Bio
Madyha J. Leghari (b. 1991) is a visual artist, writer, and educator working between Lahore and Washington DC. She earned a BFA at the National College of Arts, Lahore (2013) and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2018) through a Fulbright Scholarship. Her practice often revolves around the possibilities and limitations of language and is often positioned in the indeterminate spaces of translation, cultural friction, and semantic lacunae.
Madyha has been the recipient of the Wherewithal Research Grant; Hamiltonian Artists Fellowship; Mansion Artist Residency; Delta Research Placement at the Flat Time House; Vasl Fiction Writing Mentorship; Siena Art Institute Artist Residency and the Murree Museum residency.
Madyha has exhibited globally at prestigious venues including the Pera Museum, Karachi Biennale, University of Colorado Boulder, Bennington College, Sea Foundation, The Institute for Experimental Arts, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Images Festival, and others spanning the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Her work has found mention in the Washington Post, Artforum, and The News Pakistan, amongst others.
Madyha has written on art for a number of publications including ArtNow Pakistan and the Dawn Newspaper. Additionally, she has taught at institutions including the National College of Arts, Lahore, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, and the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.
Artist Statement
As a multilingual person, I am moved not just by the possibilities of language but also its failures. These include its inherent incompleteness; its inability to accurately map the world; its (mis)translations; its easy assimilation into communicative capitalism. Thus, my work is often positioned in the intermediate spaces of translation, cultural frictions, and linguistic lacunae.
In some works, I examine the physical manifestations of language as book, paper, library, and archive to emphasize its sensuous promise as much as its rational abilities. I focus on literalism, attempting the most direct possible realizations of language to both demonstrate its tenuous relationship with this world and to open up a different one. In other works, I examine the relationship of the voice with the body, unpacking assumptions behind the authority, neutrality, and visibility of the narrator. I also remain interested in chance operations wherein language is severed from intention. Lastly, I consider language from a perspective other than human. What would text and speech look like if not molded through a human tongue, mind and hand? What might it say? This interest stems from a sense of eco-anxiety around a seemingly impenetrable barrier even as the definition and experience of being ‘human’ is constantly modified by matter, machine, network, environment and politics. I wish to unravel this binary understanding of ‘Human’ vs ‘Other’ and posit that we are not apart from the world we inhabit.
I use multiple forms such as video, photography, sound, installation, printmaking, and painting, but language consistently remains important across all of them.