a brushstroke? For years, artists have grappled with the self, with how we are seen and remembered.

At London-based artist Naira Mushtaq's first solo exhibition in India 'The Subject is the Subject', at Delhi's Pristine Contemporary, these questions find a renewed urgency. Working with found photographs from the colonial era, Mushtaq unpacks what it means to inherit a history of being observed—and reimagines it on her own terms.

The title of the show is a wordplay on the idea of "the subject"—once the British subjects of colonial rule, now subjects captured through a photographer's lens, and ultimately, through Mushtaq's artistic gaze. The show features 12 canvases, dated from the 1930s to 1970s, each telling a story of the unknown—people who may still be alive, or long gone.

An artist of Pakistani descent, Mushtaq's practice is shaped by an education steeped in colonial legacy. "I went to a convent school, followed by an art school whose principal was once the English artist Lockwood Kipling," she says. Later, at Central Saint Martins in London, she encountered what she describes as a "white, Western-centric" curriculum. "I was being typecast to project a stereotype of a brown woman; there was no intersectionality," she adds. Her work now pushes back against the Western canon, embracing South Asian visual traditions and decolonising inherited narratives through paint and memory.