A Closer Look: The Painted Imaginaries of Fiza Khatri

Brick Library, 2026, 59 x 85 inches, oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary.
In The Great Rebuild!, artist Fiza Khatri's recent body of work, they invite us into the playful world of children. We see them inhabiting the shifting terrain between play and reality, transforming everyday objects into vessels for imagined journeys. Their irreverent world-building mimics the war and destruction they see around them, building shelters from sofa cushions, playing doctor-patient. Here, building and unbuilding become gestures of possibility, and play becomes a way of rehearsing, reflecting upon and remaking the conditions of existence.

In this edition of A Closer Look, Khatri takes us through the making of this series, and, more broadly, the evolving concerns that animate their practice at large. Across their practice, painting is as much an observational exercise as it is an exercise in imagination. Their paintings bring human and non-human figures into intimate, often unpredictable relationships, allowing bodies, objects, plants and landscapes to coexist without settling into fixed hierarchies or identities. Boundaries between the animate and inanimate, the familiar and the fantastical, tenderness and violence, the sacred and the everyday begin to dissolve. Their paintings invite a kind of looking that is also a form of sensing, or feeling, drawing from the material tactility of the medium itself: the weight, softness, texture or unruliness of things. Meaning is not always immediately legible; it takes shape through the layers that make their work, the stories they contain and the beauty they offer that is so deeply tied to the complexities of lived experience. Moving backwards through their practice, this talk considers how Khatri’s paintings create spaces in which different forms of life, knowledge and feeling might meet, and how painting can become a means of imagining ways of being together otherwise.

This programme at MAP is part of A Closer Look, a monthly series of research-focused talks by artists, curators and art historians focusing on visual cultures of South Asia