Wardha Shabbir’s work revolves around gardens – memories of her mother’s garden, and of the garden city Lahore, where ecologies and cultural density are strained by environmental degradation, political instability and social precarity. Trained in miniature painting, Shabbir probes and expands the genre’s boundaries, asking how it might evolve to hold contemporary experience.
Foliage and organic geometries constitute Shabbir’s rich symbolic language. Many of her paintings include a dark, tendrilled form – a mukhi, in Urdu, or centre of a flower bud. In Shabbir’s hands, the mukhi signifies – the beginning of something, the shape of becoming; it reads as both a volcano seen from above and a womb. Its petals reach outwards like the many arms of the Hindu goddess Kali Mata, endlessly capable of managing multiple responsibilities, as many women and mothers do.
In The Symphony of Silence (2025), the mukhi traces a path through a composition that references satellite imagery, wayfinding, migration and the artist’s own personal journeys. Other paintings construct immersive world Shabbir describes as “sacred savannahs”. Her sculpture A Home Is Where My Leaves Are (2026) developed out of research into plants that are able to adapt to extreme conditions. Shabbir’s imagined ecosystems offer visual propositions for how to survive, transform and persist.
—Jessica Cerasi
