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Artist of the Month: Durre Shahwar

  • 22 minutes ago
  • 9 min read

Artist of the Month is a feature where we put the spotlight on the incredible work of one of our members.


Our Artist of the Month is Durre Shahwar, an award-winning writer, editor, and artist whose work examines identity, narrative form, and the politics of representation.


Durre recently had her first solo exhibition, 'One of the Good Ones', at Ffotogallery! Read on to learn more about the commission and exhibition, as well as hearing from Durre about her practice, experiences, teaching, PhD, and exciting career highlights so far.



'One of the Good Ones' Exhibition:


The exhibition responds to Ffotogallery’s archive, and reflects on how place, documentation, and symbolism take on different meanings under the threat of erasure and the impact of seeking asylum.


Documentation of material and seemingly ordinary objects becomes fraught when faced with loss and (dis)placement, creating an oscillating attachment and detachment to them.


Autofictional layering of text and images capture the process of (re)constructing an identity and challenge how power is assigned through documentation. Meanwhile, the psycho-geographical remapping of Adamsdown, Cardiff, becomes a site for preserving individual memory and narrative within a collective experience.


Through a process of re-writing, re-visiting, re-presenting, One of The Good Ones addresses gaps within the Ffotogallery archive while presenting a personal counter-archive which challenges dominant ways of documenting and assigning value.


About the commission:


This commission was funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund as part of Ffotogallery’s ongoing archive project. Research into the Ffotogallery archive revealed a lack of diversity, with communities such as queer and disabled people underrepresented in the collection.


To address this, Ffotogallery commissioned two artists: one who identifies as LGBTQIA+, and one who identifies as disabled, to explore the archive and create new work in response. The resulting pieces will be acquired into the collection, expanding and diversifying the archive to reflect.


Following an open call, Durre Shahwar was selected for the Disabled artist commission, and Rhys Slade-Jones selected for the LGBTQIA+ artist commission, with Cwm Here Now shown late last year.



Congratulations on your solo exhibition 'One of the Good Ones' at Ffotogallery! How have you found the experience of putting this exhibition together?


The experience has been quite wonderful. There have definitely been difficult moments as the work draws from my own experience of seeking asylum and citizenship and draws on objects, place, symbolism and imagery associated with that. The emotional weight of revisiting something that I’ve never explored creatively or publicly was a lot to carry, especially since my anxiety and panic disorder stems, to an extent, from this experience. However, Ffotogallery created the space for those conversations to happen with care and reflection throughout the process. They practised a way of working that gave me flexibility, autonomy, and control over the narrative and how the work was presented, where there were no wrong approaches, which I haven’t experienced before. The work is anti-colonial not just in theme but in practice. And this approach is important, given that people like me are often spoken for, our voices often mediated through well-meaning facilitators or translators or interpreters. We are always one step removed from being able to tell our own story, which was why I felt it was the right moment and space to tell mine.


There was also the question of challenging how to portray this experience - rejecting a sort of a photographic colonialism or self-orientalism that occurs when depicting the experience of asylum seekers and refugees which portrays us in pitiful or traumatic lights.


I spent quite a bit of time going through Ffotogallery’s archive, making notes, taking pictures. While going through the archive, I realised that stories of Cardiff’s refugee and asylum-seeking communities were missing from it. I also started to think of the idea of an archive itself – who gets to define it? What does it mean beyond empirical and Western terms? Who gets to have one, when having one seems a privilege? Who gets to dictate what goes in it? What can it look like beyond documents or photographs?


Documentation is such a technical and sanitised term and reminded me of my family’s process of obtaining and securing and providing documents when we sought asylum and citizenship. So all of that came together in the work where I present a counter-archive in response to Ffotogallery’s archive, that draws on the universal symbol of displacement in the form of laundry bags that we also carried our things in, or a shed of objects that are our archive, or variation of passport photos that present and (re)present the self.



Could you tell us about the relationship between writing and visual art in your work?


For the longest time, I viewed them as two separate entities, perhaps because there was a key moment in my life where I had to choose between writing or art in terms of what I studied at university. I chose writing, and tunnel visioned all my energy into it for the next 8 years or so. But I never stopped taking photographs. I consciously started to pay attention to how visual art was a part of my practice a few years ago when I started to rely more and more on images and visual work to construct a written piece. I would go through photographs I had taken while on a walk on the Wales Coastal Path in West Wales, for example, because I wanted to describe and remember exactly how blue the sea was that day. The photographs became a way of transporting me back to that certain time and place, the memory of which I would use for detail and construct a narrative around. Slowly, this helped me unshackle from the separation or the visual and the written. I see both writing and visual work as a way to revisit memory, capture a moment in time, re-construct our sense of self or our narrative or become a symbol for something larger. They both are, in a way, a form of archiving and a way to cast an eye on a narrative from a specific angle that otherwise might go amiss or be looked over. My writing is often also quite fragmented, and I avoid going to great lengths to explain or justify myself in my work – which I’m often told I should do and is something I particularly had to give in to doing when it came to writing ‘academically’ during my PhD. Academia particularly seems to have this hangover with over-explaining things in convoluted ways. My writing is always attempting to reject that. I guess that’s why I’m drawn to the visual, where the work can be more open to interpretation rather than dictation.



