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)


Email
CV
Instagram

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 

Studies after Frank Auerbach 2025 

I

Studies after Frank Auerbach are a series of sketches made in 2025 inspired heavily by the late artist Frank Auerbach, known for a style that is unbeliavably rigirous, focused and volatile. He would often spend exuberant amounts of time on sketches with sitters, often having them sit for him for months. drawing, shading and constructing before rubbing large swathes of it away and starting over. A reptitaitve, manic and maddening process whos aim was to create a singular new image capturing something that a previous piece hasn’t. Often the papers would accumalte tears and holes that would get patched up with fresh paper. Ultimately the drawings aren’t subbordinate to a process thats main output is a painting but it is the main piece, an object of art in and of itself. 

I first saw his work at the Cortauld show: Frank Auerbach. The Charcoal Heads, and was immediatley drawn in and blown away. these works were eventually created a year and a half after.   I referenced images of black and white streetscapes from a book on italian town architecture. A similar process of tracing and retracing, erasure and layering marks and different paper types creates a similar type of depth. 

This project was primarily an experiment and the result work is an expression of the feeling of a city bursting at it seems. The city of London.