Saba Khan

Born in 1982 in Lahore (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

Saba Khan completed her BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore, (Distinction), and MFA from Boston University, on a Fulbright Scholarship. Synthesising painting and object-making in her art practice, her work is saturated with satirical humour, exploring class divisions and proscribed social structures through layers of endemic aesthetics, yet without sermonising or moralisation. Connotative visual motifs characterise her acerbic commentary on socio-political conditions, exemplified by her use of gaudy palettes, glitter and diamantes to comment on the upper-classes, along with the ceremonial, residential and mercantile ostentatiousness that they display. Khan has exhibited her work throughout the world, including: SAVAC, Toronto; the Khatmandu International Art Festival; the Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, Dubai; the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre; the Affordable Art Fair, New York; the India Art Fair; and the Aicon Gallery, New York, as well as two solo exhibitions at Canvas Gallery, Karachi and at Taseer Gallery, Lahore. She has participated in a wide variety of residencies, and is a published writer. Currently, she teaches at her alma-mater, the National College of Arts, and founded the Murree Museum Artists’ Residency, an artist-led initiative to support artists and writers, in 2014.

The title of Saba Khan’s sculptural installation for the Karachi Biennale 2017, [Begum-sahiba after her diet ] Sheer-Maal – Sweet Delights, inspired by the eponymous pastry-like flatbread implying a certain dietary decadence, epitomises her culturally-attuned, incisive satire. Khan appropriates and vulgarises the embellished frames of Punjabi-Baroque chairs, yet their voluptuous mass, almost bursting at the seams, becomes a burden of their own excess. The subtle acidulousness of Khan’s satire means that the bloated chairs not only symbolise elite authority and excess - the kitsch, blushing pink stuffing and the meretricious frames also reference the exhibitionistic excess and elitism of the emerging nouveau-riche, synthesising an acute commentary on the class divide.