What drives you to create? Have your own experiences shaped your practice?


I create in resistance to homogenisation of our experiences and of our identity. In resistance to categorisations, although categories seem increasingly difficult to escape from and we often impose them on ourselves. Everyone’s experience is unique and no two stories will ever be the same, which is great because it means there’s always room for more. I also create to shed light on things that I feel aren’t said or depicted with complexity or nuance. Stories that are underrepresented. Narratives that need to be looked at with your head tiled at an angle, almost, to understand properly. In doing so, I seek to challenge whose stories and voices get platformed.


My own experiences are central to my practice. I think everyone’s are, to an extent. Others simply may not be as conscious or obvious. But all art is personal to an extent because it comes from us. Lived experience can be resistance to dominant narratives, but is also a form of research, practice, and data.


I also think there is something empowering as a person of colour to own that – to say that my lived experience has informed my work – in a world that wants people like me to be silent and to disappear and shrink at every angle. I experienced this first hand when I read at a bookshop at the beginning of my career almost 8 years ago, after which, a very established writer came up to me and told that drawing on my experience was ‘cheating’. I carried that with me for years and it almost strangled my writing. Over time, I came to realise that those words came from him saw my voice as a threat and weren’t a reflection of the work itself. So, I create in resistance to that. And in resistance to shame, silence, or judgement.



Could you tell us about your PhD and the nature of your practice as research-led?


It was a creative-critical PhD, looking at representations of a Pakistani-Welsh identity through the lens of autofiction. It used autofiction and hybrid writing as a framework to portray how a Welsh-Pakistani identity differs from a British South Asian identity, and how place, memory, identity, construct it. My research resulted in a creative/critical monograph, which depicted not only this hybrid identity, but also ways of writing such as fragmentation, non-linear narratives, critical reflection and experimentation that speak to this hybridity. I completed it in 2024, yet the research has continued and transformed.


My practice is research-led in the sense that, as with the Ffotogallery commission, I spend days gathering research, reading, material, notes, footage, that feels all-consuming and eventually results in something more focused as an outcome. My work is the result of being in conversation with research material – the research is often the starting point. But I interpret the word ‘research’ much more abstractly than just academic journals or archives even. The research is both a noun and a verb and can even be going for a walk.



Could you tell us about 'Writing for Wellbeing: South Asian Stories' and your approach to designing and facilitating these workshops?


I wanted to create a space for South Asian women to come together and explore writing and reading poetry as a tool for wellbeing in their everyday lives. A lot of my own shame and silence around mental health resulted in me not being able to get help for a long time, and I wanted to open up the conversation within my community away from Western clinical frameworks and diagnosis and create a safe space to explore taboos and certain topics. Research has also shown that writing about a personal experience for even as little as 20 minutes each week can significantly reduce stress and improve quality of life and ‘inhibiting or holding back one's thoughts, feelings, or behaviours is associated with long-term stress and disease’. The foundation of my practice is that writing is a life-affirming, and gives us autonomy over our narratives and experiences, and allows us to convey them to others, thus ‘unburdening’ and ‘un-inhibiting’ us – a form of art therapy. So, the project seeks to bring all of this together.



Are there any projects that have been particular highlights for you, or that you feel have had a significant impact on your practice?


Apart from my Ffotogallery exhibition, which has been super pivotal, I spent 2025 developing my creative practice thanks to an ACW grant. The project was called Visual Language, and I spent time developing a visual language for my work that brings together moving image and text. It gave me the space, time, and support to develop lenses, mediums, and tones of my practice and speaking to other artists without thinking of an outcome. It was also the first time that I’ve had access support as a disabled artist, and it made a world of a difference as it meant that I could go see work without hinderance. I hope to continue to develop this work and am open to collaboration.


I ended 2025 co-delivering an online course on Writing Autofiction for Literature Wales with Meena Kandasamy. A large part of my practice is teaching and workshops, and we designed an entire module on autofiction and memoir writing, which I will continue to develop and deliver in various capacities alongside my Writing for Wellbeing workshops. It feels significant because I continue to find new things to learn and teach about autofiction and teaching it becomes a part of research and development for my practice.


A poem of mine about living with anxiety and panic disorder is being published in the anthology, Chronic Women (2026, Honno). It brings together 14 poets to amplify voices of women living with chronic health conditions in Wales. Supported by Literature Wales and curated by Hanan Issa and Gwyneth Lewis.


I’ve also been working on my debut non-fiction book, which is about language, identity, and belonging. I took a break from it for a while, as the book came about as the result of my PhD. However, now I’m returning to the book with a fresh and detached perspective where I can look at things differently, make changes, and let go of some things I was holding too close.


Learn more about Durre's work:





Gathering: Women of Colour on Nature: https://www.404ink.com/store/p/gathering




Morley Prize & work on debut non-fiction book: https://www.morleycollege.ac.uk/morley-prize-for-unpublished-writers/


You can also see Durre's work 'Matka' at Effaith: Disability Arts Cymru's National Touring Exhibition, which is currently at Galeri, Caernarfon.

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