Aiza Ahmed | The Music Room

October 24 - November 22, 2025

Aiza Ahmed’s debut New York solo exhibition, The Music Room, interweaves her practices of painting and sculpture into an immersive installation that conjures Satyajit Ray’s mesmerizing 1958 film, Jalsaghar (The Music Room). Ahmed’s multimedia practice is grounded in her own diasporic identity, exploring personal, cultural, and political histories of the Indian subcontinent. Ray’s film reflects these concerns as the titular “music room” becomes a stage for ritualized performances of masculinity, enshrined within a specific architectural and social environment. Ahmed’s monumental paintings and wooden cut-out figures interpolate the film in three-dimensional space. Historian, composer, and guitarist Ria Modak contributes an original composition that evokes the film’s score in the gallery space, transforming classical Indian music into a contemporary soundscape.

Jalsaghar (The Music Room) centers on the household of an aging Bengali zamindar, or feudal lord, whose power is waning as the final years of British colonial rule transform the social and economic landscape of his country. His opulent mansion is crumbling, yet he continues to host elaborate musical soirées to shore up his prestige. As the era of the aristocratic class fades, the lavish ornamentation of his home and the grandeur of the performances become his final refuge. For Ahmed, Ray’s film is less a finished text than an archive of images, sounds, and choreographies to be reactivated. Ahmed often cites films and public ceremonies in her work, allowing her to investigate histories not as static facts, but as lived, embodied, and staged experiences. 

Ahmed produced these large-scale oil paintings while watching Jalsaghar, frequently pausing the film and capturing expressions, gestures, and scenery in fluid contour lines. The first painting in the series, Music Room 1, is monochromatic, evoking the film’s black and white cinematography. Each ensuing painting included another layer of saturated color – first pink, then umber, and finally a vibrant blue that references the water and erosion in the film. Ahmed approaches painting as an extension of drawing, centering the line as the composition’s primary source of energy and movement. The drips, flourishes, and breaks in her marks transform a linear narrative into fragmented and kaleidoscopic compositions. 

The mis-en-scène of the exhibition is completed by two wooden cut-out figures, each inspired by a male character in the film. Supported by raw plywood backs that recall stage sets, they animate the space like actors in a play, implicating the viewer in their choreography. Ahmed’s music room inverts the power structure depicted in the film, in which men perform authority by curating women’s voices and bodies. In this exhibition, Ahmed and Modak propose another way of seeing – a music room authored by women, turning their gaze on patriarchal and colonial power. Ahmed, like Ray, uses her multimedia practice to produce entrancing images that reveal the unstable fictions of masculinity, memory, and inheritance.

Aiza Ahmed (b. 1997, Lahore, Pakistan; lives and works in New York) is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video. Her practice contends with borders, migrations, public histories, and private archives within diasporic identities originating from the Indian Subcontinent. Interweaving humor and performance, Ahmed constructs theatrical narratives that unsettle fixed ideas of nationhood, masculinity, and belonging.

Ahmed earned her BFA from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (2020) and her MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI (2024). Her work has been exhibited internationally, including a recent solo booth at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, NY (2025); a two-person show at Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and a three-person exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, VA. Group exhibitions include The Big Fat South Asian Show, RISD Museum, Providence, RI (2025); What Lovers Do: RISD MFA Painting Exhibition, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2024); ; Now Streaming, Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Parable of the Planes, New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), New York, NY (2024); In A Look, VM Art Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan (2021); and Ladies Who Lunch, Dominion Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan (2021), among others.

She is the recipient of the Graduate Commons Grant Fellowship (2024) and RISD Fellowship (2022) in Providence, RI; the Edith Stone and Walter King Memorial Prize (2019); and the David R. Bean Prize in Fine Arts (2018) at Cornell University. In 2024, she participated in residencies with William Kentridge & Centre for the Less Good Idea at Brown Arts Institute, Providence, RI, and The Macedonia Institute, Chatham, NY. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects, New York, NY, and will begin The Arts Intensive Study Program at Fire Station, Doha, Qatar, in fall 2025.