Niusha Khan

Born and raised in a small town in the north of Sweden with Iranian heritage, the contrasts between two very different cultures have been an important pillar of her upbringing, and the main inspiration for Niusha’s art. With ink and watercolor, she is peeling the layers of shared arts, language, culture, and history within societies and cultures.

Self-taught, she has been painting since childhood and embarked on her artistic career in 2019 while living in Sarajevo, going on to exhibit her work the following year in Istanbul. Using watercolor, acrylic, and ink on paper and canvas, her abstract pieces have a distinctive expressionism style. At the same time, her portraits often highlight subtle forms and shapes, with an emphasis on capturing female contemplation and body language, through elegant lines and playful use of color.

Her mixed heritage represents a nexus of syntheses, paths, and tensions which have all inspired, and found expression in her art. Exploring the cultural, linguistic, and socio-historical forces that underpin the formation of community identity, her art has been shaped by her work on gender equality in seven different countries for the United Nations and the European Union in the field of gender equality. Despite these preoccupations, she seeks to foreground the emotive aspects of her work, believing it best equips and compels the viewer to engage with the subtexts in a visceral and fundamentally meaningful way.

Being a woman on the move, she has had the privilege of calling many different places home. Using the arts is a way of capturing the emotions of processing the moves and exploring new cultures. She uses different tools to understand layers of searching and creating homes, and to capture the essential communal identities and intercultural dialogue that underpins the many interwoven layers of shared arts, language, and history she encounters.