Diaphanous
16 May - 20 June 2026
Lulua Alyahya, Noorain Inam, Shivangi Kalra, Fiza Khatri, Lalitha Lajmi,
Leily Moghtader Mojdehi, Jagdeep Raina, Gurminder Sikand
Diaphanous brings together artists whose practices operate at the threshold between psychological interiority and the external, social world. The paintings, sculptures, and textiles in the exhibition are considered as permeable surfaces through which memory, lived experience, and social structures circulate and overlap. Across these works, domestic interiors, bodies, streets, and communal spaces function not as stable settings but as mutable sites shaped by personal history and collective conditions. Reality is rendered as layered and contingent: memory interrupts the present, private experience reframes public space, and social expectations register within intimate environments.
Figures appear suspended, fragmented, or partially absorbed into their surroundings, while spaces remain recognisable yet subtly transformed. In the paintings of Lulua Alyahya, sparse and psychologically charged compositions stage encounters between irony, stillness, and estrangement, while Noorain Inam’s uncanny environments collapse memory, fear, and longing into destabilised dreamlike spaces. Shivangi Kalra’s works foreground emotional and perceptual slippage, presenting bodies and interiors in states of transition, and Leily Moghtader Mojdehi’s symbolic, psychologically dense scenes allow inner states to permeate and reshape visible reality.
Disjunction, temporal slippage, and surreal moments emerge not as formal strategies, but as visual consequences of navigating inherited histories, gendered roles, and shifting social contexts. Fiza Khatri’s practice traces the entanglement of intimacy and social structure through fragmented visual languages attentive to vulnerability and resistance, while Jagdeep Raina explores historical memory and migration through textile, drawing, and moving image, foregrounding the material residue of familial and political histories. Lalitha Lajmi’s spectral figures and psychologically charged domestic scenes dissolve distinctions between dream and lived experience, and Gurminder Sikand’s paintings merge feminist, ecological, and diasporic perspectives through recurring motifs of women and trees that connect personal memory with collective histories.
These works resist fixed narratives, instead articulating subjectivity as something continually negotiated. Within this framework, the works become mediums through which ongoing transformation is registered. The diaphanous quality of these works lies in their translucence: the way inner life and external reality remain visible to one another, separated by a boundary that is thin, unstable, and deliberately unresolved.
SELECTED WORKS
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Lulua Alyahya (b. 1998) holds a BFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her paintings are sparsely composed of dislocated subjects, presenting strange yet familiar accounts of culturally resonant archetypes. The figures she depicts are often steeped in irony—candid and idle—set against nondescript backgrounds. Selected exhibitions include Nafs (solo exhibition), ATHR Gallery, Jeddah (2025); We Saw an Endless Cycle, Hayy Jameel, Jeddah (2024); Aftershock, Studio Chapple, London (2024); The 7th Wall, Alice Amati, London (2024); Sludge (solo exhibition), Quench Gallery, Margate (2022); Pygostyle, The Residence Gallery, London (2022); Roundabout, ATHR Gallery, Jeddah (2021); and Widening the Gaze, Slade Research Centre, London (2018).
Noorain Inam (b. 1998, Karachi) lives and works in London. She received her MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2022. Her practice explores the construction of identity and belonging through layered cultural references and contexts. Through deeply personal experiences, storytelling, and symbolic motifs, Inam creates uncanny and destabilising spaces that engage themes of longing and fear. These phantasmagorical worlds become meeting grounds for imagination. Inam was the recipient of the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Residency Award for Emerging Artists (2023). Recent exhibitions include On New Romanticism, Slip House, New York (2026); Multiple Times, Indigo+Madder, London (2025); We Sinful Women: The Library Project, SOAS Library, London (2025); and Go Back to Sleep, It’s Just the Wind, Indigo+Madder, London (2024).
Shivangi Kalra (b. 1998, Delhi) lives and works in Amsterdam. She received a BA in Painting from the College of Art, Delhi, in 2021, and completed an MA in Painting at the Frank Mohr Institute, Netherlands, in 2024. Kalra was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and the Holland Scholarship in 2022 and 2023. After graduating cum laude, she received the Dutch Royal Painting Prize in 2024, exhibiting her work at the Royal Palace Amsterdam. She has had solo exhibitions in Italy, Milan, India, and Amsterdam. She will present a solo exhibition at the Drents Museum, Netherlands, in 2026.
