Saadia Batool (b.1998, Quetta, Pakistan) is a visual artist based in Lahore. Her practice engages with the social and political histories of the Hazara community through storytelling, archiving and tracing memory. Her work critically examines the ways in which informal archives within communities are preserved, neglected or lost in formal archival systems. She positions these narratives as palimpsests of time and collective memory, layered with meaning, erasure, and reinterpretation.
Batool’s process is rooted in community engagement and research. She collects and recontextualizes archival fragments, gathers oral histories, and traces familial lineages. Working across painting, drawing, printmaking, collage, and textile, she constructs multi-layered compositions that integrate image, text, and material memory. Her practice is informed by her family’s experience of displacement and the broader historical marginalization and displacement of the Hazara people, exploring acts of remembering within a community, and how the personal is always in dialogue with the political.
CV
EDUCATION
2019-2022 Bachelor of Fine Art (with Distinction), National College of Arts, Lahore
EXHIBITIONS
2025 Historical Children, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin
2024 Mapping Roots (open studio), Gasworks, London
2024 Woven Out Of Thick Strands (solo exhibition), Khamsa Gallery (virtual)
2024 2024 Inception Grant Show (group show), Triveni Kala Sangam, New Delhi
2023 The Story Underneath (group show), 8B2 Gallery, Islamabad
2023 In the Realm of Madness (group show), Gallery Full Circle, Karachi
2023 Fine China (group show), Artescape Gallery, Islamabad
2023 Asli Contemporary (group show), Numaish Gah, Lahore
2023 Broadcast Volume I (group show), O Art Space, Lahore
2022 Sir E Koh-e-Nashina (degree show), Zahoor Ul Akhlaq Gallery, Lahore
RESIDENCIES & AWARDS
2024 Residency at Gasworks, London
2024 Artist’s Changemaker Program Award by Global Fund for Women
2024 Inception Grant Awardee, Art Incept Gallery, Gurugaram India
2019 Merit Scholarship, National College of Arts, Lahore
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