Hamra Abbas

Born in 1976 in Kuwait City (Kuwait)
Lives and works between Lahore (Pakistan) and Boston (USA)

Hamra Abbas received her BFA and MA in Visual Arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 1999 and 2002, respectively, before going on to the Universitaet der Kuenste in Berlin where she did the Meisterschueler in 2004. Her works are part of notable international public collections including the Burger Collection, Hong Kong; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels, Belgium; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas, USA; Kadist Collection, Paris, France; British Museum, London, UK; Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, India; Kiran Nader Museum of Art, New Delhi, India; Art In Embassies Collection, USA; Koç Foundation, Istanbul, Turkey and Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, Istanbul, Turkey. She is the recipient of the Jury prize at Sharjah Biennial 9, the Abraaj Capital Art Prize in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Jameel Prize in 2009.

Hamra Abbas has two works on view at KB17. In One Rug, Any Colour, she uses a selection of coloured nylon prayer rugs bought by her on Amazon. According to the artist, prayer rugs depicting the Kaaba have recently fallen out of favour, unlike in the past, when such images on prayers rugs were quite common. The artist found it nearly impossible to find one in the markets of Lahore today. The piece recalls an incident on Umrah, when a woman handed the artist one in a small bag as she was leaving the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. Her own personal Barakah gift, this work also continues the artist’s fascination with colour and of representations of the Kaaba, recalling her 2013 series ‘Kaaba Picture as a Misprint’. The other work, Bodies, was carved from sheesham and then painted by the artist. This hyperrealist sculpture creates icons out of the ordinary and is a testament to the artist’s observance of everyday life in the homes and on the streets of Lahore. Bodies is a group of intricately carved wooden footwear taken from photos Abbas had taken outside the entrances to holy sites and family homes – a marker of segregation between inside and outside, clean and dirty, sacred and the profane. Each of these sculptures has been timelessly rendered, giving the original mundane objects a weight and presence that goes far beyond the accidental.