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

• The Gaps EP (Upcoming)
  
• Soundtrack for ‘Learning to Drive in Birmingham (upcoming)
  
• The Gaps: Listening Session
• Kuon EP
• Trace Album

Video 

• We don’t talk about it music video  
• Kuon music video 

Photography 

A dream in details
At my feet 

Our voices under this surface | Commissioned exhibition | First presented at TURF, Croydon,  2025 

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Our voices under this surface is the first solo exhibition of artist Abid Farhan (Bangladesh, b. 2001) in collaboration with his friends. The show comprises 8 new paintings broadly beginning an exploration into ideas of spaces as containers of memory. The scenes are from the artists hometown of Ilford, London, a site of various, and often diasporic, lives crossing over; from the mundanity of the domestic and familial life to the darker undertones of gang culture. The residue from all these life stories is absorbed by the porous surfaces of our environment. These paintings depict how the specificity of lived experience never reappears on the surface, but over time, the patina of these experiences crops up one way or another, hinting at a complex existence. To find it, you must look attentively and with patience. Thus, it becomes a metaphor for finding common ground. This contrasts with the speed with which short-form content, like arrow heads, decisively pierces us with content, with surface-level (dis)information, eliciting immediate and volatile reactions.   

On the surface, these paintings could be of any suburban town. Appearing more as memories, these hazy hues and seemingly mundane compositions of Ilford teeter between the uncanny banality of suburbia and the harsh realities of a decaying and yet gentrifying area. Instead of interpretative captions, the exhibition is interspersed with reflections from the artist's community. These texts reflect on childhood memories, the town's built environment, South Asian diasporic experiences, and cultures of violence and masculinity.  

Please note painting and reflective text make up the pieces.


Credits:

Paintings and concept development by Abid Farhan 
Curated by Vaishna Surjid 
Texts by Ibrahim Islam, Rajdeep Bharj, Suki Padda, Avneet Ubhi
Title graphic by Mia Bharj 
Graphic Design Cin Namon 
With thanks to TURF Projects for use of their project space