I am an Afghan-German artist based in Berlin. My abstract works are shaped by psychological inquiry, cultural fragmentation, inner transformation, and the search for meaning. The contrast between two worlds – East and West – runs like a thread through my biography and forms the ground of my artistic practice.
In search of my roots, I began collecting fragments: books about old Afghanistan, family photographs, heirlooms that survived war. I read them like echoes from a life I never lived. To make sense of them, I translated them into broken signs, geometric gestures, and atmospheres that entered my work. What draws me is the invisible – the unspeakable. My pieces reflect states between memory and dream: fractured, open, atmospheric, ambiguous. Without a fixed cultural belonging, without clear inheritance, and with a fragile collective memory, I try to understand what remembrance without images, and identity without roots, might mean – and draw creative power from this very emptiness. Art became my way of translating the inexpressible into something graspable.
My journey into art began out of necessity. As a child, all I had was a pencil and a sheet of paper – to create a world that was mine alone. Stripped to the essential, my body became the counterbalance to mental overactivity – a compass, an instrument. That still holds true today. My works are created in a physical, minimal process using monoprint techniques, acrylic paint, large-scale paper, and the soft surface of the gel plate. This indirect method requires me to respond in the moment – a dialogue between intuition, material, and composition. I combine gestural movement with fine incisions, blind linework, and spontaneous overlays. This allows me to be present and invite unpredictability. I also work with watercolor, drawing, and digital media. While my monoprints exist as one-of-a-kind pieces, my digital editions carry the same visual language – translating the inner space into a different medium. Both emerge from the same desire for resonance and depth.
Art, to me, is a quiet dialogue with life. A way of making the unspeakable visible. Growing up in the tension between opposing worldviews, I was confronted early on with fundamental questions: What separates us? What connects us? What can I believe in? I don’t offer answers. I offer a slowing down. A grounding. A return to what is essential.
My work invites a gentle attention – a stillness in which ambiguity and uncertainty can exist without needing to be solved. In that stillness, an inner space may open. And perhaps a quiet reminder that, despite all our differences, we are part of the same vast mystery:
We all look up at the same sky.