Sana Qaiser on Painting the In-Between

Sana Qaiser's studio is a narrow room with one good window. She paints in the morning, stops at two, and does not talk about work in progress.

People want a painting to be about something. Mine are about a temperature.

Sana Qaiser

Her canvases arrive at colour slowly — six or seven thin layers of oil, each allowed to dry properly, which in Karachi's humidity is its own act of patience.

On abstraction

"Abstraction gets treated as evasion here," she says. "As if you're refusing to say something political. But weather is political. Where you can afford to stand in the shade is political."