Canvas Drop Cloth
12' x 16', 2025
Photo by Roman M. Hrab

• “Whoa, look at you. So American today!”

• “You are not like the other Afghans I know…You are different.”

• “You are like a typical Afghan.”

• “Zahra? Oh, she’s definitely marrying an Afghan guy.”

• “Are you dating an American? I cannot believe you are dating someone outside your culture.”

• “ZAH-rah. Not Zaa-ruh. Don’t go all American on your name. You’re an Afghan.”

These words arrive in many tones, tender, sharp, uncertain. Sometimes wrapped in love, sometimes with quiet judgment, and other times with ignorance or plain confusion. These comments have followed me for years, whispering reminders of the duality I live inside. Of what it means to carry multiple cultures, to shift between spaces… and sometimes, to feel like I belong everywhere and yet nowhere at all.

Nowhere Everywhere is an exhibition that explores the duality, the experience of cultural transition, of being shaped and reshaped by a new language, relationships, environments, and expectations. It reflects the moments that I feel between two versions of myself. It reveals the beauty and conflict of living with two different but coexisting identities. Nowhere is when I feel far away from the places I once called home, from the relationships I had to leave behind, from the memories that now feel distant. It is when I feel like a stranger, carrying labels placed on me by others: Afghan, American, immigrant, foreigner. It is the dissonance of loving where I come from while not fully fitting into where I am. It is missing home, only to realize that “home” no longer exists in a single place. But Everywhere is when I embrace that duality. When I stop resisting the shifts within me and allow all my selves to coexist. It is when I realize that I can carry my home in the songs I still hum, in the scent of turmeric in my art, in the coffee I drink every morning, in the laughter of friends during Thanksgiving and Nowruz. My home does not have borders. It is not confined to geography or language. It exists wherever I love, connect, and create.

My materials hold these memories. The turmeric, red paper, and oil take me back to Afghanistan, to the early days of learning how to cook, standing beside my mother in the kitchen as she gently taught me. The walnut ink and pomegranates take me back to sitting with my cousins, carefully separating the pomegranate seeds from the skin and the walnuts from their shells. The wine traces the gatherings I shared with my host family and friends in Minnesota. The coffee marks my rituals of adulthood in the United States, trying to survive classes in the English language. These materials connect me to the places I have lived and the relationships I have built. When I use them in my work, I am not creating, I am remembering, reclaiming, and reconciling.

This work is deeply personal. It is shaped by the moments I was seen as a foreigner through the eyes of another Afghan, and as an Afghan immigrant through the eyes of an American. I do not seek to solve this identity crisis. I seek to express it: as a beautiful chaos, a fluid identity that sometimes feels stuck and fragmented, and at other times flows freely, like ink spreading across paper. Through Nowhere Everywhere, I state that identity can be multiple and dynamic. That we can belong even when we feel misplaced. That our roots can travel with us. That home is not where we are told we come from, but where we decide to belong.