“Nazar is a photo installation that engages with recurring symbols to examine concepts of religious existentialism and the female experience as it relates to shame and agency. As a Pakistani artist, Zafar examines her own complacency within colonial structures by delving into her relationship with language. She translates her own poetry from English into Urdu and back again, in an ouroboric loop that leaves the phrases untranslatable. Having always prioritized one language over the other by choosing to write in English, Zafar engages translation as a self-reflexive, decolonial practice in her work as a way to deconstruct her understanding of poetic language and reconstruct it in a way that allows it to take on new cultural definition. Utilizing self-portraiture and images of her family, Zafar’s work speaks to the epistemological connection between the female body and the language of mythology. The proliferation of eyes in her work references ways of seeing, and art historical conceptions of eyes that not only revert a patriarchal gaze but also a colonial one. Arranged in an accordion sculpture, Zafar’s images and words construct a visual poem that both describes and visualizes the stream of consciousness of a woman whose experience has rhetorically been shaped by the language of colonizers.”    

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