AIZA AHMED

Time Pass

Curated by Rajiv Menon

Opening: May 15th, 6-8 PM

May 15th - June 10th, 2026

"Time-pass" in South Asian slang is a beautifully fluid piece of vocabulary. Its most immediate meaning is baked into its literal construction: a moment or experience that passes the time. It is both an activity and an appraisal. At its gentlest, it can mean the casual, low-stakes moments of everyday life. At its most pejorative, it's synonymous with what the youngest artists in the exhibition might call "mid." Most generally, it names interstitial times seemingly unworthy of inquiry or reflection.

Despite my best efforts and impulses, it would be hard to claim that South Asians invented this quite objectively universal experience. But time-pass carries a weight and feeling that demands its own language. Both fundamentally human and deeply specific to South Asian milieus, the idea of time pass captures those seemingly minor moments that glue the big moments together. Those ostensibly unserious hangouts or bits of solitude contain meaningful intimacies and self-reflection. In the hands of the artists in the exhibition, Time-Pass is not fleeting or insignificant, but revelatory of the magic that exists in the everyday. 

From the hyperrealist to the fantastical and futuristic, the works in the exhibition announce the arrival of significant cohort of young South Asian artists, whose perspectives suggest a larger creative movement at the intersection of culture, aesthetics, and generational perspective. Ricky Vasan's fragmented, yet cohesive compoisition captures the flow of time and emotion during friends' gatherings, giving a visual language to the invisible forces of feeling that bind these casual times. Mustafa Mohsin's diaristic paintings render everyday moments in the artist's life in canonically-referential grandiosity, reminding us that history is made up of a million small moments. And in a deeply personal collaboration between artist and curator, Sajeela Siddiq depicts me enjoying my morning cofee, as her signature hyperreal composition transports me to an imagined liminal space reflective of my mindframe. These works, alongside the other brilliant artists in the exhibition, reveal significance in the insignificant and permanence in the fleeting.