March 8, 2026

Hamida: Invisible that Governs

Yul Cho, Ifra Shariq & Letian Lois Ding in Conversations with Hamida

Conversations with Hamida, a Stockholm-based artist from Pakistan, on desire, shame, the Orientalist gaze, and what governs you without being visible.

Hamida grew up in Quetta, Pakistan, trained in miniature painting, and came to Stockholm directly after her bachelor’s – arriving in the middle of a pandemic. She now studies at Mejan (Kungliga Konsthögskolan, Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm), where she makes large-scale paintings and short films, and is preparing a performance piece for her graduation show at Konstakademien (The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts). We met her in her studio at Mejan, and the conversation began there.

LOIS: We’re building an evolving archive and platform to highlight the voices of art practitioners with connections to Asia. Asia is vast, both culturally and geographically – we don’t want to define it, we just want to connect the dots and show the multiplicity of people relating to it. You’re our second guest, after Nanna Li from Konstfack.

HAMIDA: It makes me very excited. If there is anyone from Asia doing art practice and living in Stockholm, I want to know about them. What I would personally love to see is whether these artists have common threads, and whether their work has changed since coming here. Because it’s one thing to live in Pakistan and experience something. It’s another to come here and experience the same things.

I thought if I got out of Pakistan, everything would change. Especially, things I work with – shame, construction, desire. But you see different forms of the same thing in different parts of the world. It just has a different shape. I think that the East has a specific way of seeing the West. The West has a very specific way to look at the East. And someone who can travel between the two can see what assumptions Swedish people have about Pakistan, and what assumptions Pakistanis have about Sweden, and somehow they connect at some point.

Both Ifra and Yul reflect that they had a similar feeling – that moving out of their home country would free them from certain restrictions. Hamida picks up the thread.

HAMIDA: A lot of things are not present in society at the moment. I don’t see them, but I know they govern a lot of things, even by not existing. In Pakistan, everyone is modern now, educated, progressive – you don’t see a lot of tradition in that way. But it governs. So I work with desire, because desire is a place where all the things that don’t exist – but still govern you – can stay.

When I was growing up, I always heard stories about girls who broke their marriages or who weren’t virgins. I’d try to ask my aunt or my mother about it, and the immediate reaction was: that’s so in the past, people are not like this anymore, virginity tests don’t exist, only very close-minded people did that. But somehow the idea of the pure girl, the dirty girl – people are too civilised to say it, but the idea lingers. 

When I came to Sweden, I thought: I’m free. But then I noticed something. No one will ever stop me if I want to do something here, but no one really does anything that’s a little different from anyone else. It’s like everyone is ashamed to. There’s no law against being different; nothing that bad would happen if you were. But somehow there’s this invisible thing that governs how everyone dresses, how everyone acts.

IFRA: The social norms exist in Sweden, and they’re quite strict – but also very invisible. I think the reasoning is different though. In Asia, it feels like shame-based enforcement of social norms. Here, it’s more about conformity, so everyone can be the same and no one feels uncomfortable.

YUL: The wording in the West is more palatable. “We’re secular and accepting,” but banning hijabs in public schools while every single holiday comes from Christianity says something else. The wording is deemed more civilised because people see themselves as the center of the world. They decide what’s acceptable. 

HAMIDA: And things don’t have to be violent to be governing, which is actually more disturbing. If you say hijab is not allowed, that’s something you can protest. But if you say everything is allowed, you are free – and yet somehow there’s an invisible feeling that if you do it, you’ll be uncomfortable – then what do you do? I think I’m interested in those invisible things.

When I was in Pakistan, I knew how things worked. When I’m outside, I see that every society is built this way. The more invisible things are, the more difficult they become. So then, in Pakistan, I was doing more violent work. Now I’m doing it more subtly. I’m trying to manipulate in quiet ways.

