Biography
BIO
Kishwar Kiani GBA (b. Pakistan) is a visual artist and educator. She is a recipient of the Gilbert Bayes Sculpture Award and a Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors, London. A Chevening Scholar, she completed her MA in Drawing at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London.
Her work has been exhibited internationally across London, New Delhi, Mumbai, Colombo and Lahore, including at the South London Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, the NCA Triennale at the National College of Arts and KALA South Asia.
STATEMENT
I read scaffolds the way others read faces.
My practice is built around one obsession, structure under pressure. What holds. What bends. What looks stable from the outside and is already giving way within. I work across drawing and welding, between the architectural and the organic, because the same tension lives in both. Both are defined entirely by the forces acting on them. What contains something shapes it just as much as what builds it.
I grew up as a Muslim in Pakistan where everything felt load-bearing, and I have spent most of my life being precisely that, present, invisible, holding things up for people who never once look at what is beneath them. The scaffold was not a subject I chose. It chose me. Outdated structures do not collapse on their own. Someone is always holding them up.
Drawing is where I think. Sculpture is where it lands. What looks chaotic from a distance is a constant dialogue with the material, and with myself.
I want the viewer to feel like a bystander. Present for the collapse, unable to stop it, not sure they would even if they could. That uncertainty is not innocent.