Artist Sanié Bokhari’s Wild Motherhood

Pakistani-born, Brooklyn-based artist Sanié Bokhari has long grappled with the notion of a life lived in between. Through her paintings, she has consistently translated dichotomies into suspended, liminal works shaped by her experience of being born in Pakistan and then coming of age and becoming a woman in the radically different environment of the United States.

Her diasporic grief and longing is a source of both tension and inspiration in Bokhari’s practice. Her creativity feeds on a desire born from lack and never fully fulfilled: not a simple nostalgia for a place that can be reclaimed, but a desire that orbits an absence, sustained by memory, fantasy and projection rather than resolution. Artistic practice becomes a way to re-inscribe herself within that fracture on her own terms, producing meaning where continuity has been broken.

That paradox became even more urgent when Bokhari became a mother last year, giving birth in a place and culture far from her homeland—a geography from which her daughter will remain irreversibly estranged. These reflections shape the new body of work she now presents at Rajiv Menon Contemporary in Los Angeles, marking a significant evolution not only in her visual language but also in the artistic and personal consciousness it embodies.

Bokhari’s earlier solo show in New York was conceived while she was pregnant, during a period marked by waiting, expectation and profound introspection, as she observed her body and her sense of self shifting. Her first solo exhibition on the West Coast, by contrast, arrives in the first year of her child’s life—after a stretch in which deep personal change had time to settle and permeate the work. “It feels like such a big shift. With the last body of work, I was still in that space, but I think I reached a point where my priorities shifted so much that I just let go,” Bokhari tells Observer. “Once you’ve lived in two different places, that sense of being split never really goes away. You’re always in this constant in-between space. There was something within me that truly felt the displacement and mourning and I think that feeling started to fade once I fully committed to the work. Somehow, becoming a mom gave me that courage. You become much more aware of everything within and outside yourself.”

Her paintings have long been inhabited by feminine, ghostly and diaphanous presences, often suspended in liquid, porous spaces—hovering between time and place, between memory and hallucination. These apparitions evoke a distant world that remains deeply embedded in her imaginary and cultural language.

Working primarily on canvas and paper, Bokhari has gradually developed her own interpretation of ancient miniature painting. Drawing from South Asian and Pakistani mythological and religious narratives, her sinuous graphic line and dense symbolic language remain deeply rooted in those traditions—even as they are reimagined through a distinctly contemporary lens. Her palette, once limited to graphite grays and deep blues, began to feature deeper reds only recently. In this new body of work, however, the vibrant intensity of reds and oranges takes over, infusing the paintings with an entirely new energy.

As they were installing the show, her gallerist, Rajiv Menon, told her he had quite literally watched her discover color before his eyes. That comment stayed with her. “Moving from large graphite drawings into this warm, almost fevered palette of oranges and rusts has felt like a real transformation, and it’s especially meaningful that it’s happening now, during the first year of motherhood and in my daughter’s first year of life,” Bokhari shares. “There’s something about that period that is so heightened, raw and sensorial and color became the only way to hold all of that intensity.”

A key element guiding this shift was the rug—a symbolic presence central to both miniature painting and daily life. It appeared prominently in her solo exhibition at Swivel. “There was a piece with the tiger and the rug. The woman was transforming into a tiger, and the tiger was transforming into a woman. It was cyclical. In my head, it felt like the cycle of life—who comes first,” she recalls. “I spent a lot of time with that piece, and through it I started finding something I wanted to hold onto. That was the moment I thought, this is where I want to go with the next chapter.”

From there, Bokhari began researching the tiger figure and its symbolic weight in South Asian miniature painting. “There’s so much there. It opened up an entire world,” she says. While the tiger is generally a positive symbol, it is often ornamental and stylized. “You see it in rugs, as part of the background; it’s never really foregrounded. Even in battle scenes, tigers remain largely decorative, despite their immense symbolic power within South Asian culture and history.”

Bokhari sought to challenge this hierarchy, sensing that something fundamental about feminine energy had long been repressed. “There’s so much power in that image, and I wanted to bring it to the forefront. The palette, the scale—I wanted to really run with it and make it my own,” she explains. “I’m using references from miniature painting, but you would never see pastel, charcoal or large-scale formats in traditional miniatures. That’s my version of it.”

The process demanded extensive experimentation; she had to find the confidence and courage to assert her own way of seeing and to rework her cultural inheritance. It unfolded alongside a deeper reckoning with who she was at that moment in her life, in relation to her first child, her family’s past and the world around her.

Nostalgia and longing have always shaped Bokhari’s work, but so too have redemption and regeneration. Her paintings have long expressed the concerns of a young woman navigating secular traditions, familial and social expectations and a persistent yearning for spiritual anchorage within the alienation of contemporary urban life. In this new body of work, she claims a space for creative reimagination—reactivating a symbolic and mythological universe to keep it alive in a globalized present.

Motherhood pushed these questions further. For Bokhari, the challenge became how to raise a child who will not grow up in Pakistan. “My daughter is going to be so removed from the language, the history, the culture I came from. That was the first thing that hit me,” she says. “What is that going to be like? How will she be disconnected from it, or still attached to it?” It is a radical displacement. “I was displaced, but she’s going to be removed from that displacement itself,” she reflects. “I felt this responsibility—to teach her everything, to keep culture alive. To keep a child alive, literally. I didn’t know how to do that. The first two months were so hard. That’s why I went back to work so early. I felt like I had to—otherwise I wouldn’t survive.”

