Hanna Noor Mahomed (b. 1999, Durban, South Africa) graduated from Cape Town Creative Academy with a Bachelor of Arts in Contemporary Art in 2019 and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town in 2022.

Storytelling is central to Hanna Noor Mahomed’s practice. Her narratives, however, do not lend themselves to legibility - the artist resisting pictorial clarity in favour of productive ambiguity. That her paintings and drawings are rooted in abstraction is, she suggests, an invitation to more expansive complexity. Noor Mahomed works against the aesthetic assumptions and demands, and the expected foregrounding of identity politics, that so many minority artists are freighted with. How might one centre one’s religious and cultural experience without reaffirming conceptions of otherness and difference? In answer, she composes stories gleaned from personal, collective, speculative, and historical accounts, gesturing to those narratives that go unheard and untold. Quoting a range of religious motifs, political symbols, traditionally Western tropes, and essentialist images, Noor Mahomed considers how these accumulated signifiers are disrupted by a new and unfamiliar context. The resulting, hybrid compositions, with their layers, quotes, and fractal forms, offer alternative imaginings of the past, present, and future.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2024
'Rage Against the Dying of the Light', WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, South Africa

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2024
'A Very Loop Street Summer III', EBONY/CURATED, Cape Town, South Africa
'...as we see it', EBONY/CURATED, Cape Town, South Africa
'The Light Between', WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, South Africa

2023

‘Common', A4 Art Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa
'Oh So Quiet,' WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, South Africa
'Elemental', 99 Loop Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

2022

'Disruption', A4 Art Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa
'Untitled 9.99', 99 Loop Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa