Hafsa Nouman (b. 1998, Lahore) is a Pakistani visual artist based in New Haven, Connecticut. Her practice engages memory, ecology, and decolonial inquiry through painting and installation. Having lived within economies shaped by IMF-led reform and neoliberal extraction, she approaches decolonisation as a mirage, a horizon structured by desire, always visible yet endlessly deferred.
Nouman’s works exist both as an image and a withheld object, structurally present yet visually inaccessible. Through reflective surfaces that glimmer and oscillate, she complicates flatness and destabilises the act of looking. The viewer is positioned not as a passive observer, but as an implicated witness, confronted with the conditions that govern visibility, preservation, and loss.