Zakhm-e-Nau

About the work

*Zakhm-e-Nau* — "new wound" in both Urdu and Persian. It is a phrase that holds two meanings at once: damage and beginning. Ashraf makes no attempt to resolve the tension between them. The work consists of two wooden panels embedded with fragments of fired porcelain, mounted on the wall not quite as sculpture and not quite as painting, but somewhere between relief and image, between what has been broken and what has been deliberately reassembled. Fragmentation here is neither accidental nor decorative. Ashraf treats rupture as a formal element: a crack in the glaze, an imperfection in the firing process, a vessel shard that no longer functions as a vessel. In *Zakhm-e-Nau*, this logic expands beyond the individual object. The porcelain fragments scattered across the wooden panels become a map of something that was once whole and no longer is. A wound as topography. A new wound as possibility — not despite damage, but through it. For an artist whose studio is called *Don't Be Afraid*, this is ultimately a work about what happens when fear itself is accepted as material.