Nusra latif qureshi biography

The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities.

Nusra Latif Qureshi’s artworks challenge the traditions of South Asian painting.

We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders both past and present. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that this website contains images of deceased persons. Nusra Latif Qureshi was born in Pakistan in and originally trained in the traditional art of Mughal miniature musaviri paintings.

She layers appropriated imagery from colonial photography, patterns from Middle Eastern textiles or the Arts and Crafts movement, silhouettes and botanical paintings; these elements combine to comprise the backgrounds and foregrounds of isolated female figures. Qureshi lives in Melbourne. Over the past fifteen years Nusra Latif Qureshi has worked extensively with the tropes and language of Indo-Persian miniature and Company painting, and nineteenth century conventions of portrait photography, to explore the politics of representation in art history.

Through her practice, she encourages us to distinguish between what was and what remains; viewing history as a collection of fragments constantly rearranged to construct new narratives. Qureshi has frequently used the lone female figure as the subject of her work, often inserting it in dialogue with well-known and usually male dominated examples of Mughal miniatures.

At times, the figure is merely an outline or a collaged cut out — a ghostly annotation to earlier instances of female invisibility. And since moving to Melbourne from her native Lahore in , this subjectivity has expanded to include the trials and tribulations of being an immigrant in a land almost wholly populated by other immigrants.

Nusra Latif Qureshi was born in Pakistan in and originally trained in the traditional art of Mughal miniature (musaviri) paintings.

The two works or rather bodies of work in this exhibition mark a distinct new step in her practice, using the same passport photograph of herself as an integral part of both compositions. In the Red silks series of digital prints, she creates digital photomontages incorporating her passport photo, Victorian era dresses, paintings of flowers, exercises in classical calligraphy and other seemingly orientalist ornamentation.

The prints are variations on a tightly controlled visual theme built from these same basic components, and when shown together, hint at the process of constructing identity. The Victorian dresses with their exaggerated shapes speak of the physical constraints placed on the female body in the pursuit of an ideal.