LB02: between the sun and the moon,

Curated by Hoor al Qasimi

Khadim Ali

Invisible Border series, 2019–2020
Oil on canvas and two tapestries
Khadim Ali draws from personal memory to reflect on identity, displacement, and belonging. Anchored in the artist’s childhood in Quetta, the series captures a moment of rupture—when borders, once intangible, became painfully real. Through oil paintings and monumental tapestries, Ali explores how shared dreams among school friends dissolved in the wake of deepening sectarian and ethnic divisions.
Inspired by his Hazara heritage and the generational trauma of forced migration, the work evokes the transformation of home from a site of comfort to one of fear and exile. Ali’s figures—dusty, ghostlike, and mirrored—inhabit landscapes haunted by war and memory. Though the physical borders remain unseen, their impact is deeply etched into the bodies and psyches of those marked as “other.” The series becomes a powerful meditation on how invisible lines fracture communities and redefine the meaning of home.
Co-Commissioned by Australia Council for the Arts, Institute of Modern Arts (Brisbane, Australia), & Lahore Biennale Foundation 2020
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