Kavi Gupta is pleased to present Haya Zaidi’s Up Against, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States.
Opening this Friday, April 10, 5–7pm at Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd.
Zaidi's work belongs to a vital lineage of artists who have reclaimed Indo-Persian miniature traditions as sites of feminist inquiry and contemporary political thought. Shahzia Sikander pioneered this territory — transforming the NCA Lahore miniature department into a launchpad for an entire movement, using the form to resist simplistic categorizations of South Asian women. Hayv Kahraman draws from Persian and Arabic manuscript painting to address the displaced female body and embodied memory. Arghavan Khosravi merges Persian miniature conventions with surrealist construction to articulate the fractures of exile and gendered constraint. Zaidi extends this conversation in a voice distinctly her own — rooted not in diaspora but in the lived textures of life within Pakistan, working through collage, found materials, textiles, and teawash to build densely layered surfaces that are at once personal and historically charged.
Drawing from South Asian mythological frameworks and the codified language of Indo-Persian miniature traditions, Zaidi constructs new visual propositions for how the feminine may be claimed, embodied, and reimagined. This body of work takes inspiration from classical Sufi narratives — Gulshan-i 'Ishq, Madhumalati, Hamzanama, and other mythic romances — in which a recurring motif unfolds: a man undertakes perilous journeys, confronts fearsome beasts, and rescues a princess depicted as helpless, without agency. Zaidi rewrites these stories, transforming demons into whimsical, cartoon-like figures that coexist with women rather than threaten them. Once fears or harmful myths are confronted, they lose their power — and can even appear absurd. By situating women as active, self-determined participants rather than passive figures to be saved, she subverts the traditional fairy tale for a contemporary lens.
Where her predecessors have taken the miniature tradition global, Zaidi speaks to today —
