As it enters its final weeks at Kunstmeile Krems (a major museum and cultural district in Austria known for its cluster of contemporary art institutions) Mohsin Shafi’s six-month exhibition feels less like a culmination and more like a quiet reckoning…a moment that asks not only to be seen, but to be reflected upon.
There is something striking about the scale and duration of the show itself. In a context where exhibitions are often fleeting, this extended institutional presence carries both weight and rarity. And yet, what it reveals is not spectacle, but a deeply personal and layered inquiry into what it means to exist in-between, between geographies, identities, histories, and the fragile architectures of belonging.
Mohsin’s practice has long occupied this liminal terrain. Rooted in what he describes as the “Third Space,” his work resists fixed categories, instead moving fluidly between fact and fiction, archive and imagination. Across mediums – image, text, sound, and moving visuals – he traces, tenderly, the emotional and political residues of postcolonial life: memory that slips through official records, identities shaped as much by absence as by presence, and futures that remain suspended between desire and possibility.
Part of this exhibition’s emotional charge comes from its context within his own journey. Over nearly two decades, Mohsin has built a practice that has travelled widely, from residencies in Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands to exhibitions across international platforms, while remaining, in many ways, peripheral to the more visible circuits of recognition at home. His relationship to the art world has never been defined by easy belonging, but by a sustained commitment to the work itself, a choice that lends his current moment both poignancy and clarity.
That clarity sharpens further in the works developed during his recent residency in Krems, where encounters with borders, bureaucracy, and the subtle violences of exclusion find their way into his practice with a disarming blend of tenderness and humor. These are not grand declarations, but precise, often intimate gestures…acts of repair that push gently against inherited structures of power.
Though born in Sahiwal, Mohsin’s life and practice have been shaped by over two decades in Lahore, a city that runs through his work. To encounter this exhibition now, at the point of its closing, is to step into a body of work that has been evolving in parallel to the city itself, attentive to what is spoken, but equally to what is left unsaid.
What follows is an exclusive conversation with an artist who has spent years working within these in-between spaces, and who, in doing so, has created a language that is as introspective as it is expansive…
Mohsin, after 17 years of practice, this exhibition marks your first institutional solo presentation. What did it mean for you – emotionally and artistically – to see a decade and a half of work come together in this way?
After seventeen years of working, often quietly and without much institutional framing, seeing the works come together in a museum space felt both strange and deeply emotional. It wasn’t so much a moment of triumph as a moment of recognition — almost like encountering different versions of myself across time. Many of the works were made during very different periods of my life. Some emerged from grief, some from tenderness, some from confusion, some from love. When they were installed together, I began to see how long the conversation with myself had actually been unfolding. Ideas I once thought belonged to separate narratives — memory, desire, masculinity, longing, belonging — slowly revealed themselves as part of the same inner terrain, echoing across time in ways I hadn’t fully noticed before.
Emotionally it felt like walking through a landscape of my own life. Artistically it also allowed me to see the continuity of the practice. For many years I was following instinct, responding to memories, images, and impressions that surfaced along the way. Even when the direction was not fully visible, there was always a quiet sense that these encounters were part of a larger search. As artists we often carry an intuition about what we are seeking, even if the destination is not yet clear. Over time the works begin to gather around that intuition, forming a language of their own through layers of experience and reflection. Seeing them together allowed me to recognise that language more clearly. It felt less like an arrival, and more like pausing for a moment to look at the road already travelled.
Much of the work seems to exist in what you call the “in-between” – a threshold between past and present, history and imagination. Why does this borderland feel like the most truthful space for you to create from?
The more I work with memory and history, the more I realise how incomplete both can be. Personal memory changes with time. Collective history is shaped by power, by what is recorded and what is left out. There are always silences and absences. The space between fact and imagination allows me to approach those gaps. It gives me room to speculate, to reconstruct, and sometimes to mourn what has been erased. In that borderland different timelines can coexist…personal memory, historical echoes, myths, and poetry.
For me truth does not always lie in perfect documentation. Sometimes it appears in the emotional atmosphere surrounding an experience or a story. That is the space I am drawn to, where certainty dissolves and something more fragile, but perhaps more honest, begins to surface.
Your concept of the “Third Space” runs throughout your practice. Has this space become a kind of refuge, or is it more of a site of questioning and tension?
