Paiband
12 June - 12 July 2026
Virtual Solo Show of Rafique Shah
For Rafique Shah, Paiband is not just a word, it’s the soul of his practice, where the word carries the personal memory of the artist’s family history of Fakeeri. A language shaped by the movement, repairs and survivals.
Rafique recalls how torn cloths were never thrown away instead, they were carefully repaired with the pieces of fabric stitched together, creating a patch that covers the ruptured part. Over the period of time, these patches become the part of the cloth itself by preserving the marks of use, movement and survival.
This memory quietly enters into Rafique’s works where each plane is stitched together with geometric interruptions, layered surfaces, silent grids and blocks of colours. At first glance, everything appears abstract, but underneath them is a carries visible history of rupture, memory and lived experience, much like Paiband.
With Paiband we are not romanticising poverty, nostalgia or loss. Instead, we talk about repairs as a living condition, incomplete, visible and ongoing. In a world that constantly seeks for seamlessness and erasure of imperfection, Shah’s works remind that fractures and marks too has form, a rhythm and a beauty.
In his works the patch becomes a metaphor of identity itself, assembled through memory, displacement, care, and persistence. His works invites viewers into a space where abstraction carries the weight of lived histories. For us these are not merely paintings of colour and form, but quiet act of remembering, surfaces where wounds are neither hidden nor healed entirely, but transformed into enduring sites of resilience and becoming.
Do not forget to share your feedback with us after exploring the exhibition:
Project Significance
We built Paiband around a simple but genuine question: what does repair look like when it is done honestly?
Not the kind of repair that conceals damage. Not the seamless restoration that pretends nothing ever broke. But the visible, ongoing repair of someone who has been through something and continues anyway, carrying the mark of it, not hiding it, finding in the mark itself a form of dignity and beauty.
We live in a world that has become very skilled at hiding its joins. At producing surfaces that appear whole, effortless, uninterrupted. Imperfection is edited out. Damage is concealed. The evidence of time and use and repair is treated as something to be ashamed of.
Rafique Shah's paintings do not participate in this. His geometric lines are seams, present and visible. His layered surfaces hold the evidence of what has been built up beneath them. His white spaces are honest about what cannot be filled. His paintings insist, quietly but completely, that the visible repair has its own form, its own rhythm, its own beauty.
Through this exhibition, we want to offer a space, literally and metaphorically, where that insistence can be felt. Where a viewer can stand in front of a painting and recognise something in it that they already know from their own life. The held-together thing. The tended thing. The thing that is not perfect but is present and continuing.
Sessions happening during the Exhibition:
About the Artist
Rafique Shah is an Indian abstract artist whose practice explores memory, displacement, silence, and the emotional residue of lived experience through layered surfaces, geometric interruptions, and colour relationships. Born in a village in Madhya Pradesh and later shaped by the complexities of urban life, his works move between rural memory and contemporary restlessness, forming visual spaces that carry traces of migration, belonging, rupture, and repair.
Rafique studied at the Indore School of Art, where his early engagement with drawing, geometry, literature, music, and landscape painting gradually evolved into a distinctive abstract vocabulary. Influenced by the coexistence of colours in nature and the philosophical ideas surrounding stillness and nothingness, his works focus less on representation and more on revelation, where abstraction becomes a way of sensing memory and experience beyond direct narration.
His practice has been recognised through several awards, scholarships, and exhibitions across India and internationally. He is a recipient of the Lalit Kala Akademi Scholarship, and his works have been exhibited at prestigious galleries including Aicon Gallery, New York.
Through his paintings, Rafique Shah continues to investigate how memory survives through fragments, silence, and layered acts of repair, transforming abstraction into a quiet yet powerful space of reflection.