A Knock on the Door: Ancestral Ghosts by Maliha Abidi
Panel Talk and Opening Night 8 August
A solo exhibition by Maliha Abidi A Knock on the Door: Ancestral Ghosts explores what it means to live in a constant state of displacement, of not feeling at home in the place you come from, nor fully belonging to the place you now live. The titular work is a new animation, shown alongside a recent painting that reflects the artist’s interdisciplinary practice.
The exhibition will open on 8 August with a panel talk led by Maliha, running until 26 August, 10am-5pm.
This panel explores the role of memory, migration, and inherited absence in shaping contemporary artistic and curatorial practices. It interrogates how diasporic artists, and cultural workers resist institutional pressures to assimilate or perform identity for legibility. The conversation centres how cultural memory—often fragmented or suppressed—becomes a site of resistance, reinvention, and community.
The panel will reflect on:
- What haunts us in our practices (artistic and curatorial) and why?
- How do we negotiate visibility without flattening complexity?
- What does it mean to hold space for contradiction, silence, or refusal within institutions?
Speakers:
Maliha Abidi
Dr Chantal Faust, the Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art
Kaia Charles, Senior Cultural Projects Manager at NOW Gallery and Greenwich Peninsula
Moderator: Alisa Lisovskaia
About the exhibition
Drawing from family archives and personal history, this exhibition weaves together the migration stories of the artist’s grandparents, who journeyed from India to Bangladesh, and then to Pakistan, with her own experience of living in the diaspora and the emotional landscape passed down through generations. “‘Where is home’ becomes the most difficult question to answer” the artist says.
Now living in the lands of the former colonisers, the artist unpacks the emotional tension of that inherited migration — the contradiction of building a life in a place that once disrupted your own ancestral home. The exhibition asks what happens to those stories that were never fully told, those memories that slip between generations, and how one might begin to preserve what’s fading.
Embedded within this work is a critique of how Western capitalist societies reduce identity to transactional terms—where worth is tied to visibility, productivity, and conformity. In these conditions, memory becomes harder to sustain, and identity is often compressed into simplified, legible forms—risking tokenisation rather than true recognition. What becomes of ancestral stories—of nuance, grief, and resistance—when dominant culture only values them if they serve an instrumental purpose or fit convenient narratives?
This is not a search for resolution. It’s an act of reflection, investigation, and quiet resistance. A desperate attempt to hold on to disappearing narratives, and to make space for conversations about colonialism, migration, and one’s identity, especially of those who exist between borders, languages, and lands.
Using archival materials, personal and collective memory, Abidi has developed this new body of work that invites viewers into an immersive space of quiet reckoning. A Knock on the Door: Ancestral Ghosts a refusal of forgetting.
About Maliha Abidi
A Pakistani-American multidisciplinary artist and Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree, Maliha’s work spans painting, VR, and Web3, focusing on migration, gender, and the South Asian diaspora. She is also the founder of Women Rise and BackPackX.
