Shahida Ahmed Online Show

“I want people to be really curious about my work,” she says. “The idea is to trigger an inquisitiveness so that the viewer asks questions and wants to explore further.”

Nowhere is Shahida’s vision for her art more evident than in her latest series of works, titled ‘Children in a Lightbulb’. “I wanted to relay the message that children are the light of the future and that it’s critical for us to recognise the critical role earmarked for them,” she explained. “The lightbulb reminds us that in the interim, their formative years, they are surviving in a vacuum – a society which is manmade – and it’s our role as adults to nurture them, otherwise we’re damaging, or even taking away, their future.”

Her richly coloured paintings of whirling dervishes are another nod to her roots, while also providing a platform for Shahida to explore several issues that are close to her heart, including life’s ebbs and flows and its circular patterns, via metaphor. The space we occupy in society and its complex layers which increase over time, meanwhile, are explored in her collection of bubbles and abstract shape paintings.