Jahan Ara Rafi Bio

My name is Jahan Ara Rafi. I am, on the surface, a quiet and calm person. Inside, though, I carry a great deal of energy and passion, an inner drive that pushes me toward freedom, toward the well-being of my community, and toward the defense of human rights. True freedom is something I have struggled with throughout my life; the societies I have lived in have never offered a clear or honest definition of individual freedom, and that absence has shaped both who I am and what I make.

Most of my work centers on women, on identity and on the social role women are expected to occupy. I am drawn again and again to the moment a woman is made to feel the weight of gender difference simply in trying to find her place in society. My paintings hold up that limitation, that inherited “silence,” for the viewer to see. Making the work is my way of partially breaking that silence.

The figures in my paintings are often drawn with bent necks and closed eyes, standing at the end of a road that is both motionless and moving. They are colored as red as twilight, turned inward on themselves, holding the cold indifference of hurried passersby. Tired bodies, necks tall and bent, counting the lines of the ground, sighing as they search for the footsteps of the sun.

Silence carries a different meaning in my work. In the minds of these long-necked women, silence is the search for freedom from the narrow mentalities that confine them. It is not the absence of sound, it is the sound from the other side: the hidden secrets behind closed walls, held in the eyes of a woman as she is stoned, as she is buried alive..