An Atlas Written by Time by Naemat Wardak
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 50 x 70 cm
Year: 2026
Price: $9940.00 USD
Status: available
I made this painting as a way of holding my memories of Afghanistan in one place. An Atlas Written by Time is not a literal map it is a map of memory. The arches, pathways, floating spheres, distant landscape, and distorted clock represent places, journeys, and moments altered by time. I use geometric forms and layered oil paint to break the landscape apart and rebuild it into something dreamlike. The clock suggests that time does not simply pass, it changes what we remember, what we lose, and what remains. For me, this work is about a country constantly being rewritten, while its memories refuse to disappear.
Why collect this work?
A rigid vertical framework holds several incompatible routes at once, turning spatial contradiction into a precise account of how remembered places can remain vivid without remaining coherent.
- Wardak’s statement describes painting as a means of rebuilding memories that resist words. Here, Afghanistan is approached through personal recollection rather than topographic description, with architecture serving as a structure for absence and persistence.
- In the photograph, stairs stop or change direction, a checkerboard passage narrows toward a bright opening, and a white profile is enclosed by overlapping curves. The bent clock adds a temporal marker, but no single route resolves the composition.
- Catalogued as oil on canvas, the painting sets crisp geometric boundaries against shaded spheres and atmospheric landscape passages. That contrast lets flat pattern and suggested depth coexist without settling into one pictorial system.
- For collections concerned with memory, migration, or nonliteral mapping, this work demonstrates how a homeland may be pictured through disrupted access: thresholds multiply, while arrival remains uncertain.
About the Artist
Naemat Wardak
Naemat Wardak is an artist on Mondoir Studio. Artistic discipline: painting. Based in Kabul, AF.
Nationality: Afghan
I paint because there are things I remember that I cannot fully put into words.
