Abid Farhan




Abid Farhan (b.2001, Dhaka, Bangladesh) is a London-based artist working across painting, photography, moving image and sound. Farhan's practice explores the psychogeographic relationship between people and place, considering how diasporic lives and memories are soaked into the surface of our environments.

Drawing on his lived experience of Bangladeshi diasporic identity, migration and architectural theory, Farhan considers how multiple truths can co-exist, the conflicting identities held within a person between two countries and places reflect the sense of self.

Farhan’s work is concerned with pushing the formal qualities of his mediums. Simultaneously, he folds in flickers of imagery and feelings, from his environment and past, to create codified works with a tinge of surreality. Through this, he slightly shifts the angle at which viewers perceive, creating a condition to encounter the familiar in a new form.

Art-making for Farhan is a way to draw from his past stories to be in contact with them. Through expressing those stories in new forms and mediums, the intention is to understand himself in a new way and create gaps through which the perceived distance between people of differing backgrounds is collapsed, and a condition to find commonality is created.

Recent presentations include The Gaps - Listening Session, Harlesden High Street (2026), Our voices under this surface, TURF Projects (2025)


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Painting and Visual arts
Memory collages
Studies after Frank Auerbach

Our voices under this surface


Music


Video 


Photography 

A dream in details
At my feet
 


Miscellaneous
Post-it note sculpture, 2025, Post-it note, glue stick, pen
Post it note blocks are an interesting surface because they are defined so much by a specific function. Post it notes give off the feeling of a fleeting and transient moment; a reminder, a sudden idea, a temporary list. They are portable, fit very easily into pockets or is not a nuisance to carry around. They come in bright colours (my personal favourite being the more subdued yellow ones) perfect to grab attention, mark, sign post a singular idea. 

They have a very defined and close relationship with functionality.  So then this sculptural piece who is made of a post it note block with rectangular voids carved in, cuboids stuck on top, displaced, the square shape disrupted and every page stuck together completely removes that functionality and suspends this object as a strange new object with traces of the familiar but all together new and confusing. 

The sketches on top are doodles, based on my practicing of automatic drawing techniques.  

It feels complete but in progress like a sketch.