At that point, painting became a hybrid space—one in which different cultures and temporalities could coexist. “The only way I’ve been able to hold on to that place is through history and through creating my own universe,” she says. By building a symbolic lexicon, she found a way to give form to something that inevitably becomes hybrid. If earlier works leaned more strictly toward the miniature tradition, these paintings are openly Pakistani-American.

When she returned to the studio, the first thing she painted was a rug—without knowing exactly why or how. “I was pulling from what I used to do, but it didn’t feel possible anymore. It was like picking up where you left yourself, only to realize that person no longer exists. I couldn’t just continue. I had to start again as someone else.”

Titled “How to Hold a Wild Thing,” the exhibition frames motherhood as unfamiliar terrain defined by risk, wonder and adaptation. The works unfold alongside Bokhari’s process of learning a new being, her daughter Aaria, as well as a newly transformed self. Encountering her child, deciphering that early human life as it begins to engage the world, felt like meeting an entirely different species: unpredictable, frenetic and driven by untamable curiosity. That primal creative energy—the first encounter with the world—became the emotional ground from which the works emerged.

Yet many of the paintings also confront the profound isolation of the postpartum experience and the sensation of irreversible change. “There’s something about giving birth… I really wanted that sense of the circle to be present,” Bokhari says. In one small painting, she depicts herself holding her own face. “At the end of the day, it’s a deeply isolating experience. You’re kind of alone in it, even though it’s the most universal thing imaginable,” she reflects, recalling how difficult it felt even to ask her own mother for guidance. That tension between universality and isolation runs throughout the exhibition.

Bokhari spent months returning to that first painting. “The number of times I went back into that work was insane. I don’t think I’ve ever changed a piece that much,” she says. “When you return to the studio after something so transformative, you’re left asking: what just happened? How do I even articulate this? You’re a different person.”

This body of work became a site of reconciliation and a way of understanding both her daughter and herself. That is why the doubling and multiplying figures that have long populated Bokhari’s paintings remain present. These shadowy presences function both as projections of the self and as manifestations of the multiple identities that coexist within a single individual, resisting any fixed or singular process of individuation.

“There was this constant experience of seeing myself in her while also feeling detached from my former self,” Bokhari says. When she returned to Pakistan a few months postpartum, the experience proved emotionally complex yet generative. “I made a lot of work there,” she adds, referencing the painful realization that she belonged but not entirely. “When you go back to your own country, you feel you belong—but also that you don’t anymore. You’re stuck in that in-between. Before, it still felt like returning to my childhood home. At some point, that sensation breaks.”

The tiger’s striped skin becomes a filter through which to read the primordial wilderness of these existential moments. In those sinuous patterns reside the emotional intensity of a phase in which everything feels raw and new—for parent and child alike. The stripes seem to vibrate with the rhythm of life itself, marking time, transformation and necessary change.

In a few rare works featuring a male figure, Bokhari also reflects on how a partner becomes a stranger again while learning to inhabit fatherhood. Through multiplication, she maps the many possible ways of being present within this new existential dimension.

Circularity remains central, suggesting the ongoing possibility of return and transformation. In Origin Dream, an orange floor-based textile work inspired by both a Persian rug and her daughter’s play mat, Bokhari recreates the possibility of a playful first encounter with the world—that initial push toward discovery that activates the imaginative force often lost with adulthood. “You lose that sense of play over time,” she says. “It’s like when you go somewhere like Black Rock City; it’s about bringing that back. A jumping castle in the desert somehow makes sense.”

That playful, creative energy prompted Bokhari to experiment with handblown glass for the first time, creating a series of vessels and sculptures where the idea of continuous metamorphosis finds even more fluid expression through the alchemical transformation of matter. She collaborated with her cousin, Ayla Bokhari—the only family member she has nearby and her only remaining tie to Pakistan. Though their styles differ, Bokhari drew inspiration directly from Bokhari’s paintings. The result was an entirely new process and medium, but also a deeply personal collaboration that felt like a true family affair.

“What’s been most moving is seeing how people are resonating with the work as an honest portrayal of the emotional and physical reality of being a mother,” Bokhari shares. “The tenderness, the overwhelm, the beauty and the chaos… rather than the polished, idealized version of motherhood we’re constantly shown on social media.”

Through the symbolic and psychological density of this new body of work, Bokhari makes peace with ongoing transformation—with growth as a fluid, open-ended process and with the possibility that change holds for keeping the creative imagination alive. “My idea was for the exhibition to be called ‘For You, AAria,’ because everything I’m making is for you,” she says—acknowledging how motherhood reawakened the original creative impulse that first led her to art and to a more porous, receptive way of encountering the world.

More in Artists

• How Jorge Pardo Turns Light, Color and Form into a Phenomenology of Seeing

• The Early Experiments of Manoucher Yektai

• Hans van Manen Remembers Photographer Erwin Olaf

• Marina Abramovic’s Erotic Epic Spreads Wide (and Displays the Limits of) the Artist’s Psyche

• An Interview with Anselm Kiefer, Iconoclastic Alchemist