IFRA: Do you feel like you have to translate your work for the Swedish audience? Or have you ever found yourself looking at your work through their eyes?

HAMIDA: Yeah, totally. When we were choosing our majors in Pakistan, everyone kept saying: miniature paintings are very exotic in the West. People pay a lot for those precious little paintings. So I thought, “Something exotic, something seductive is interesting. I want to go to the West and sell mine for good money.”  So I had this Orientalist view. Even if it’s not actually there, I’m already assuming that I and my work will be seen that way. Especially with miniature painting – it’s from books, from history, with women in beautiful lehengas and all those details. I already had it in mind as something very exotic. So I’ve used that assumption in my work – to talk about it, to be very aware of it.

And most of the time, I don’t even experience the exoticism directly. Sometimes I think that I am the one seeing my miniature painting as exotic. Maybe it’s not even exotic here, in the way I thought. But I have the same eyes that I assumed the West would have. When I did my solo show about seducer and seduced, people told me to be careful how my work would be perceived. It’s shocking, but I think I objectify it more than I actually experience it.

YUL: I often notice this binary among POC artists: you’re either objectified by the white gaze or forced into the white norm, constantly balancing the two. What you’re describing feels connected to that, but also more internal, like you’re seeing your own work through that imagined gaze, almost to make things hyper-visible.

HAMIDA: Yeah, that’s why maybe I objectify a lot – to heighten things. This is my painting. When I paint, mostly the painting is made not by painting but by erasing the paint. When I was working with gouache on thick paper, I could put water and clean it with a towel or paper, and it left marks. The painting was built with washing and painting. Now with oil or acrylic, I can’t wash the same way, but I can do another layer. So I do one thing, and then the next layer is almost to hide the one before. The painting is made through this erasing. 

I came to Sweden right after my bachelor’s, during COVID. Then I went to many shows and galleries and saw really large-scale paintings. That inspired me to do large scale – I was doing very small scale works before.

YUL: Are you still working with miniature painting?

HAMIDA: No, I have a very interesting relationship with it. I’m obsessed with those paintings. I use references from miniature paintings to do my own paintings. It doesn’t look like them, but I look at something very small and very detailed – digital miniature paintings on my phone – and then I paint something very big and very loose. There’s a relationship between the two. I can’t just paint; I need that duality.

For my [graduation] film, I was collecting miniature paintings to animate – but they aren’t mine. They’re also not any single artist’s, because traditionally, many people worked on one painting. I had to sign agreements when downloading [the images of the miniature paintings] that I wouldn’t use them commercially. That immediately made me want to use them for commercial purposes. And I also feel very angry, because I love these paintings, and I want to possess them but they are in a lot of museums all over the world, but not in Pakistan's museums. 

So when I’m working, I want to be very clever with using them as my paintings. It’s like wanting to do the entirely opposite. So I found a way: in Photoshop, when you select something, there’s a small luminous selection line. In my film, all the characters from the miniatures exist only as those selection lines. I’m using the paintings – and also not using them.
 

Hamida has her upcoming graduation show at Konstakademien, Stockholm, with the performance opening on May 21, 2026. 

HAMIDA: The performance has a mannequin as the protagonist, wearing a paper skirt printed with a structure taken from a tree in a miniature painting. When I look at that tree, I don’t see a tree – I see something very sexual. A person that will do the vocals and narration for the performance and there will be models walking in a fashion-show format, wearing white T-shirts and skirts printed with the text ‘love sucks’ on both sides.

I'm thinking a lot about love because I feel like love is the safest word to use. You cannot use religion – it’s dangerous. You can’t use a lot of other things. But love is something you can say anywhere, in Pakistan, in Sweden. No one objects. So the idea is to put love as the opening, and then slip other things through. 

IFRA: That’s very similar to what we were discussing about using terms that are more palatable here – taking concepts no one wants to talk about and turning them into something everyone loves talking about. It’s very contrasting and ironic. That’s great.