Hanna Noor Mahomed - Biography

Hanna Noor Mahomed (b. 1999, Durban, South Africa) graduated from Cape Town Creative Academy with a Bachelor of Arts in Contemporary Art in 2019, and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from the University of Cape T own in 2022.

Storytelling is central to Hanna Noor Mahomed’s practice. Her narratives, however, do not lend themselves to legibility - the artist resisting pictorial clarity in favour of productive ambiguity. That her paintings and drawings are rooted in abstraction is, she suggests, an invitation to more expansive complexity. Noor Mahomed works against the aesthetic assumptions and demands, and the expected foregrounding of identity politics, that so many minority artists are freighted with.

How might one centre one’s religious and cultural experience without reaffirming conceptions of otherness and difference? In answer, she composes stories gleaned from personal, collective, speculative, and historical accounts, gesturing to those narratives that go unheard and untold. Quoting a range of religious motifs, political symbols, traditionally Western tropes, and essentialist images, Noor Mahomed considers how a new and unfamiliar context disrupts these accumulated signifiers. The resulting, hybrid compositions,

with their layers, quotes, and fractal forms, offer alternative imaginings of the past, present, and future.

EDUCATION

2017 - 2019, BA Contemporary Art, Cape Town Creative Academy, Cape Town.

2022, Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art, University of Cape Town, Cape Town.

SOLO SHOWS

2024, Rage Against the Dying of the Light, WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, South Africa

GROUP SHOWS

2024, ... as we see it, EBONY/CURATED, Cape Town, South Africa

The Light Between, WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, South Africa

2023, Common, A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa

Oh So Quiet, WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, South Africa

Elemental | A Group Exhibition, 99 Loop Gallery

2022, Disruption, A4 Art Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa