Shama Sahzayasin
Art + Ecology MA
Goldsmiths University of London
Specialisms: Painting / Drawing / Installation/Sculpture
Location: London, United Kingdom
Shama Sahzayasin
First Name: Shama
Last Name: Sahzayasin
Specialisms: Painting / Drawing / Installation/Sculpture
Sectors:
My Location: London, United Kingdom
University / College: Goldsmiths University of London
Course / Program Title: Art + Ecology MA
About
Born in Lahore in 1976, British artist Shama Sahzayasin lives and works in London. Her practice draws on diverse sources including Jain and Buddhist philosophy, Sufi literature, and pre-monotheistic cultures, reflecting a sustained interest in how systems of belief and ecology shape human and nonhuman relations. Working across drawing, painting, sculpture, writing, and installation, Sahzayasin creates layered, semi-abstract evocative environments that invite reflection on interconnectedness and resistance. Her watercolours, with their multi-textured surfaces and flowing registers, evoke an interplay between internal and external spaces, tracing the fragile lines between bodies, environments, and collective survival. Water and multispecies ecologies recur as metaphors in her work, used to examine anthropocentric patterns of imposed “natural” order and the ways abstracted forms of violence are normalised and made invisible. Through a process that is decolonial, research-driven, and intuitively grounded, Sahzayasin engages contemporary debates in ecofeminism and critical ecologies. Her practice interrogates the relationship between biopolitical systems and the ideological structures embedded within the social fabric, and their direct impact on multispecies life. By doing so, her work seeks to provoke new ways of thinking about ecological politics, kinship, and the possibilities of collective futures.
Examines the longest war on Earth—waged upon nonhuman animals who are here with us. With terror, this appetite reigns—creating devastation in its wake, consuming lifeworld's, silencing resistance, and pushing extinction as a systemic outcome. Through my practice I explore multispecies lifeworld's, intervening in capitalist time by drawing—contemplating bounded space-times and beings caught in human–animal cog-machines, like the horseshoe crab: its blue blood sustaining vaccines while their numbers collapse. As wilderness recedes, wild mammals fall below 4% of biomass; livestock swell to 60%; poultry comprise 70% of Earth’s avian biomass. (Yinon et al. 2018). Futures unravel.
Competitions
