Yeh Kab Ki Baat Hai?

This body of work, a solo exhibition by Irum Rahat, approaches memory not as something fixed or retrievable, but as something continuously made and remade. Rather than offering stable recollections, the paintings return, again and again- to the same interiors, figures, and gestures, each time subtly altered. These shifts register memory as an accumulative and non-linear process, shaped through repetition rather than preserved as a singular, intact image.

Not a longing for a distant past, nostalgia, for Irum, exists as a condition in which multiple temporalities coexist. Past and present do not unfold sequentially; they inhabit the same frame, allowing moments to surface as layered, simultaneous, and unstable. Within these spaces, identity emerges as something composed and performed—at once self-aware and self-effacing. The figures move through these interiors with a sense of presence that is equally marked by disappearance, as if caught between remembering and forgetting.

While the works are informed by cinematic modes of seeing—particularly in their attention to framing, staging, and the relationship between figure and space—they do not reference specific films. Instead, they borrow from cinema’s structural logic to explore how images are constructed, perceived, and recalled. The paintings unfold like fragments of an unanchored narrative, where meaning is continually deferred and reassembled.

A rhythm is established between nocturnal scenes and quieter daytime interiors, creating a movement between introspection and continuity. The recurrence of spaces and figures produces a sense of familiarity that is never fully resolved, but instead reconfigured with each encounter.

“Home” for Irum is not a fixed site, it’s a shifting construct—formed through acts of return, shaped by longing, repetition, and imagination. Memory here is not simply revisited; it is re-authored, held both in its immediacy and in its transformation over time. Each painting exists both as an autonomous work and as part of a larger constellation.

Meaning does not settle within a single image, but accumulates across the series, inviting the viewer into a process of looking that mirrors the instability and persistence of memory itself.