Fiza Khatri was born in Karachi (Pakistan) in 1992 and currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut (USA). In 2023, they graduated from the Yale School of Art with an MFA in Painting and Printmaking. Khatri’s works have been exhibited in Asia, North America and in the UK by galleries such as Jhaveri Contemporary, Perrotin, Grimm and Micki Meng and in the Lahore Biennale. While living in Pakistan, Khatri was engaged with curating and organising in relation to feminist and queer communities.
Leily Moghtader Mojdehi (b.1999) is an Iranian, Singaporean, British artist, based in London. She holds a BFA from Goldsmiths University of London (2021). She has exhibited at galleries and museums internationally, including Quench (Margate), South London Gallery (London), Ferens Art Gallery (Hull), and Zhan Art Space (Selangor, Malaysia). She was selected for the 2022 Bloomberg New Contemporaries, shortlisted for the Ingram Prize (2023), and has been commissioned by Tate Collective (2024).
Lalitha Lajmi (1932–2023) was born in Kolkata and later moved with her family to Mumbai. Introduced to art and cinema at an early age by her uncle, artist B.B. Benegal, Lajmi developed a lifelong engagement with painting, film, literature, and psychoanalysis. Largely self-taught, she balanced motherhood with evening classes at the Sir J.J. School of Art, where she studied printmaking, while immersing herself in feminist literature and the intellectual circles surrounding her brother, filmmaker Guru Dutt.
Working across acrylic, oil, and watercolour, Lajmi developed a deeply psychological practice that blurred the boundaries between dream and reality. Following Guru Dutt’s death in 1964, her work became increasingly spectral and emotionally charged, marked by fragmented bodies and ambiguous narratives. She held her first solo exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, in 1961, and later received several major grants, including the Indian Government Junior Grant (1979–83) and the Indian Council Travel Grant in 1997. In 2023, shortly before her death, the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, presented a major retrospective of her work.
Gurminder Sikand (1960–2021) was a Nottingham-based painter born in Punjab, India, who moved to Britain with her family at the age of ten. She studied Fine Art at Birmingham Polytechnic and, from the mid-1980s onward, became an important figure within pioneering Black and Asian British art exhibitions, as well as feminist art circles.
Sikand’s distinctive visual language brought together South Asian traditions—including Mithila, Kalighat, and Pahari painting—with influences ranging from Chagall and Picasso to medieval European art. Across painting and drawing, she returned repeatedly to themes of women, ecology, and the “tree of life,” informed in part by the feminist environmental politics of the Chipko movement. Her works entered numerous public collections during her lifetime, including the Arts Council Collection, Nottingham City Council, and Wolverhampton Museum and Art Gallery, and appeared on book covers for Heinemann and Oxford University Press.
Since her death in 2021, Sikand’s work has received renewed institutional attention through exhibitions at the Barbican Centre, Tate Britain, the British Museum, the Hepworth Wakefield, and Museum Arnhem, among others. Her works have recently entered the collections of the British Museum, Tate, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Sainsbury Centre, and the Women’s Art Collection, Cambridge.
Jagdeep Raina (b. 1991, Guelph, Ontario, Canada) has an interdisciplinary practice that spans textile, drawing, writing, ceramics, 35mm film and video animation, Jagdeep Raina utilises the archive in order to explore historical memory. His multi-media practice seeks to identify the residue left behind by the human touch, and its restorative potential.
Raina is a previous Fellow of the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, as well as a Paul Mellon Fellow at Yale University and is currently doing a second masters degree in information science/library science with a focus on archives and preservation of materials at Queens College, NY. He was a recipient of the 2020 Sobey Art Award, and a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He received his BFA from Western University in 2013, his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016. He has exhibited internationally at the Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris; Todd Madigan Art Gallery at California State University, Bakersfield; Libby Leshgold Gallery, Emily Carr University, Vancouver; Blaffer Art Museum, Houston; Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai; Museum of Contemporary Art; Textile Museum, Toronto; Soft Opening, London; (Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis; Art Gallery of Guelph, Guelph; Cooper Cole, Toronto, amongst others. His works can be found in the permanent collections of Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Yale Center for British Art, Carleton University Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Guelph, National Gallery of Canada and Speed Art Museum. Raina lives and works in Queens, New York, USA.
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Untitled, 2006
Watercolour on paper
57 x 38 cm