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Sidra Khawaja

@stud_iosk

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Interdisciplinary Artist+Designer|Academic| Fulbright Scholar(SAIC) @maltairofficial @delfinafdn
@kashmircreativescollective
@pakistankarigargallery

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August 2025 - Interview with @delfinafdn , reflecting on my Autumn 2024 artist residency, supported by @britishcouncilpakistan in partnership with @artdivvy

To read the full version, visit the link in bio. by @stud_iosk

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a year ago

It was an absolute pleasure chairing an insightful panel that I only imagined could be possible.

We shared rich and thought provoking discussions on the embodiment of food, beliefs that stem from it and upon it and how that impacts our lives.

@stud_iosk Ms Sidra Khawaja shared her research into the everyday eating of the Hunza tribe. Her documentary provides a commentary on how an indigenous community is negotiating its understanding of food and traditional beliefs in a world being reshaped by climate change, changing economies, and global capitalism.

@s_lamberthurley Dr Siobhan Lambert-Hurley walked us through her journey of unpacking cookbooks and texts on food through the twentieth-century South Asian cooks. Her research exposed the gendered experience of eating in South Asia. She also shed light on how these manuscripts suggest that our eating has transformed in recent times as we have forgotten certain tastes.

Dr Mariam Zia, provided a critical perspective to contemporary understandings and beliefs around food. She particularly drew our attention to the changing relationship we are building with what we put into our bodies. Her reflections on organic eating and the complexities and privileges that often surround it, really put many of our assumptions into perspective.

As a chair, I primarily brought the conversations together and tied the relevancy of how thr embodied knowledge of our food has trasnsformed through time and context. Drawing from my own research of the local understanding of healing through food, and the ways that modern medicine has made healing collectivist rather than subjective, I brought the conversation towards the questions of belief, faith, and the knowledge we carry through food.

Overall, it was an enriching conversation. Time spent talking and understanding food was time well spent!

I heartily congratulate @aasinasia_lahore for a wonderful event hosted at @mgshsslums , and I am deeply grateful to every panelist that was able to join me. And of course all the people attending, who asked just profound and insightful questions! taken in LUMS by @stud_iosk

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22 days ago

Roti Kahani: A workshop format edition of my ongoing artistic research practice ‘Edible Archive’

I started this workshop with a simple question: ‘What does Roti mean to you?’

For some, it was sustenance. For others, it was ami ke haath ki roti, childhood kitchens, hospitality, home, class, labour, marriage and survival. Very quickly, conversations around roti became conversations about ourselves—our mothers, the women who raised us, the work they carried, and the expectations we inherited around what a woman should be able to make with her hands.

I was particularly interested in what would happen when something as familiar and deeply gendered as roti entered the formal space of an art institution @nca_officials At first, there was hesitation, surprise, curiosity, questions—even a sense that roti was somehow an unusual or unsuitable material for an art workshop. I wasn’t entirely sure myself how this encounter would unfold.

But something shifted once we began making…

Roti Kahani was a one-day participatory workshop exploring food, craft, gender, memory and embodied knowledge through the humble roti, presented as part of NCA Triennale 2025.

What stayed with me most was the contradiction: the very material that carries so many expectations and restrictions could also become a space of freedom. By making, remembering and talking together, we allowed roti to hold what it doesn’t usually have space to hold—our questions, frustrations, memories, tenderness and stories.

Some of the questions we sat with:

Describe a moment when food made you feel at home, or displaced?

If you could make roti for your younger self, what would you make—and why?

When have you seen woman’s craft hold a family together? A dish, a textile, a ritual?

Imagine a kitchen where all the invisible labour is suddenly visible. What does it look like?

What is one food-related lesson you inherited, and one you chose to unlearn?

Recall a food ritual from your childhood kitchen. Who prepared the food?

What gestures, sounds or smells do you remember?

How can a piece of bread weigh over every other quality of a woman?

Why does our roti need to be perfectly round?

Describe an embroidery motif taken in The Tollington by @stud_iosk

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a month ago

Feeling incredibly grateful to share that I’ve been selected as an Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellow for the 2026–2028 cycle.

Following a rigorous selection process with 63 fellows representing 23 countries, I’m honored to join this remarkable community of artists, scientists & researchers.

