Indigo+Madder London

For Liste 2026, the artist presents a new body of work developed over the past year, sparked by a hillside fall that briefly overturned perception—sky inverted, a branch like a hand, lights flickering at the edges of vision. From this moment of stillness emerges an ongoing exploration of gravity, suspension, and the porous boundary between memory and imagination, realised through hand-painted books, sequential imagery, and sculptural forms that extend pictorial motifs into space.

Noorain's painting practice examines the construction of identity and belonging through layered cultural references and contexts. She creates uncanny, destabilising spaces that weave together personal experience, storytelling, and symbolic motifs. Across these works, themes of longing and fear unfold within phantasmagorical worlds where imagination and lived reality converge.

Noorain Inam (b. 1998, Karachi) lives and works in London. She received her MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2022. Her practice explores the construction of identity and belonging through layered cultural references and contexts. Noorain creates uncanny, surreal, and destabilising spaces by weaving together deeply personal experiences, storytelling, and symbolic motifs. Engaging with themes of longing and fear, these phantasmagorical worlds become a meeting ground for imagination.

Noorain was the recipient of the prestigious Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Residency Award for Emerging Artists (2023). Recent exhibitions include Multiple Times, Indigo+Madder, London, 2025; We Sinful Women: The Library Project, SOAS Library, London, 2025; and Go back to sleep, it’s just the wind (Indigo+Madder, London, 2024).