Khushboo (b. 1994, Karachi, Pakistan) is an artist, educator, and researcher working across painting, sculpture, and installation. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London (2022–2024), supported by a fully funded Inlaks Scholarship, a BVA in Painting from MSU Baroda (India), and a BSc in Zoology from St. Xavier’s College, Ahmedabad, India.
Her works have been exhibited and privately collected in India and the UK. Khushboo currently lives and works between London and Edinburgh in the UK.
Statement of Artistic Practice:
I make art that draws from the universal experience of shifting places, finding new homes, and adjusting and absorbing into new spaces. My practice centres on knowledge production in the form of paintings, drawings, ceramics, textiles, and installations in the direction of decoloniality. While looking closely at the land and the ground beneath us, I work with the complex themes of migration, land ownership, identity, & belonging.
My relocation from Pakistan to India in 2009 increased my fascination with maps, borders, city limits, and geographical locations. I find it surprising that borders can create and divide places at the same time. Since then, I have created memorabilia through objects, photographs, and memories directed towards counter-mapping and alternative archiving. Moving to the UK fuelled it further, and I delved into marrying archival data with visual storytelling through colours, patterns, markmaking, and crafting techniques.
Material exploration and tactility of the mediums plays a significant role in the projects that I undertake. In India, I learnt to make my own paper and extract pigments from the plants and refined these practices at the specialized studios in the UK. Stitching and embroidery were passed down and taught to me as a child from the women of my family as a tradition; and these materials became a core part of my practice.
My initial artworks were inspired by the migration journey and lived experience as a Pakistani migrant in India alongside memories of home and a search for belonging. When I moved to the UK for my postgraduate studies, the archival data from colonial India here became my subject of fascination and I created art in response to the colonial systems that continue to shape my present-day life, cause human and nature displacement, and inform identity politics.
Through world building, I currently research and make art to explore interconnections between ecological urgency and how environmental concerns & cultural belonging continuously transgress geopolitical borders.