Natasha Tareen, BREAK AND ENTRY (detail), 2025.
Image courtesy of Adhyan Dhull.
Natasha Tareen
Gallery 2
Friday 16 May - Sunday 8 June
Opening Thursday 15 May, 6pm - 8pm
SPLIT OPEN marks the debut solo exhibition of artist Natasha Tareen. Rooted in the mythological and folkloric elements of Central and South Asia, this body of work traverses deeply personal and ancestral narratives to explore the complexity of brown femininity, bodily autonomy, and generational memory.
Drawing from her Afghan heritage, she meshes together symbolic references to mythological figures, storytelling, and familial history to create a visual language that is both intimate and otherworldly. Figures emerge from dark, dreamlike spaces, hovering between presence and disappearance. These works resist colonial linear storytelling in favour of atmospheric, layered compositions that reflect the depth of identity and memory.
The exhibition features large-scale, scroll-like pieces alongside reimagined objects and painted clothing. SPLIT OPEN gestures toward forms of protection, transformation, and inherited knowledge. Ethereal textures and harsh compositions serve as marks of both rupture and restoration, investigating what it means to hold trauma and resilience in the same space.
Through a multidisciplinary lens, this work explores how ancestral stories live in the body. SPLIT OPEN asks: what shifts when we examine what we've inherited, and do we choose to open it up, forcefully, honestly?
Rather than simply reflecting on cultural legacy, this exhibition is part of an ongoing process of reclaiming it. It traces a path through story, spirit, and self, one that is continuous.
About the Artist
Natasha Tareen, 2025. Image courtesy of Adhyan Dhull.
Natasha Tareen is an emerging visual artist based in Canberra. Working across several mediums inclusive of charcoal, painting and textiles, her practice is driven by a desire to reclaim fragmented histories and give form to the emotional weight of inherited experience.
Her work explores themes of brown femininity, myth, bodily autonomy, and generational memory. Tareen's work often merges dreamlike imagery with symbolic references to mythology and familial history, resulting in atmospheric compositions that evoke both intimacy and disruption.
Tareen was a finalist in the ANU School of Art & Design Drawing Prize and was recently part of Everything I Am Not (2024), a group exhibition curated by Yona Su and Joyce Fan at Platform by Canberra Contemporary.
Her debut solo exhibition, SPLIT OPEN, showcases large-scale scrolls, painted garments, and object-based work that reflect on intersectional femininity, protection, transformation, and inherited knowledge.
Tareen's multidisciplinary approach resists linear storytelling, instead tracing layered narratives through @natasha.tareenbody, memory, and spirit.