Rida E Zainab

About

Rida E Zainab is a visual artist from Lahore, Pakistan, whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, and object-making. Drawing from the fragmented logic of dreams and the haunting quality of nightmares, her work confronts life’s absurdities through uncanny imagery and dark humour. She distorts the human figure, merging the familiar with the grotesque to evoke a sense of the surreal and inexplicable. Recurring themes include the fragility of existence and the inevitable decay of organic matter, often set against a critique of humanity’s flawed relationship with the environment. Through abject forms, satire, and material experimentation, she probes the meaning of what it means for something to be human, alive, or natural while questioning the impulse to dominate or modify the natural world.

In recent explorations, Rida has begun to weave political and socio‑cultural narratives into her practice, drawing on the lived and inherited histories of marginalized identities. Her work increasingly reflects on persecution, displacement, and the weight of inherited trauma, particularly within the context of her own background and broader regional tensions. By embedding these realities into her material and visual language, she transforms intimate, dream‑like imagery into a space where personal and collective histories converge, raising questions of power, vulnerability, and resilience.