Ahsan Memon is a highly accomplished art practitioner based in Lahore, Pakistan. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2016 and a Master of Arts in 2019, both from the prestigious National College of Arts in Lahore. Ahsan’s ethereal portraits of living beings recognise the inherent ambiguities of existence, and the limitations of identity, labels, and construct. His subjects appear like plants, silently existing, yet very much alive, but with recognition of decay and the gradual process of natural disappearance. Ahsan has received numerous prestigious awards including, most recently, the 2024 Niggah Art Award for portraiture, and has exhibited work at solo shows and art fairs in India, Pakistan and the United States. Ahsan’s work is being shown for the first time in Canada in Ways of Being.

Aksh Diwan Garg is an emerging visual artist based in New Delhi, India. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the College of Art, New Delhi. Aksh renders oil and acrylic in dense, bold strokes, using vivid and rich tones. His paintings often feature semi-autobiographical, gender-neutral figures placed in imagined scenes drawn from personal experiences. Aksh’s sensitive portrayal of human postures, facial expressions and hand gestures brings his figurative characters to life. Styled in strong and groovy attires, hairstyles and jewellery, they flaunt their identity with sensuality. They are unmistakably fearless and independent, each asserting a rightful place in society. The characters and the domains they inhabit are born of Garg's observations of his milieu, and are expressed with flourishes of his own beliefs, personality, fantasies and story-telling. Aksh, who also practises film-making and photography, is making his North American debut in Ways of Being.

Anoushka Bhalla is a visual artist based in New York City. She has an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, in New York, and a BFA from MSU, Baroda, India. Her work confronts the weight of history and time through a visceral engagement with materiality—particularly fractured terracotta and densely layered oil. Her psychologically charged figures emerge as spectres: fragmented yet rooted in personal and collective memory. Anoushka’s practice blurs the line between ruin and ritual, drawing from myth, archaeology, and the emotional residue of lived experience. Her works have been exhibited in solo and group presentations in India, as well as in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. She has previously participated in the Kochi-Muziris Students’ Biennale, India and will be included in the 2026 Immigrant Artist Biennale, NYC. Anoushka is making her Canada debut in Ways of Being.

Farheen Fatima is a photographer and visual artist based in Chandigarh, India. Her practice focuses on tenderness, belonging, and the emotional landscapes of everyday life, often in overlooked small cities and public spaces. Working primarily with digital, film, and cyanotype — often hand-altered with emotional insertions — she builds intimate narratives that resist spectacle, foregrounding softness, care, and memory. Her series Meet Me In The Garden was exhibited by Photoink Gallery at India Art Fair 2023, Serendipity Arts Festival 2024, and Chennai Photo Biennale 2024. Internationally, her work has been shown at the Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE), Jameel Arts Center (UAE) and Der Greif (Germany). She holds a Master’s in history of art and received the TOTO Photography Award in 2022.

Fatima Kaleem is a visual artist currently based in Richmond, Virginia where she is pursuing an MFA in painting and printmaking at the Virginia Commonwealth University. She received a BFA with honours from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2023, where she majored in printmaking. Her work explores how feminine spaces, particularly the home, school, and TV soap operas, function as sites where power, control, and narrative are negotiated. She considers the way in which emotional dynamics like gossip, suspicion, jealousy, and discipline operate within these environments, often reflecting broader social and political structures. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in the US, Pakistan, the UK and India. Her work was also presented as part of a group project at the Lahore Biennale in October 2024. Fatima is making her Canada debut in Ways of Being.

Sadia Fakih is an interdisciplinary artist of Pakistani origin, whose parents migrated to Canada in the mid-1970s from Karachi. She is currently based in Calgary. Sadia received her BFA in painting from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2017, where she also currently teaches, and an MFA in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in2019. Through intricate and densely-layered collage-drawing influenced by Indo-Persian miniature painting, she seeks to visually reconfigure the hierarchical social constructions of South Asian and Western cultures.  Sadia explores her own myth-making in the transitional spaces that erupt when imposing identities collide. Sadia is currently an international artist in residence at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA) in New York. Her work is in the collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Global Affairs Canada, and the BMO Corporate Art Collection. 

Shaheer Zazai is an Afghan-Canadian artist renowned for his digital media practice, with painting emerging as a site of personal excavation and emotional release. Art Manzil is thrilled to present this developing area of his practice. While his digital works are built on the logic of structure, repetition, and coded design—often drawing from the grid-like form of traditional Afghan carpets—his paintings unravel that order. In contrast, they offer a space where structure dissolves and fluidity takes over; where internal landscapes are laid bare. Shaheer’s paintings are self-reflective and deeply intimate and organic. Figures stand within unruly gardens—dense, disordered spaces teeming with overgrown florals that feel both lush and uneasy. They rise like memories or emotions that cannot be avoided—repeating not in form, but in their persistence. These flowers are not decorative; they are symbols of confrontation and emotional terrain. They rise like memories or emotions that cannot be avoided—repeating not in form, but in their persistence. In these works, vulnerability—especially male vulnerability, which is often culturally suppressed—finds a visible, painterly expression. He offers a glimpse into a world where fragility is not only allowed but honored. The paintings do not resolve; they unfold. In doing so, they create room for grief, tenderness, and the private chaos that lies beneath composed surfaces.

Shaheer received his BFA from OCAD University in 2011 and was artist-in-residence at the Digital Painting Atelier in 2015. His work has been recognized by the 2024 TFVA Visual Artist Award, and supported by the Ontario Arts Council. His paintings and digital works have been exhibited in solo and group shows at institutions including the Aga Khan Museum, The Power Plant Contemporary, Owens Art Gallery, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Textile Museum of Canada, and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand. An upcoming solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Mississauga is set for January 2026.

Tazeen Fatima is a visual artist based in Lahore, Pakistan. She graduated from the National college of Arts, Lahore in 2024. Her work explores the delicate balance between masculine and feminine energies, with a particular focus on the emotional consequences of their imbalance in both individuals and society. By engaging with this theme, she seeks to challenge traditional gender roles and prompt a conversation about personal and collective wellbeing. Her intensely expressive canvases are awash in aesthetics, architectural styles and landscapes that are distinctly tropical modernist and essentially South Asian. Her practice has been shaped through residencies at Muse Gallery and Articulate Residency, and her work was recently showcased in a group exhibition at VM Art Gallery, Karachi. Tazeen is making her international debut in Ways of Being.