In winter 2025, Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA will present the first major solo exhibition in Melbourne of artist Nusra Latif Qureshi. Following threads of art history and politics of representation, the survey assembles works from across her thirty-year career including painting, collage, photography and installation, as well as a new body of work made in response to the Monash University Special Collections.

Qureshi is largely known in Melbourne for exquisite painted works that extend South Asian painting traditions in a contemporary context. This exhibition locates these works alongside larger installations incorporating found objects and imagery, often shown overseas in institutions but exhibited here provide a new and more in depth understanding of Qureshi’s central areas of focus. Her work speaks to the persistence of collective trauma, dislocation and loss, the seduction involved with power and the capacity of beauty to disguise violence – topics that are ever more relevant for us today.

Building on Qureshi’s recent commission presented at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Qureshi has worked with Monash University Special Collections to create a new commission addressing practices of collection, mapping, geographies and the provenance of objects. The exhibition has been developed around several key themes: retracing art histories from several perspectives that position our gaze from multiple viewpoints; the role of women in a largely patriarchal society and the universality of this theme; and issues of borders, barriers and migration. Qureshi layers historical and contemporary references, using vibrant colour, delicate line drawing and a series of poetic motifs that speak to notions of power and knowledge, memory and desire.

Qureshi trained at the National College of Arts in Lahore in the 1990s, learning the miniature painting techniques that had been brought to the Mughal courts from Persia in the 16th century and the resulting intermixing with local traditions. Bringing into this format fragments of her own personal experience and contemporary political events, ranging from reflections on family and the role of women to the ongoing impacts of colonisation, she consistently challenges the typical content of the painting tradition. Reimagining customary compositions and themes, Qureshi appropriates the form to reconsider the architecture of space, history and absence, and the potential for freedom of movement across time and geography.

Through a meticulous process that blends painting, photography and installation, Nusra Latif Qureshi traces erased and forgotten histories to reveal the inadequacies of representation. Grounded in figuration, the artist uses imagery from the past, meaning from the present and methods from both to blur fixed identities and collapse the distance between traditionalism and contemporaneity. Small, sparing surfaces feature finely outlined silhouettes of female figures that surmise her composed tableaus. Qureshi’s depiction of the mutable human form allows her to present her own subjectivity in flux, while also explore and subvert patriarchal notions of the ideal and divine.