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Ariba Akhlaque is a Karachi-based multidisciplinary artist whose work spans photography, printmaking, jewellery and metalwork. Drawing from personal history and family archives, she explores grief, nostalgia, home, and the emotional significance of objects.
“I think I was always inclined towards the arts, as it was a portal for me to escape and express myself,” says Karachi-based multidisciplinary artist Ariba Akhlaque. When she decided to pursue a BFA, initially it was more about exploring her own artistic voice. She wanted to experiment with every medium before choosing one particular field and specialising in it. Art school gave her the opportunity to do just that.
In the beginning, she was especially drawn towards printmaking and photography. “I loved the physicality of the process: of carving, inking, pressing and layering and the way an image could retain traces of the process that created it,” she recalls. But after the death of her father in 2021, she became less interested in materials simply as techniques and more interested in ‘what they could hold.’
Initially, Ariba would sit and look at his belongings for hours and cry, reliving the memories. Eventually, started scanning the photographs and saving them as digital files. Cyanotype and scanography became particularly meaningful to her in the way they allowed an object to preserve a person or a moment even when they no longer exist. It also became a way for her to navigate her grief.
Over time, however, they did make their way into her art. In 2024, Ariba was one of eight artists part of Creation in Translation [Case Study 01], curated by Ghazala Raees. The exhibition looked at how memories are remembered, retold and turned into history through an exchange between the artists. Each artist was asked to write a short text about a memory of sentimental value, which was then anonymously given to another artist as a prompt for a new artwork.
When Ariba was given Zahra’s text, her prose evoked the feeling that memories are tied to particular objects and spaces, something she had already experienced by revisiting her father’s belongings. The artist recreates this visually by juxtaposing photo albums of her family and archival prints with dried flowers and objects of domestic decoration.
In recent years, jewellery and metalwork are other mediums that she has felt called upon to explore. A goldsmith and jewellery designer himself, Ariba’s father was the owner of New Almas Jewellers, who intuitively taught her the craft from a very young age, even though it took her years to realize how deeply it had shaped her. For a very long time, jewellery was something Ariba associated with her father and her family. “I approached it very hesitantly at first, as I struggled with the idea of simply replicating my father’s work,” she admits. “Over time, I realized that the emotional significance rooted within his work could act as the ideal muse for my jewellery designs.”
Being able to physically carry memories with her is what draws her to the craft now, which also makes it a really sentimental experience for the artist. The emotional bond she shared with her father and her home now shows up in her designs as architectural grills from their old house; flowers such as motia and gulab and other domestic visual motifs from her childhood home. “I think working with jewellery helps me connect to those memories in a different manner, while also allowing me to reinterpret them by bringing in my own experiences,” she shares.
Nostalgia is its own heritage in the South Asian community, especially for the younger generations who can never quite free themselves from a yearning for love; a love that, for most, was rationed over how well we did at school and that only came through practical albeit cold, acts of service when perhaps a more physical display of affection was due. I write this from my maternal home where I’m visiting my mother who hugged me when she saw me – something I found endearing but unusual, given I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve done that in my 30 years on this planet. And yet we learn to love and remember them the best we can by the memories and souvenirs they leave behind. It means a lot more, I think, to our collectivistic cultures than to those in the West.
Ariba too admits that working with old photographs, objects and personal archives has always felt very different to her than working with found imagery — especially the fact that it belonged to a real person who lived and breathed — she finds it incredibly special. Which is why her father’s belongings have taken on a new meaning for her: “they suddenly felt like pieces of him that I wanted to keep,” she notes.
And now she gets to, having worked with original jewellery designs that he made. Going through his photographs and his designs that hold his legacy evokes a longing in her — “the longing to have him here with me, to see him, to talk to him. I think that is what I feel most when looking at them, the sense of absence,” she shares. “It is more than just a feeling of memory; it is the feeling of missing him. It is also the feeling of presence, if that makes sense, as much as it is loss.”
Follow Ariba here.
