Al-Qawi Nanavati

Al-Qawi Nanavati’s art practice is an amalgamation of printmaking, paper making, painting and textiles. She is heavily influenced by meditation, prayer, and repetition along with the aftermath of loss and its manifestation in one’s own life. She has been writing letters to her late mother, Mumtaz, as a way to feel close and continue conversations with her. Mobilising murmurs, materials, and memories, Nanavati has created a body of work that she affectionately calls Letters to My Mother. The process of crafting these letters resulted in secret scripts and repurposing pieces of her mother’s clothing, photographs, found objects that remind her of her mother etc. Here you see Nanavati’s mother’s clothes and threads woven within each other. The diversity of Nanavati’s artistic processes are built to prolong the intimacy she shared with her mother whilst healing from the grief of her absence.

Al-Qawi has completed her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2017) and a Postgraduate Certification in Indian Aesthetics from Jnanapravaha, Mumbai (2022).  Additionally, she is the Co-founder of Young Art Support, an online platform that promotes, exhibits, and sells work of young artists commission free. She recently received the Iowa Arts Fellowship and full scholarship to pursue an MA and MFA in Printmaking at the University of Iowa. Her works have been exhibited at ‘Letter to my Mother’, A Solo Exhibition on Terrain.Art. (Online) (2021); ‘When is Empathy Too Much?’, LATITUDE 28, New Delhi (2020); the Sakshi Art Gallery, Mumbai, India (2019 and 2020); the Arc Gallery, Chicago, USA (2018); the Union Arts Club, Chicago(2017),  the Jubilee Arts Festival, Lisbon, Portugal (2018); the Peggy Notebaert Museum, Chicago (2016) among others.  Additionally, she has taught at the Metropolitan Schoolhouse Chicago, the Project Art teaching Artist Residency, Chicago, and has been a resident at the Space118 Studios in Mumbai.