ShopArtist Spotlight: Multidisciplinary Artist Zahra Bundakji
Zahra is an artist working across diverse media, which includes sculpture, sound, ceramics, performance, image and installation. Her work considers communication, relationships and shared experience, often examining how the familiar objects, gestures and spaces of everyday life can reveal wider social and cultural structures.
Art was part of Bundakji’s everyday life long before it became a practice. Growing up among family members from different cultural backgrounds, she was surrounded by different languages, traditions and ways of gathering, often centred around the preparation and sharing of food. Together, they celebrated the plurality of life: Bollywood dance routines with cousins, cassette collections, MTV music videos and hours spent wandering fabric markets.
Her mother, an educator who formally taught art, was central to this environment, extending creativity beyond the classroom and into family life. “She was living a creative life, and she generously invited us into it,” Bundakji recalls. These early experiences of making, gathering and communicating across different creative languages continue to resonate through her practice.
Bundakji’s practice often begins with a question rather than a particular medium. Research develops through conversations, oral histories, observation and lived experience before moving into a materially driven process. She follows a subject until its form begins to reveal itself, whether through sculpture, sound, performance, image or installation: “The research could honestly last forever, so at some point I have to stop thinking and start filming, casting, sanding, mould making, and getting covered in dust,” she says.
Zahra first encountered ceramics while studying figure modelling in San Francisco. It wasn’t until she moved to Barcelona that she truly fell in love with the material. A close friendship with a ceramicist completely transformed her relationship with clay. She initially entered the medium intending to create conceptual sculptures, only to discover a genuine love for making plates and vases, alongside her contemporary art practice.
Her work The Voice of Listening marked a formative point in this approach, bringing together sound, spatial installation and oral histories gathered from women across generations. Listening became both subject and method: a way of considering how people communicate, how individual experiences enter collective space, and how relationships formed through the act of listening can become part of the work itself.
More recently, motherhood and caregiving have expanded the questions Bundakji brings into her practice, particularly around who artistic spaces make room for and how art might respond to the lives unfolding within and around them. Current works bring care, play, sound and intergenerational relationships into the conversation, extending her interest in participation and shared experience without negotiating between nurture and art. These concerns also inform Bundakji’s curatorial practice. Having begun by organising exhibitions alongside other emerging independent artists, she continues to approach curation through conversation and experimentation. She values the time before an exhibition takes form, when artists and curators exchange references, test ideas and allow projects to change through dialogue.
Her advice to emerging artists follows the same spirit: “come together. Promote each other to oblivion. Share studios. Critique each other’s work, and actively seek critique of your own.” She encourages artists to continuously make, remain open to having their ideas challenged and pursue grants, residencies, open calls and other opportunities without waiting for either the work or themselves to feel perfectly ready.
Saha, Hayy Jameel’s central community courtyard is Zahra’s favorite part for its welcoming ambience. Through Hayy Makers, her dream of a communal ceramics studio came true. Leading a workshop there was a full-circle moment, returning home after a decade studying abroad to share her craft with the local community that inspired it.
The Hayy Jameel ‘Artist Spotlight’ series aims to spotlight emerging creatives who are making a significant impact in their fields.