Azraa Motala is a North-West based artist and graduate of the MA Fine Art program at the Chelsea College of Arts. In 2017, she graduated from the University of Central Lancashire with a first class BA honours degree in Fine Art. Azraa was recently a finalist for the UK Young Artist of the Year Award in partnership with Saatchi Gallery and has exhibited work nationally in solo and group exhibitions.
She creates conceptual representational work which relates to herself as a young British-Asian Muslim woman within the contemporary Western space. Seeking to untangle culturally inherited expectations, and the overlapping aspects of her identity; providing an intimate narrative on the many cultural blankets making up the social stratum. Utilising both photography and painting to self represent in a society where the bodies of South Asian and Muslim women are often considered pawns in political discourse. Essentially empowering and uplifting women of colour through work which touches upon the mutual struggles of many second and third generation immigrants.
Azraa is inherently interested in the way in which women from the diaspora have been represented in both the past and the present day. Parts of the diasporic image not only centres around remembered or imagined pasts and places but also projected futures. Through large scale oil paintings, she seeks to re-appropriate the image of the Eastern woman as it was depicted in orientalist paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries; essentially adopting the same medium to portray opposing imagery. Working through a dominant autobiographical stance which reviews on the establishment of classed, gendered, sexualised and ‘raced’ individualities, including a plethora of personal recollections and modes of representation.
She creates conceptual representational work which relates to herself as a young British-Asian Muslim woman within the contemporary Western space. Seeking to untangle culturally inherited expectations, and the overlapping aspects of her identity; providing an intimate narrative on the many cultural blankets making up the social stratum. Utilising both photography and painting to self represent in a society where the bodies of South Asian and Muslim women are often considered pawns in political discourse. Essentially empowering and uplifting women of colour through work which touches upon the mutual struggles of many second and third generation immigrants.
Azraa is inherently interested in the way in which women from the diaspora have been represented in both the past and the present day. Parts of the diasporic image not only centres around remembered or imagined pasts and places but also projected futures. Through large scale oil paintings, she seeks to re-appropriate the image of the Eastern woman as it was depicted in orientalist paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries; essentially adopting the same medium to portray opposing imagery. Working through a dominant autobiographical stance which reviews on the establishment of classed, gendered, sexualised and ‘raced’ individualities, including a plethora of personal recollections and modes of representation.