Hi! I’m Dua, a visual artist and writer from Pakistan. I studied painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore and am currently studying printmaking as a master’s student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Since 2009, I have worked, too, as an art writer/ journalist/ fringe historian.
As both an artist and a writer, I look to collage to articulate connections between things. You might say that the kind of making or thinking that comes most naturally to me is through collage: interweaving memoir with art history, poetry with lore, text with image. I am interested, in particular, in alternative or overlooked histories, in the anecdote and the apocryphal tale, and in reanimating them to broach concerns about the present and the future.
In 2022, I was awarded a South Asia Speaks Fellowship to develop my first book of visual nonfiction: a graphic memoir about a Pakistani girl and a (very dead) English poet and the complicated nature of inspiration. On most days, I can be found mentally working out the illustrations for my book.