Artist residency at the Allama Iqbal Centre
To Break the Horizon brings together the culminating works of fine artist Seyyed Ali Ameem Naqvi and mixed-media practitioner and poet Zain Haider Awan. This collection was created during their residency at the Allama Iqbal Centre, shaped through community engagement with youths and elders alike, grounding Iqbal’s thought within the lived realities of contemporary Britain.
Seyyed and Zain based themselves at the centre for a large part of their residency, making the artworks in the classroom as users of the centre popped in, chatted about the work and Iqbal, and asked questions about techniques and meaning. The artists inspired youth club attendees to have a go at creating their own zoomorphic artworks, learning about how to use text and writing within drawing and visual art.
Drawing from themes of migration, movement, emancipation, decoloniality and empire, the exhibition reflects on how Iqbal’s philosophy resonates across diasporic experiences. Central to this exploration is the question of khudi – selfhood, and how its cultivation might open pathways toward a more expansive, flourishing sense of being.
Across digital media, pencil studies, pen drawings, paintings, poems, prose, and collaborative installations, Naqvi and Awan reimagine Iqbal for a new generation. Their works invite viewers to encounter the intimate, restless, horizon-seeking spirit at the heart of Iqbal’s imaginings, refracted through the textures of modern Britain.
As well as a collection of canvases and paper drawings and poems, a selection of the work was transformed into vinyls and attached at height to the wooden panels on the walls of the centre, as a permanent welcoming display.
About Seyyed Naqvi
I am a local artist residing in Peterborough and am a fully qualified secondary school Art & Design teacher since 2006, having taught in various schools & Higher Education institutes within Cambridgeshire, Birmingham and London
I completed my degree in Fine Art from Derby University in 1995 and have continued to produce art for private commissions in the form of canvases, an inhouse Mural for a restaurant and very recently for a football club in Peterborough, the compositions of which included Graffiti Art and portraits of famous footballers. The current work in progress for the Allama Iqbal Centre in Peterborough is inspired by the love for the poet, Alama Iqbal’s work, and desire to interpret it via visual expression in the form of canvases, paintings and drawings that include calligraphy, flora and fauna and mixed media. Nick Bantock, Escher and Jim Butler amongst other artists are influences also for my work.
About Zain Haider Awan
Zain Haider Awan is a multi-award-winning creative, cultural advocate, and strategist whose work spans poetry, performance, academia, and technology. His writing weaves faith, identity, and resistance into intimate and spiritually resonant narratives that have been showcased internationally across stage, screen, and gallery, including The Spaces in Between (Islamabad) and Once We Were Too (UK).
Through his multidisciplinary practice, he reimagines creativity as both a spiritual act and a framework for alternative imaginings.
