Rah Naqvi has been painting with soil, marking and measuring it by scent. Soil from their mother’s potted plants, new and old siblings in her care, soil from a broken tasbeeh from karbala, soil from motherlands.

These pigments extracted from where wood erodes into earth, where death turns into life, where spores blanket new leaves, deceiving. These works serve as studies for a larger body of work that contemplates at the intersections of grief and faith.

The artist, in the face of ever growing social atrocities has been confronting the comforts of food, body, shelter, and empty illustrations of peace in capitalist luxuries- all that is waste that’ll find its way to our coasts, break our soil, become stone,
never eroding, never dead, never nurturing.

These paintings in soil, serve as witness, and archive the richness of soil, in reckoning and resistances- rich in a colour that can’t be erased.