Adeela Suleman (b. 1970, Karachi, Pakistan) is an artist whose practice interrogates the intersections of beauty and brutality, tradition and violence, permanence and fragility. Trained in both International Relations (MA, University of Karachi, 1995) and Sculpture (BFA, Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, 1999), Suleman works across sculpture, installation, and painting to examine the violence embedded in her sociopolitical landscape.

Her practice draws on the ornamental traditions of Islamic filigree and Mughal miniature painting, which she reconfigures into disquieting tableaux. Birds, flowers, and foliage recur throughout her works as patterned motifs, at once delicate and decorative, yet often set against scenes of rupture, bloodshed, and disappearance. Stainless steel filigree sculptures recall memorials and funerary forms, while her miniature-inspired paintings on vintage domestic plates collapse the registers of high art and kitsch, suggesting how atrocity seeps into everyday life and even into the intimacy of the home.

In works such as I Don’t Want to Be There When It Happens (2013–ongoing), chandeliers of hand-beaten tin birds become collective monuments to lives lost in Karachi’s cycle of violence, their shadow play evoking both the sublime spaces of Mughal architecture and the haunting absence of the dead.

Suleman has exhibited extensively worldwide. Solo presentations include Grosvenor Gallery, London (2024); Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham (2022); Sullivan+Strumpf, Singapore (2019); Aicon Gallery, New York (2017, 2014); Gandhara Art Gallery, Karachi (2017); Davide Gallo Gallery, Milan (2017); Canvas Gallery, Karachi (2015, 2012); Alberto Peola Gallery, Torino (2012); Aicon Gallery, London (2011); and Rohtas Gallery, Lahore (2008). Her work has also been featured in major group exhibitions such as Embodied Change: South Asian Art Across Time at the Seattle Asian Art Museum (2022), Media Art in Focus – Part III at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2022), 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane (2021–22), the Singapore Biennale (2016), and Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan at Asia Society, New York(2009).

Suleman is the founding member and director of Vasl Artists’ Association in Karachi, Odd Bird Art in Singapore and Karachi, and the Suleman Annual Grant for Arts (SAGA). From 2008 to 2019 she served as Head of the Fine Art Department at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, where she remains a leading voice in arts education and mentorship.

Her work has been widely reviewed in Artforum, BOMB Magazine, The New York Times, and Art Asia Pacific. Her monograph Not Everyone’s Heaven was published by Skira in 2020, followed by Art, Violence and the State in the Killing Fields of Karachi (with Mariam Ali Baig) in 2022.

Suleman continues to live and work in Karachi, creating art that confronts the coexistence of beauty and brutality, and the cultural conditions through which violence is normalised.