For me the idea of the Third Space resonates both intellectually and spiritually. In academic terms it is often associated with the work of Homi K. Bhabha, who describes it as a space where identities are not fixed but constantly negotiated between cultures, histories, and narratives.
But for me the idea also connects to something much older within the spiritual and poetic traditions of South Asia. I have always been drawn to the language of Sufi poetry and to figures like Shah Hussain, where love, devotion, and identity often move beyond rigid categories. In those traditions the self is not singular or stable; it is layered, contradictory, and constantly in motion. Because of that, the Third Space is not simply a theoretical concept for me. It feels closer to a lived condition — a place where vulnerability, desire, spirituality, and social reality intersect.
There is refuge in that space because it allows identity to remain fluid rather than confined to rigid expectations. But it is also a space of tension. Living between worlds means constantly negotiating visibility, cultural norms, and the pressures of belonging. In that sense the Third Space becomes less an escape and more a way of existing with those contradictions. It allows me to inhabit the in-between — a place where different parts of the self can coexist, even when they do not easily resolve into a single definition.
You’ve spoken about feeling somewhat peripheral to the structures of the art world despite years in academia and practice. Do you think distance from those networks has allowed you a certain kind of freedom?
Yes, but that freedom comes with a cost. For many years I existed somewhat outside the usual art networks and circles. It wasn’t a deliberate rebellion; it simply happened that way. I studied, taught, and worked within the art ecosystem for a long time, yet I never felt particularly comfortable navigating the social choreography that often shapes visibility in the art world — the alliances, the quiet hierarchies, the informal structures that determine whose work circulates and whose remains at the margins.
Living slightly outside those systems can be painful at times. As an artist you are constantly working from a place of vulnerability. You invest years of emotional and intellectual energy into something deeply personal, and naturally you hope that the environment around you will recognise that effort. When that recognition does not always come — especially from the place you consider home — it leaves complicated emotions. At the same time, that distance created another kind of space for me. Because I was not fully absorbed into those circles, the work had to grow according to its own rhythm. I had to trust intuition more than approval.
There is also a strange irony in the way journeys unfold. I have lived and worked in Lahore for most of my life, and the city has shaped my sensibility in profound ways. Yet my first institutional solo exhibition emerged far from home, in Austria. Experiences like that inevitably make you reflect on what “home” really means. Sometimes the place that forms you does not immediately know how to hold you. In moments like that I often think about the rebellious spirit of Shah Hussain, whose poetry and life deeply resonate with me. In his own time he was seen as unconventional, even troubling to some, yet his verses carried a profound devotion and tenderness that later generations came to recognise. That spirit of rebellious vulnerability has always stayed with me — the idea that sometimes recognition arrives slowly, long after the work has already begun its journey. In the end the work had to sustain itself first. Recognition, if it arrives, arrives later.
Several of the works began during your Artist in Residence programme in Kunstmeile Krems. How did being physically away from Lahore shape the way you looked back at your own memories and histories? Also, can you tell me a little about how this program came about and what it was like for you?
Being away from Lahore created a very particular kind of distance — not only geographical, but emotional as well. When you live in a city for many years, especially one as intense and layered as Lahore, its rhythm becomes part of your everyday life. You rarely have the chance to step outside that rhythm and look at it from afar. Arriving in Kunstmeile Krems felt like entering a completely different tempo. Krems is a small town along the Danube, quiet and almost contemplative. After the constant movement and noise of Lahore, that stillness created space for reflection.
For me that distance became important. It allowed memories to surface differently. Lahore began to appear in my mind not just as a place, but as a landscape of experiences, emotions, and stories that had shaped me over time. I also arrived there during a very introspective moment in my own life. I was processing certain personal closures and emotional transitions, including the lingering weight of unrequited love. Being in such a quiet environment made those reflections more present. Instead of escaping them, I found myself sitting with them. In that sense the residency became less about producing work in a conventional way and more about allowing distance to reveal things that are difficult to see while you are still inside the intensity of your own world.
During that residency, you engaged with the journals of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Sissi). What resonances did you find between her writings and your own reflections on identity, exile, and vulnerability?
