About
Ajea Zahid (b. 2000, Karachi) is a visual artist from Lahore, Pakistan, currently based in London. She graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore, and is pursuing her MA at the Royal College of Art.
Her interest lies in the intimacy of the human condition. Working from observation and memory, she constructs figures that sit somewhere between the deeply familiar and the unknowable — surfaces that seek an emotional truth in the way people exist among, and in relation to, one another.
Zahid is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Her exhibitions include Untitled Art Miami Beach; Frieze at 9 Cork Street and 55 Eastcastle Street, London; Pristine Contemporary, India; Muscat Art, Oman; and Tanzara Gallery, O Art Space, Gallery 6 and NumaishGah, Lahore. She has also worked with Our Shared Cultural Heritage, a youth-led project exploring the shared cultures and histories of the UK and South Asia.
Artist Statement
My practice is rooted in movement and observation. Early recollections of displacement meant renegotiating ideas of home and belonging — I learned to observe people and places I knew would be temporary.
In many ways, painting has become a way to hold onto the transient: to slow down the act of seeing and make sense of impermanence. It begins, for me, with sketches of observational lines — gestures of my immediate surroundings and people — an intuition that evolves naturally into painting, where the paint itself leads the direction of the work.
The figure has become a site through which I explore emotional and psychological tensions; a way to hold the intimate and the melancholy, capturing moments that are personal yet hint at something universal. I am drawn to small, often overlooked interactions that reveal something fragile about human connection — lingering, liminal scenes, suggestive of narrative but never quite revealing it. The work examines what it means to be together yet apart; displaced, but still belonging.