There is something strangely nostalgic about Reya Ahmed's illustrations — in the way they gesture towards collective memory, ritual, and cultural inheritance. Born in Kolkata and currently based in London, UK, Ahmed is part of a growing wave of South Asian diasporic artists radically reinterpreting the region's visual culture and reshaping what it means to work with tradition in a post-colonial, globalised art world. Her practice pushes against static ideas of heritage and tradition, treating South Asian aesthetics not as fixed references but as living frameworks through which gender, identity, and memory are constantly negotiated.
As a queer, Bengali, Muslim artist living and working in the UK, Ahmed's work — much like her identity — refuses to sit neatly within dominant narratives about migration, ethnic and national identity, and intangible cultural heritage. Ahmed draws heavily from Mughal miniatures, Kalighat paintings, as well as Bengali and Indo-Islamic design motifs, but her practice goes far beyond being a perfunctory homage to these traditions. Stylised figures, ornamental motifs, illuminated borders, hand-rendered typography, and found objects converge in her compositions that dissect, stretch, and reassemble these traditions into a new visual language that reflects the fluid nature of identity today.
"My illustration practice explores the intersections of Islamic aesthetics and Bengali cultural heritage, using storytelling as a vehicle to navigate the politics of identity."Reya Ahmed
Ahmed's approach places her practice in conversation with a growing cohort of South Asian diasporic artists dismantling the Western gaze through the revival and recontextualisation of South Asian visual traditions. Her work shares kinship with artists like Shehzil Malik, Osheen Siva, and Sid Pattni who use historical aesthetics not as nostalgia bait, but as critical material.
Much like her cohorts, Ahmed is not interested in representation for its own sake — but in the ways contemporary visual culture can engage the contradiction, memory, and multiplicity of othered communities across identitarian cross-sections of caste, gender, religion, nationality, and ethnicity through traditional visual idioms. Grounded in the recurring motifs and textures of South Asian life, her personal work reveals how ordinary, everyday spaces can become sites of resistance.
This intersectional ethos is most evident in her recent bodies of work like 'The Margins of Memory', which utilised the form of the miniature painting as a narrative device. Using the decorative margins found in South Asian and Islamic manuscripts, Ahmed populated them with diary-entries, supermarket receipts, fish markets scenes, cans, jars, and other ephemera to trace the layering of her lived experiences and the passage of time through its margins.
A graduate of Central Saint Martins, Ahmed moves fluidly between institutions and independent circuits. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and Kerala Museum in Kochi, and she has also collaborated with platforms like Google Arts & Culture and Penguin Random House in recent years. Across these projects, both personal and commercial, one sees a refusal to cater to exoticising narratives. Instead, in her practice, Ahmed positions South Asian aesthetics as self-sufficient and elastic — capable of absorbing modern anxieties, queerness, and the messy contingencies of contemporary life.
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