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.

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. 

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.