Samiya Younis London, United Kingdom
Samiya Younis is a British-Kashmiri-Pakistani artist based in London, she is a curator, educator, and advocate/voice for women's empowerment and liberation. Her work is concerned with exploring her identity and struggles as a second-generation woman of migrant parents from a South Asian culture. She explores gender violence and the histories and legacies of colonialism.
Younis's artistic practice is interdisciplinary working across mediums such as sculpture, performance, installation, and painting. She explores and makes work on childhood memories, intersections between power, empowerment, challenging patriarchy, conservative ideologies, migration, exile, colonial violence, belonging, and hybridity. Her work interprets emotions, experiences, tradition, and religion. She examines material as language, textile-based concerns with the embodiment in dress, and the Sociopolitical landscape. Postcolonial theory informs her thinking. Through processes of constructing and deconstructing, Younis embodies this tension within her work and it manifests itself through her concepts, material appearance, and charged forms. By doing so she is opening up and revealing these oppressive forces, exposing a hybrid of cultural identities, inciting discussions, questioning and examining the past, and the present political/social landscape she lives in.
Artwork
Women are your fields, (series of 3), 2016, Silicone, acrylic paint, 2016
Let me breathe, 2015, Mesh fencing wire, metal spray paint., 2015
Between two worlds, 2015, Plaster of Paris, surface wall filler, fabrics, charcoal, acrylic paints, glue, fabric transfer, chains., 2015
Remnant, 2016, Plaster, fabrics, chains., 2016
Haven, 2019, Printed text on cotton, underwear, bonding web and mosquito net., 2019
Flight Revisited, 2018, Second hand South Asian women and girls clothes, pure Indian silk/cotton/linen, laundry bags, and cotton thread., 2018