June 30, 2026
In this BBC Arabic feature, artist Aiza Ahmed discusses Footnotes, her solo presentation with Sargent's Daughters at the inaugural Art Basel Qatar. The segment explores Ahmed's multidisciplinary practice, examining themes of borders, performance, nationalism, and diasporic identity through the body of work developed during her residency in Doha.
Click here to watch the full segment.
Footnotes draws on Ahmed’s ongoing engagement with the Wagah–Attari border ceremony, a highly theatrical military pageant enacted daily at the border of India and Pakistan. In this latest body of work, Ahmed focuses on the soldiers who perform at the border, as well as military marching musicians—drummers, brass players, and band members who perform at national parades, ceremonies, state events. Their uniforms and synchronized movements mimic those of soldiers, yet they remain marginal, even as they are fundamental to these nationalist displays. Populating Ahmed’s site-specific installation, the soldiers and musicians inhabit a charged landscape where political, geographic, and theatrical boundaries converge and collapse. Here, the border is not a fixed line but a breathing, shifting entity, inviting viewers to engage, cross, and recross the margins of history, humor, and memory.
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 The Arts Intensive Study Program at Fire Station, Doha, Qatar.