Thank you to the jury and the Solitude team for your trust. Looking forward to this next chapter. ✨

@akademiesolitude by @stud_iosk

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3 months ago

Field notes from Hunza

Apricot bark exuding Gum Arabic: A natural edible resin valued for its medicinal properties.

Observed across orchards during pre-harvest season.

May, before harvest - Gojal

The landscape appears still, yet beneath its quietness unfolds a fragile mountain food ecology shaped by seasonality, everyday labor, and the anticipation of harvest.

Stone Oil Press, Bildih Gojal

More than a tool, this hand operated stone grinder embodies a local knowledge system—where extraction is not merely production, but a practice of preservation, care, and making every part of the harvest valuable.

Traditionally used to extract oil from apricot kernels and walnuts—it transformed seasonal harvests into nutrient-dense oils that sustained households long after the growing season. It has now been largely replaced by mechanized oil presses. Only a few remain as living reminders of earlier practices.

Mechanized Apricot Oil Extraction

Extraction creates more than oil. It produces khal—the compressed and edible remains of the kernel, where nourishment persists in another form. In Hunza’s food ecology, residue is not waste but another stage in the life of the harvest. Khal is incorporated as a nutrient rich element in animal feed.

Glacial Water, Gojal

Food begins upstream. Long before harvest, glacial water travels through carefully maintained channels, linking mountains, fields, and the everyday labor that sustains life in Hunza.

Domestic Kitchen, Gojal

Knowledge often lives in the hands. Rolling, shaping, and baking bread are everyday gestures learned through observation, repetition, and care—quiet practices that sustain households across generations.

Experimental Kitchen Garden, Altit

Research often unfolds in unexpected places. A café owner’s personal passion has grown into a living collection of medicinal herbs, nutrient-rich vegetables, and fruit plants, some of which are imported from far off regions—demonstrating how mountain food ecologies are shaped as much by experimentation and care as they are by tradition.

Local Pancake on cast-iron skillet, Bildih Gojal

The skillet is as much a part of the recipe as its ingredients. Seasoned over years taken in Hunza Valley by @stud_iosk

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3 months ago

Edible Archive - Hunza Edition (2026)

Over three weeks in Hunza during @ambiancehotels artist residency, I spent time researching and thinking about food not simply as something we consume, but as a way of understanding how people sustain life in a fragile mountain environments.

Through conversations with farmers, cooks, shopkeepers, and families, I became interested in the everyday practices that often go unnoticed: drying apricots for winter, storing food for seasons of scarcity, pressing oil from kernels, gathering herbs, sharing recipes, and adapting to changing ecological and economic conditions. These small acts of labor and preservation form an archive of knowledge that is carried through bodies, landscapes, and generations.

Edible Archives: Hunza Iteration emerged from this research. Combining visual ethnography, field notes, interviews, participatory installation, and food, the project explores how mountain food ecologies are sustained through processes of gathering, transformation, preservation, and adaptation.

The installation at the culmination of the residency is built around fallen rocks naturally embedded within the landscape, which become both terrain and table. Participants are invited to forage among materials drawn from my research—dried apricots, kernels, walnuts, herbs, bark, soil, birchwood paper, and apricot oil residue—and create their own temporary assemblages. In doing so, they contribute to a collective archive of traces, memories, and gestures of preservation.

The experience culminates in a series of small conceptual bites created in collaboration with the art cafe’s chef, using ingredients and preservation techniques encountered during fieldwork. Together, they reflect on extraction, nourishment, resilience, seasonality, and the ways communities continue to adapt within an environment shaped by both abundance and uncertainty.

Rather than documenting Hunza as a fixed place, this project attempts to listen to the knowledge embedded within its food systems and to consider how preservation itself can be understood as an act of care, survival, and cultural continuity. taken in Ambiance Hotels & Resorts by @stud_iosk

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4 months ago

Sidra Khawaja is a Kashmiri interdisciplinary artist-designer, researcher, and educator whose practice engages with material culture, food systems, and collective memory to explore belonging, ecology, and postcolonial identity. She holds a BFA in Visual Communication Design from the National College of Arts and an MFA in Designed Objects from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was a Fulbright and New Artist Society scholar.

