Where the River Bends, I Begin Again

A river moves in gentle bends, yielding to the contours of the land, and in doing so reshaping both itself and the landscape it travels through. It carries with it traces of every place it has touched, even as it discovers a new course.

This enduring spirit finds resonance in Feroza Hakeem's paintings, where the river is more than a recurring presence, cultivating resilience and renewal. . 

Born into a Hazara family shaped by generations of displacement and persecution, Hakeem's practice emerges from deeply personal histories of violence. Her motherland, Quetta, often exists beyond its borders as a geography of headlines, a frontier city marked by sectarian violence, displacement, military presence, and the long precarity of its Hazara community. These realities remain urgent, yet they also risk becoming totalising, reducing both a place and its people to the circumstances of their suffering.

While her practice does not deny violence, it does, however, refuse to grant it visual sovereignty. Her paintings unfold through winding rivers, flowering orchards, towering mountains, and skies washed in light. Out of fraught terrain emerge vivid blossoms and flowing streams, where the landscape itself becomes an emotional topography of her experience as a Hazara woman. Drawing upon Persian visual traditions, Hakeem repeatedly returns to the apricot and the cedar, wherein the apricot is associated with femininity and renewal, while the cedar is associated with steadfastness and strength. In her hands, these inherited symbols become acts of reclamation, imagining abundance where history has sought erasure.

Hakeem’s landscapes are not only witnesses to loss; they are rehearsals for another way of inhabiting Quetta and another way of seeing Hazara life. It poses the proposition of whether beauty itself can become a political gesture, an act of repair, rather than escape?

Where the River Bends, I Begin Again invites us to embody resilience as a continual reshaping of one's course, gathering, returning, and finding new channels to flow through.