My encounter with the journals of Empress Elisabeth of Austria stayed with me because of the vulnerability in her voice. There was a sense of solitude and restlessness in the way those thoughts unfolded, almost like a private inner monologue rather than writing intended for the world. That emotional tone resonated with me deeply. During the residency I was already moving through a very introspective moment in my own life, processing personal closures and the tenderness of unrequited love. Engaging with those journals — seeing the handwriting and sensing the intimacy of that voice — created a strange recognition, as though two very different lives could still meet in the same fragile emotional space.
Many writers have worked from that same interior register. When encountering Elisabeth’s journals, I often thought about the quiet self-questioning in Franz Kafka and the longing woven through the poetry of Shah Hussain. That same intimate voice of reflection appears across traditions — in poets like Bulleh Shah or Emily Dickinson. Similarly, many visual artists have transformed personal vulnerability into artistic language. Figures such as Frida Kahlo, Anwar Saeed, Sehr Jalil, Ayesha Jatoi, and Marina Abramović all approach their work through deeply personal narratives.
What interested me most was not the historical image of an empress, but the human voice inside those pages. In that moment it felt less like encountering a historical document and more like hearing another person’s inner monologue — one that echoed the same vulnerable space many artists inhabit across time.
Your work often weaves together personal memory and broader postcolonial realities. Could you expand on this for a layperson?
For me, the personal and the political are never completely separate. The way we remember our lives, the stories we inherit, the language we speak, even the things we are allowed or not allowed to express — all of these are shaped by larger historical forces. Living in South Asia means inhabiting many overlapping histories at once: colonial rule, spiritual traditions, social expectations, and inherited cultural narratives. These forces quietly shape how people understand devotion, difference, and belonging. In my work I move through those layers, trying to understand how private lives exist within larger cultural structures.
Through the work I try to create small non-colonial gestures of repair — ways of rebalancing what history, censorship, and fear have fractured. Sometimes this happens through tenderness, sometimes through satire and humor.
Much of my work begins with stories that refuse to disappear. Following them often leads me into deeper cultural memory — into the ways history quietly shapes the lives we live today.
South Asia also carries older spiritual traditions that once allowed far more fluid understandings of human experience. In Sufi poetry and folk narratives one encounters seekers who move between worlds — wandering dervishes, rebellious lovers, and two-spirited presences who resist rigid boundaries of gender or belonging. These traditions continue to echo within the cultural imagination. In many ways the exhibition itself grows from that threshold. The title, Between Two Worlds, gestures toward that space — a space that is neither fixed nor easily defined, what theorists like Homi K. Bhabha describe as a ‘Third Space.’ It is somewhere between devotion and rebellion, intimacy and silence, love and distance, a place where personal histories and cultural memory meet, and where new meanings can begin to appear.
The exhibition brings together video works created over more than a decade. How do these works relate to one another as a ‘living archive?’
The works in the exhibition are not separate pieces for me, but different parts of my life that have gradually taken form through images, objects, and gestures. Over the years I have carried certain memories and materials with me, and they slowly became inseparable from my own existence. Sometimes they enter the works directly, sometimes they return quietly in different forms across time.
For instance, an early work called The Playground explored traditional plastic dolls — altering them, giving them body hair, dressing them in clothes I stitched myself. Years later the doll appears again in Malamatiyya [an immersive audiovisual component, part of the exhibition], but in a different way. By the end of the film I begin to resemble it myself. The boundary between object and body becomes uncertain, as if memory is asking how real our attachments to the world truly are.
Many of the materials in the exhibition carry similar traces. A waistcoat that once belonged to my father becomes part of a self-portrait. In Malamatiyya, pieces of fabric from my mother’s dupattas reappear as the turban I wear — while I am dressed in my father’s kurta. In a quiet way these gestures allow the masculine and feminine presences of my parents to exist together within the work. Even an intimate recording from a past relationship returns within the work — transformed into a tender, almost luminous visual memory that carries both warmth and ache at the same time.
As these objects move through different works and moments, they begin to form what I think of as a living archive — not something frozen in the past, but something I keep returning to and reshaping as I change. Rather than presenting a single narrative, the works invite visitors to move through shifting constellations of memory, spirituality, and personal reflection. In that sense the space becomes less like a traditional exhibition and more like a moment of stillness, a reflective space where viewers might briefly turn inward and outward at the same time, perhaps encountering something of themselves somewhere between two worlds.