Love and Heartbreak
Group ShowFebruary 13-20 2025
Bushwick Gallery
artist profile
Love and Heartbreak: A Duality explores the spectrum of emotions that define relationships and personal histories. Miraal Zafar’s My Grandparents fits seamlessly within this theme, offering a poignant depiction of love, grief, and resilience. By documenting her grandmother in a moment of quiet reflection, Zafar creates a visual narrative of familial love and loss, highlighting the ways in which life continues even in the wake of profound change.
My Grandparents is a deeply intimate portrait capturing Zafar’s grandmother at her dressing table in the family’s ancestral home in Pakistan. The photograph, taken in the wake of her grandfather’s passing, reflects a pivotal moment in her grandmother’s life—the first time living alone after a life shaped by marriage and matriarchal responsibility. The act of putting on lipstick, a daily ritual, becomes a symbol of continuity amidst change, an anchor in the midst of loss and transformation.
The dressing table, unchanged over time, becomes a site of memory and resilience, holding echoes of past generations and childhood memories. Indexical photographs, standing quietly in the background, serve as markers of familial legacy. The warm tones and textured quality of the 35mm digital print enhance the sense of nostalgia, inviting viewers to reflect on their own familial ties and the role of ritual in maintaining identity and strength.
Opening Day
Self Aware
Solo Show
May 8-28 2023
Granoff Center for Creative Arts, 3s Floor, Providence, RI
There is a power in knowing who you are. And for women, the need to know how to define your identity is necessitated by the need to constantly perform. How often do we create ourselves on the basis of how we are perceived? And how often is that image influenced by our idea of what is feminine and what is beautiful?
In this series, I photograph the women in my life: those who raised me, those who grew with me and those who I met at a transformative point in my life, each of which influenced my own perception of myself. This project is personal, and aims to recognize the ways in which womanhood intersects with other aspects of identity, and how conceptions of femininity differ across physical spaces. My photographs, taken in Pakistan and Providence, aim to acknowledge spaces of comfort, of change, of loss and of birth through a gaze that is female, and that knows that it is being watched in return.
Opening Day
Inclusive Femininity
April 10-17, 2023
Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender, Providence, RI
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