Wajd

Samra Mansoor can best be described as someone who loves working with paper, but more formally, she is a visual artist and a sculptor. She earned a BFA majoring in sculpture and miniature painting from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture with a distinction in her thesis. 

Samra’s work is influenced by her experience of violence in Karachi at a young age. Karachi is a city that thrives on its monstrous disparities and is fraught with staggering contradictions. Her work considers the victims of violence and unidentified dead bodies. These people didn’t only die, they also lost their identities and were turned into riddles. Her work recognizes them, their absence, and the violence most of them endured while making sense of my own loss. She aims to visualize the grief, loss, anger, and other psychic scars resulting from armed conflicts or civil violence, simultaneously providing a means for reconciliation with loss and remembering.

Samra tries to give form to the said themes with the use of commonplace materials like paper, sand, rose petals, and watercolors. The fine, loose sand, the opacity, and the fragility of the paper and watercolor have unintentionally helped her to achieve what she calls “a quietness and softness in my works.” This quality aims to and translates into a restorative practice: offering, if just for a moment, a personhood to those lost, murdered, unidentified and oppressed, encouraging viewers to reflect on the meaning those lives hold.