Ayesha Alizeh

Ayesha Alizeh

Painting, Poetry, Performance art and communal art, Installations

Karatschi, Pakistan

Artist in Residence from January to March 2025

Layl Ali is a visual artist based in Karachi. Their work seeks to address collective memory and ideas around world building. Their practice is rooted in looking at marginal spiritual practices, histories, architectures, gender, mapping within the subcontinent. They seek to connect drawing and writing with research in order to develop an interdisciplinary methodology in understanding the world around us. They often like to work with a dialectical approach to arts and the world, enjoying moving between two oppositional forces and investigating their relationship with each other. This can range from the relationship between the interior and exterior, personal and political, local and international, the past and the future, the self and the other and many relational dynamics like this that manifest around us. Layl Ali applies this approach to specific instances, events, and embodiments that can range from patriarchal violence, critique of the built environment and marginal expressions of resistance within them that manifest as a living archive that always emerges despite repression and oppression.

An important theme in their work is building evidence for connectedness within all living beings and matter. Their work is not secular. It is political. It is sacred. It is devotional. It seeks to examine darkness and light together. The multiple and plural is an important aspect to their work, while they seek oneness within it. Their work often confronts the relationship between the living and the dead, believing that the presence of those who have left us are still with us today. The methods they use to address these moods vary from writing, pedagogy, paintings, diagrams, murals, and any possible medium that they can get their hands on.

Coaching by Pascal Sidler

Realised by IG Rote Fabrik and Pro Helvetia New Delhi