BIOGRAPHY

Samiya Younis is a British-Pakistani Kashmiri multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, painting, performance, textiles, photography and research. Her work explores diasporic identity, cultural memory, migration, belonging and the legacies of colonialism.

Younis graduated with an MA in Fine Art: Sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 2019 and a First Class BA (Hons) in Fine Art: Sculpture from Wimbledon College of Arts, University of the Arts London, in 2017. Her work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally, including exhibitions in London, Venice and Miami.

I am a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores diasporic identity, cultural memory, belonging and the legacies of migration and colonialism. Drawing on my British-Pakistani and Kashmiri heritage, I work with personal and intergenerational histories to consider how identity is inherited, negotiated and transformed across generations and geographies.

Working across sculpture, installation, painting, performance, textiles, photography and archival research, my earlier works examine gender, cultural expectation and the ways women’s bodies and identities can become sites of control, resistance and negotiation. Other works consider migration, Partition, homeland and the complex experience of belonging to places that can feel simultaneously familiar, inherited and distant.

More recently, my practice has become increasingly concerned with fragmentation, material memory, preservation and repair. I use unfired terracotta, textiles, casting, found and archival objects, photographs and fragile natural forms. Through imprinting, moulding, threading with gold, ornamentation, repetition, preservation and responding to accidental breakage, I explore how materials can hold traces of people, places and histories that may no longer be physically present.

The archive is central to this enquiry, extending beyond documents and photographs into objects, surfaces, fragments and impressions. I am interested in the space between fragility and permanence, and in how something broken, displaced or partially lost can continue to carry knowledge and memory.

Across my practice, I return to questions of what survives, what is inherited, what is erased, and how acts of making, preservation and repair might allow cultural memory to be reinterpreted rather than fixed.