TA: Describe your painting technique and relationship with colour and abstraction.

HNM: I’ve always been an observer. Growing up in a smaller city, I spent hours taking photos, documenting life as it unfolded. That instinct to archive became foundational to how I make art.

When I begin a painting, I start by abstracting existing images—reducing them to shape, rhythm, and colour. It’s intuitive, but also methodical. My hand often knows where to go before my mind catches up.

Colour is essential and embodied. Durban’s lush, tropical landscape shaped my visual memory. I grew up in a home full of bold, sensory experiences—gardens bursting with flowers, monkeys in the trees. That vibrancy stays with me and lives in the way I work.

TA: What forms, motifs, and signs regularly appear in your work?

HNM: I’m fascinated by symbols—how they’re read, misread, and manipulated by power. You’ll often find mosque domes, minarets, stars, and moons in my paintings. These were part of my everyday growing up, but for years I distanced myself from them because of how Islamophobic narratives had reframed their meaning. Slowly, I reclaimed them—not through religion, but through memory, beauty, and love.

I also return often to natural landscapes—mountains, birds, the sea. These are elemental forms that ground me. Table Mountain, in particular, recurs across my work. It represents presence, rootedness, and resilience.

TA: You discuss a connection to Islamic architecture. How does this appear in your art?

HNM: Islamic architecture shaped my visual world. I attended both secular and religious schools, moving between two very different spatial and ideological registers. I spent time in mosques that were both sacred and ordinary—spaces of ritual and repetition.

One recurring motif is the Grey Street Mosque in Durban, which my great-grandfather helped build. Its form, history, and personal resonance continually reappear in my work. The architecture of minarets, domes, and intricate geometry feels embedded in me. These visual codes are part of why I feel so connected to abstraction.

TA: Why have you been drawn to figures like Salman Rushdie and the discourses that surround them?

HNM: Rushdie shaped much of my early thinking—his ability to inhabit the “third space,” to write between cultures and histories, was formative. He stood for artistic defiance and freedom of speech.

But that admiration shifted. In 2024, he gave an interview in Berlin that aligned him with right-wing narratives on Palestine. It felt like a rupture—a betrayal of the very values he once championed.

That moment became the subject of my painting Rushdie the Puppet II, exhibited in Hot Spots (The Third Line x Tabari Artspace at Sotheby’s Dubai). In it, I abstract his facial features—those same features once caricatured in effigies—exploring how symbols, like people, change under pressure.

TA: Tell us about your new series, The Burning of Her Heart Illuminates a Ruin.

HNM: This series is about transformation, and perhaps even transcendence. It’s inspired by women whose lives—rich, complicated, often painful—have been overshadowed or flattened by history.

TA: What are the recurring motifs in this series?

HNM: Butterflies and birds carry this series—they signify change, motion, freedom. The title comes from Forugh Farrokhzad’s poem Captive. She writes, “I am that candle which illuminates a ruin with the burning of her heart.” That line became a touchstone—a way to think about the light that can emerge from suffering.

TA: Can you tell us about some of the key works? 

She who must endure trials (Nomzamo), 2025

This is a portrait of Winnie Mandela. “Nomzamo” means “she who must endure trials,” and the painting reflects the complexity of her life—both as a liberation figure and as a woman with her own path. A bird motif nods to the one often seen on her garments.

The one who wears the plumes of the rare bird (Isithwalandwe), 2025

Named after the highest ANC honour awarded to freedom fighters. This painting, also of Winnie Mandela, recognises the enormity of her contribution—too often eclipsed by the men around her.

The soul is here to transform, 2025

Anchored by the butterfly, this work evokes feminist and resistance movements—Woman, Life, Freedom in Iran, and uprisings in Palestine. It’s a call to shed the comfort of stasis and embrace the difficult work of change.

Al-Qarawiyyin, 2025 

This piece is rooted in the University of Al-Qarawiyyin in Fes, founded in 859 AD by Fatima Al-Fihri. It draws from a collage referencing Farha, the Palestinian film, and protest imagery from Kashmir, among others. It’s a meditation on knowledge, erasure, and resistance led by women.