Inside the Studio: Qinza Najm
- Art Dealer Street
- Sep 9
- 5 min read
To encounter Qinza Najm’s work is to step into a charged space where the body becomes archive, protest, and prayer all at once. Born in Lahore and now based in New York, Najm moves fluently across painting, sculpture, and performance, building immersive environments that hold contradiction—softness and steel, intimacy and rupture, visibility and erasure. Her interdisciplinary practice is anchored by a psychological sensitivity (she trained as a psychologist) and a steadfast commitment to empathy: not as sentiment, but as method. Whether she’s stitching memory into fabric, scaling reflective steel into sculptural thresholds, or inhabiting a dress made of bullets, Najm constructs atmospheres that invite viewers to slow down, witness, and consider how power moves through bodies—especially women’s bodies—in public and private space. What follows is a conversation about migration, symbolism, tenderness, and the long work of making art that endures.
Read on to learn more in an exclusive interview with Qinza Najm :
1. Your work often portrays bodies stretched, fragmented, or deconstructed as a way to challenge cultural stereotypes and political power. What compels you to return to the body as your central motif?
The body, to me, is both archive and battlefield. It carries memory, trauma, migration, gendered expectations—and yet it resists being fully owned. By distorting or stretching it, I reclaim it from fixed readings. The body becomes a site of tension between visibility and erasure, structure and collapse. I return to it not to depict it, but to interrogate how it's controlled, performed, and ultimately transcended.
2. Growing up in Lahore and now living in New York, you navigate multiple cultural identities. How has this experience of migration shaped your perspective as an artist and influenced the narratives you create?
Migration creates a dual gaze—you’re always both inside and outside, familiar and foreign. That liminal awareness runs through all my work. In Lahore, space was deeply gendered; in New York, identity is hyper-visible yet flattened. I respond by creating visual languages that hold contradiction: softness within structure, fragmentation that still asserts presence. My work often asks: what is home when the body is the only place you carry?
3. You have described your practice as a tool for fostering empathy and understanding across cultures. Can you share an example of a project or installation where you felt this connection was most strongly achieved?
Pakora Portraits: Bites of Belonging, part of my Home and Belonging series and presented during the AIM Biennial closing at the Bronx Museum, created one of the most tender and resonant moments in my work
"Pakora Portraits: Food For Thought With Artist Qinza Najm"
Surrounded by my reflective stainless-steel sculptures, visitors were invited to share pakoras—spiced fritters rich with cultural memory. These simple, sensory acts became powerful gateways to conversation. Strangers from different walks of life—divided by skin tone, origin, or language—found themselves pausing to listen, to reflect, to share.
It was a reminder that empathy doesn’t demand shared history—it simply requires the courage to slow down and witness each other’s stories.
4. Many of your performances and installations directly address the experiences of women living under systemic violence or prejudice. How do you approach translating such complex and painful realities into visual form without reinforcing stereotypes?
I start by listening. In #NoHonorInKilling, I wore a dress made of bullets—each one tied to a real story. The act of wearing that pain wasn’t spectacle; it was surrender. I’m careful to avoid voyeurism or simplified narratives. Instead, I create spaces—whether through performance, fabric, or form—that hold the emotional residue of these experiences and invite viewers into reflection, not consumption.
5. In your interdisciplinary work, you blend painting, sculpture, and performance. What does this blending allow you to express that a single medium cannot?
Different materials carry different truths. A painting may hold psychological depth, while a sculpture can confront physical space, and performance channels urgency. When I braid them together, I’m not just layering media—I’m layering experience. This approach allows me to speak to both the internal and external, the seen and unseen. It keeps the work open-ended, porous—like identity itself.
6. As someone originally trained as a psychologist, how does your background inform the way you think about audience engagement and the emotional impact of your work?
Psychology taught me how people carry emotion in silence, gesture, and absence. That has deeply influenced how I build my work. I’m not interested in telling viewers what to feel—I want to construct atmospheres where they can confront what they’ve suppressed or overlooked. Whether it's through the distortion of a figure or a whisper of fabric, I invite a kind of emotional excavation.
7. In projects like Veil of Bullets, you incorporate powerful symbols tied to gendered violence. How do you balance the personal and the universal in pieces that draw from such intimate sources?
I use the personal as a point of entry—but never the end. The bullets in Veil of Bullets came from my own story, but they stood for so many others. I embed symbols that carry cultural weight—textiles, objects, gestures—but I strip them of literalism. This creates room for others to find their own stories within the work. The universal isn’t abstract—it’s the emotional common ground we uncover through specificity.
8. For artists who wish to use their practice to challenge social injustice and create dialogue, what advice would you offer about sustaining that commitment over time?
Sustainability requires evolving the form, not the intention. Burnout comes when you feel pressure to constantly react. I’ve learned to trust the slow burn—to work from a place of integrity rather than urgency. Stay close to the questions that haunt you, and build a community that holds you accountable. The art world moves fast, but change is slow. Make work that endures.
Qinza Najm’s work refuses easy answers. It asks us to feel before we name, to notice how power marks bodies and how bodies resist those marks. Across media and across continents, she builds spaces that are rigorous and tender, where a viewer’s presence is part of the piece. In a cultural climate that rewards speed, Najm insists on the durational—on the slow burn of attentiveness, the deep time of empathy, the long arc of change. Her practice reminds us that the most radical gestures can be quiet ones: an invitation to listen, to witness, to stay.
You can learn more about Qinza Najm and her work via these links:
Website: @Qinza Najm Instagram: @qinza1 Artsy: @Qinza Najm
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