Working at the intersection of design, craft, and anthropology, her research-based practice employs participatory installations, archives, and sensorial encounters to examine care, resilience, and ecological knowledge within contexts of conflict and displacement. She is the co-founder of the 𝘒𝘢𝘴𝘩𝘮𝘪𝘳 𝘊𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘊𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 and the founder of 𝘗𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯 𝘒𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘢𝘳 𝘎𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘳𝘺, a digital archive dedicated to indigenous craft and food heritage.

Sidra currently serves as a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts & Design at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.

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Images: Sidra Khawaja arranging the 𝘌𝘥𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘷𝘦 installation at 11 Temple Road, Lahore, in 2025. Courtesy of the artist (@stud_iosk).

The fourth iteration of 𝘌𝘥𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘷𝘦 titled 𝘋𝘶𝘣𝘢𝘪 𝘌𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 is currently on view in 𝘋𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘳𝘦, 𝘉𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘧, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 at Mussawir Contemporary until 08 May, 2026.
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#mussawircontemporary #desirebeliefandthetable #exhibition #sidrakhawaja #artistinfocus by @stud_iosk

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5 months ago

In this Dubai iteration, Sidra Khawaja’s 𝘌𝘥𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘷𝘦 centers on the date — a fruit deeply embedded in the region’s ecology and closely associated with the rituals and traditions of Ramadan. Traditionally used to break the fast, the date signifies both sustenance and intention. Participants are invited to select two dates: one to consume and one to remain as an offering within a growing collective archive. Through this gesture, private desire and public belief coexist at the table.

Surrounded by ingredients that reflect Dubai’s layered culinary landscape — shaped by trade, migration, and global exchange — participants compose their plates deliberately. Each arrangement becomes a site of decision-making, revealing personal histories, cultural affiliations, and subtle negotiations between comfort and difference.

Completed plates return to a structured archive table, where they accumulate over time into a visual field of edible forms. Alongside each offering, written reflections record the reasoning behind the compositions, transforming subjective choices into shared knowledge.

The installation stages a quiet tension between consumption and preservation, desire and restraint: one date disappears; one remains. Through this ritual, food becomes both medium and method — an epistemological tool for examining how belief, identity, and power quietly shape what, and how, we consume.

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Images and videos: 𝘌𝘥𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘷𝘦 (𝘋𝘶𝘣𝘢𝘪 𝘌𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯): 𝘉𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘖𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨, courtesy of Ahmad Bilal.

𝘌𝘥𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘷𝘦 (𝘋𝘶𝘣𝘢𝘪 𝘌𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯) is currently on view until 08 May, 2026, as part of 𝘋𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘳𝘦, 𝘉𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘧, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦.
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#mussawircontemporary #desirebeliefandthetable #exhibition #sidrakhawaja #artistinfocus by @stud_iosk

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5 months ago

Trailer: ‘Bakarwals - The Shepherds of Kashmir’

A documentary by @kashmircreativescollective

Concept & Production: @stud_iosk
Direction: @zafeerbuttfilms

Language: Gojri & Urdu

A Bakarwal elder from Pakistan administered Kashmir reflects on his community’s history, identity, and migratory way of life, while speaking about the growing challenges of conflict, climate change, and commercialization.

Through this project, Kashmir Creatives Collective documents the stories, cultural traditions, and indigenous knowledge of the Bakarwal community—an integral yet often overlooked part of Kashmiri heritage. As traditional pastoral lifeways come under increasing pressure, we seek to preserve and share the voices, wisdom, and lived experiences of a community that has long sustained both people and landscapes across the region.

#Bakarwal #Kashmir #IndigenousKnowledge #Pastoralism #climatechange by @stud_iosk

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5 months ago

Teaser..
‘Bakarwals - The Shepherds of Kashmir’

A documentary by @kashmircreativescollective

Concept & Production: @stud_iosk
Direction: @zafeerbuttfilms

Language: Gojri by @stud_iosk

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6 months ago

Teaser: Bakarwals - The Shepherds of Kashmir (2026)

A documentary by Kashmir Creatives Collective.

Language: Gojri taken in Ganga Choti by @stud_iosk

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6 months ago

Bakarwals: Shepherds of Kashmir
(2026)

Language: Gojri & Urdu by @stud_iosk

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4 months ago