Mohsin Shafi is a Lahore-based practitioner whose work rises from the restless pulse of South Asia—its silences, contradictions, inheritances, and intimate histories. His practice does not begin from distance or theory alone, but from lived unease: class dissonance, familial rupture, delayed language, social shame, desire under scrutiny, and the long afterlife of grief. Working across collage, text, sound, installation, performance, and moving image, he builds forms through which tenderness and critique, satire and sorrow, can inhabit the same frame.
Born in Montgomery, Pakistan, and raised in a Punjabi context, Shafi came into art without cultural ease or inherited access. Punjabi remained the language of nearness, soil, and intimacy; Urdu opened the door to literary and social worlds; English arrived later, self-taught and hard won, as part of a wider remaking of the self. This layered relation to language continues to shape his work. In it, language is never merely descriptive: it is aspiration, fracture, class passage, mistranslation, longing, and reclamation. Drawing from personal archives, vernacular speech, folklore, shrine culture, and South Asian poetics, he returns to forms of feeling and ways of being that existed before colonial morality turned them into fear, secrecy, and punishment.
His work is also haunted by the question of home. Not only where home is, but whether it is ever fully available. Growing up adopted, learning late about the terms of his own family history, and later living as a solitary figure within a culture organized around kinship and heteronormative continuity, Shafi approaches belonging as something desired yet continually unsettled. Ritual occasions—festivals, mourning, weddings, family gatherings—can become the sharpest sites of estrangement, where one feels most visibly outside the script. In this sense, his work asks what it means to survive in a place where desire itself can feel criminalized, and where safety is rarely a given even when familiarity is.
Love, in his practice, is not a decorative theme but a structuring force. Romantic longing, attachment, ghosting, devotion, grief, friendship, abandonment, and the ache of emotional asymmetry recur throughout his work. Much of what he makes is shaped by one-sided love, delayed love, and love imagined before it is ever lived. These are not only autobiographical concerns; they become ways of thinking through intimacy, masculinity, tenderness, loneliness, and the emotional labor of remaining open in a world that repeatedly asks for concealment. Humor enters here too—sometimes dry, sometimes absurd, sometimes devastatingly small. He often laughs where he might otherwise collapse. In his work, black comedy is not a stylistic flourish but a survival instinct.
This logic of concealment and exposure extends into form. Shafi’s turn to collage, layering, and multiplicity emerged not simply as aesthetic preference but as a way of thinking: one image against another, one truth interrupting the next, one register unable to contain the whole. Layering became a structure through which contradictions could remain active rather than resolved. It also gave him a way to work against the pressure of singular meanings—whether in relation to art, class, sexuality, or the social performances required to move through Pakistan as someone visibly misaligned with masculine expectation.
His work has at times encountered both direct and diffuse censorship, from the closure of an early solo presentation to quieter forms of exclusion, refusal, and institutional silence. Yet these conditions have not diminished the practice; they have sharpened its tonal intelligence. Suggestion, code, displacement, irony, and emotional excess all become part of how the work speaks. Rather than positioning himself neatly inside available categories, Shafi turns toward Sufi traditions, regional myths, and postcolonial inheritances to imagine selfhood and desire outside imported moral frameworks and their local enforcers. What emerges is not a fixed identity claim, but a field of coexistence: vulnerability and resistance, devotion and satire, nakedness and disguise, despair and prayer.
His trajectory through the art world has been equally marked by persistence. He studied at the National College of Arts in Lahore—an institution with a long and influential legacy in the region, originally established as the Mayo School of Arts in 1875 before becoming NCA after Partition—and later taught there, as well as at Beaconhouse National University and the Pakistan Institute of Fashion Design. Even so, his path has remained largely self-fashioned: without sustained gallery protection, without an art-world inheritance to cushion him, and often without the critical coverage given more easily to others. That outsider condition continues to shape both the politics and the stamina of his practice.
Over the past decade, Shafi’s work has been shown across solo exhibitions, biennales, museum contexts, fairs, collaborations, and independent platforms in Pakistan and internationally. Recent projects include a solo museum presentation at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria, exhibitions at Queer Museum Vienna and Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, and residencies at AIR Niederösterreich, 1646 Experimental Art Space in The Hague, Atelier Mondial in Basel, The Growlery in San Francisco, and Rondo Studios in Graz, among others. He has also curated projects including Museum of Repairing Reminiscences and Encounters in Time.
Recent years have drawn him further into moving image and embodiment. In Mlamtia (The Reprimended), he turns toward himself with unusual directness, bringing together mourning, personal archive, performance, parental memory, spiritual address, and the remains of an unreturned love. The film is less a departure than a condensation: grief for his parents, unresolved attachment, prayer, shame, closure, and self-exposure all gathered into one form. It marks a threshold in his practice, not because it abandons earlier concerns, but because it allows them to stand more nakedly in the frame.
For Shafi, making is not separate from survival. Art is
witness, mirror, joke, prayer, argument, and evidence that a life—however contradictory, excessive, wounded, or culturally illegible—has been fully inhabited. What gives his practice force is not polish alone, but consistency: the refusal to stop, the refusal to become smaller for comfort, and the faith that even what has been denied language can still be given form.