Artist Irum Rahat’s Yeh Kab Ki Baat Hai is a house full of memories

There’s something profound about the mundanity of daily life—the stillness of rooms, kitchen filled with the cling-clang of vessels, the pours and sips of chai, or simply existing. At Lahore-born, London-based artist Irum Rahat’s first solo exhibition in India, ‘Yeh Kab Ki Baat Hai’, at Delhi’s Pristine Contemporary in Delhi, these visuals come alive. Drawing from fragments of memory shaped by her upbringing in a South Asian household, Rahat turns the ordinary into the central language of her practice.

Irum Rahat's ongoing show draws from memory and life

The title itself gestures towards the ambiguity of time—a question that hovers between past, present, and memory. Yeh kab ki baat hai she asks, attempting to recall fleeting moments that resist being pinned down. Featuring 16 new works, the exhibition unfolds as an archive of domestic life—interiors, nighttime scenes, and figures drawn from memory—like a visual journal where recollection and imagination merge, and where the everyday is held long enough to be seen.

Long before painting, Rahat was documenting her surroundings through photographs—a cup of coffee, the sky, her mother sitting casually at home. Later, when she turned to painting during her early years at the National College of Arts, the transition felt natural. “I thought, I already photograph these things—why don’t I just paint them?” The domestic spaces she returned to again and again began to reveal themselves as repositories of intimacy and cultural meaning.

Painting the overlooked

Rahat’s works push against the idea of ‘what deserves to be painted’ by centering scenes often dismissed as mundane—particularly those tied to women’s lives within the home. Making chai, sitting in a room, sharing space with family—forms of labour and existence that frequently go unacknowledged.

“In most South Asian contexts, you so easily take it for granted and don’t even consider it labour—it becomes invisible,” she notes. “It’s not paid, so it’s easier to ignore.” By placing these moments on canvas, Rahat reframes them as worthy of attention in their own right.

She portrays women realistically—they are not stylised, not performing, not reduced to spectacle. They are simply there—resting and occupying space. “Why is it only worth talking about or respecting when it’s serving somebody else, often a man?” Rahat asks. “By putting it on a canvas it speaks to this—whether it’s women doing something for themselves, because that act of making chai is also something for themselves. It’s really important to show women just being, without the caricature of how they should look or perform to be ‘productive’.”

Nostalgia on canvas

She paints with a softness, a haze—as though each frame has been lifted from a film or a half-remembered dream. This sensibility traces back to her love for cinema. From the realism of Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation and About Elly to the theatricality of Karan Johar’s Om Shanti Om and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, her influences span both ends of the spectrum. “I can hold these varying sorts of tastes when it comes to influencing how I look at things… whether that’s something as serious as Asghar Farhadi or something more fun-loving like Karan Johar,” she says. 

Similarly, her paintings carry a dreamy, nostalgic quality—reminiscent of familiar domestic scenes: chatting with your sister, your mother in the kitchen while lounging in the living room, scrolling on your phone upon waking, or observing guests in a courtyard framed by pillars. Soft blues, muted pinks, browns, and creams dominate—colours that feel almost melancholic.

“They are resonant of a kind of melancholia attached to this work because it’s so much like semi-memory and semi-imagination,” notes Rahat. “I’ve also lived through these memories—the characters and the spaces. The more you delve into a certain place and memory, the more you feel… It's not always a particularly fun process. Nostalgia can be painful when you keep returning to it.” 

There are contrasts too—between day and night, warmth and coolness, presence and absence. Some works lean into darkness, exploring nighttime scenes with sharper, more concentrated light, while others hold onto the faded brightness of daytime interiors. Even when colours intensify—deep magentas or rich blues—they never overwhelm.

For Rahat, titling is its own creative process. Drawing from personal notes, conversations, memes, and pop culture, she treats language as another medium. “It gives me a chance to be a bit cheeky,” she admits. A title like 'Diva Coded' references contemporary internet culture, while others draw directly from her own writing and memory—like 'I Just Woke Up', where she paints a girl scrolling through her phone in bed, a moment deeply familiar to many.

“Memory is always changing; it’s never the same. So her memory of home, her people, is constantly evolving,” says Arjun Butani, a gallerist. Bringing Rahat’s work to Delhi, he says, will resonate with the city’s audience owing to a shared Asian heritage. “India, especially cities like Delhi, Amritsar, Jalandhar, Srinagar, and even Lucknow, embodies a shared north Indian cultural rhythm. You still see people in salwar kameez, sitting in courtyards, eating, reminiscing. It’s a mix of Punjabi and Nawabi sensibilities, where younger generations move abroad, but the culture remains intact. Delhi, in many ways, epitomises that.”

On view at Pristine Contemporary, Bhishma Pitamah Marg, South Extension I, until May 12

This article is written by Adithi Reena Ajith