Ghazi Sikander Mirza is a visual artist, designer, and theatre practitioner from Lahore, Pakistan, whose practice moves between drawing, painting, performance, and spatial storytelling. He joins Studio 88 as an Artist-in-Residence as part of the Reviving Nature program in January 2026.
Ghazi Sikander Mirza is a Lahore-based visual artist and theatre practitioner whose multidisciplinary practice bridges drawing, painting, performance, and spatial experimentation. With a background grounded in both South Asian artistic traditions and contemporary international discourse, Mirza’s work reflects a sustained engagement with cultural rituals, urban life, and collective memory.
He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, where he studied painting alongside printmaking, sculpture, miniature, ceramics, textile print, and South Asian design. This wide-ranging education continues to inform the layered material and conceptual nature of his work. Mirza later completed his Master of Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, where he further refined his practice through advanced painting techniques while also studying arts administration, museum management, and curatorial studies.
Alongside his studio practice, Mirza has been active as an educator, serving as a drawing lecturer at the Pakistan School of Fashion Design and at the University of Lahore, School of Creative Arts. His teaching experience has strengthened his commitment to visual literacy, observation, and disciplined mark-making—qualities that are evident throughout his artistic output.
Mirza has exhibited widely in Pakistan and internationally. Selected exhibitions include presentations at Ev Art Gallery (Tehran), Parsons Gallery (New York), Art Escape Gallery (Islamabad), Dominion Gallery (Lahore), Canvas Gallery (Karachi), Full Circle Gallery (Karachi), Ejaz Gallery (Lahore), O Art Space (Lahore), Taseer Gallery, and Alhamra Arts Council. His work has been shown in both solo and group contexts, reflecting a steadily evolving practice that responds to place, scale, and audience.
Fluent in English, Urdu, and Punjabi, with a working knowledge of Arabic, Mirza brings a culturally nuanced perspective to his artistic and collaborative engagements.
Ghazi Sikander Mirza’s artistic practice is rooted in the logic of magical realism, where the ordinary and the mythical coexist without hierarchy. Working across oil painting, ballpoint pen drawing, ink, collage, installation, and performance, he explores themes of crowds, traffic, rituals, landscapes, and mythic beings as metaphors for contemporary life.
Much of his work emerges from close observation of dense urban environments in Pakistan—cities shaped by congestion, spiritual gatherings, ceremonial processions, and ecological strain. Through meticulous drawing and immersive compositions, Mirza captures moments where human behavior mirrors natural forces, and where collective movement becomes both poetic and unsettling. Crowds dissolve into clouds, roads echo rivers, and figures hover between human, animal, and myth.
Materially, Mirza is drawn to the tension between precision and excess. His large-scale ballpoint pen drawings demand patience and endurance, while his paintings embrace fluidity, scale, and emotional resonance. Performance and theatrical thinking inform how he approaches space, movement, and the viewer’s body, often inviting audiences to experience his work physically rather than as passive observers.
At its core, his practice reflects an ongoing inquiry into how cultural memory, spirituality, and environment shape human behavior—and how myth can serve as a contemporary language for ecological and social reflection.
During his residency at Studio 88, Mirza proposes to develop a new body of work titled “Processions of the Forest.” The project shifts his practice from dense urban environments toward a slower, nature-centered inquiry. Drawing on magical realism, Mirza explores forests as living spaces where ritual, memory, and myth quietly unfold. Through observation, walking, sketching, and photography, the landscape becomes both subject and collaborator.
The project will take form through large-scale ballpoint pen drawings that layer trees, roots, fog, and water with subtle human presences. Paintings and works on paper will introduce hybrid mythic beings inspired by Thai folklore and South Asian visual traditions. A floor-based, walkable installation will invite viewers to physically move through a symbolic forest procession. Together, these works reflect on the relationship between collective behavior and ecological rhythms. Processions of the Forest seeks to reimagine the forest as an archive of shared memory and environmental imagination.
More about on his website and Instagram
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