Abid Farhan




Abid Farhan is an artist who grew up in Ilford, London. Moving back home ha s been the source of inspiration for his practice, which looks at spaces, how they hold our memories, and reflect back to us the stories of our lives. Being of Bengali descent, the works sometimes draw on his diasporic experiences, examining the tensions created by immigration and growing up between two countries. His work shifts between multiple media, guided by the idea.

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Painting and Visual arts
Our voices under this surface Post-it note selected sketches
Music

• Kuon 
• Trace 

Video 

• We don’t talk about it music video  
• Kuon music video 

Photography 

Selected photography 

Our voices under this surface | Commissioned exhibition | First presented at TURF, Croydon,  2025 

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Our voices under this surface is the first solo exhibition of artist Abid Farhan (Bangladesh, b. 2001) in collaboration with his friends. The show comprises 8 new paintings broadly beginning an exploration into ideas of spaces as containers of memory. The scenes are from the artists hometown of Ilford, London, a site of various, and often diasporic, lives crossing over; from the mundanity of the domestic and familial life to the darker undertones of gang culture. The residue from all these life stories is absorbed by the porous surfaces of our environment. These paintings depict how the specificity of lived experience never reappears on the surface, but over time, the patina of these experiences crops up one way or another, hinting at a complex existence. To find it, you must look attentively and with patience. Thus, it becomes a metaphor for finding common ground. This contrasts with the speed with which short-form content, like arrow heads, decisively pierces us with content, with surface-level (dis)information, eliciting immediate and volatile reactions.   

On the surface, these paintings could be of any suburban town. Appearing more as memories, these hazy hues and seemingly mundane compositions of Ilford teeter between the uncanny banality of suburbia and the harsh realities of a decaying and yet gentrifying area. Instead of interpretative captions, the exhibition is interspersed with reflections from the artist's community. These texts reflect on childhood memories, the town's built environment, South Asian diasporic experiences, and cultures of violence and masculinity.  

Please note painting and reflective text make up the pieces.


Credits:

Paintings and concept development by Abid Farhan 
Curated by Vaishna Surjid 
Texts by Ibrahim Islam, Rajdeep Bharj, Suki Padda, Avneet Ubhi
Title graphic by Mia Bharj 
Graphic Design Cin Namon 
With thanks to TURF Projects for use of their project space