Mapping the Unmapped by Naemat Wardak
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 40 x 50 cm
Year: 2026
Price: $4940.00 USD
Status: available
Mapping the Unmapped is an oil painting about Afghanistan as I have experienced it not as a fixed place, but as something carried through memory, distance, and loss. I use fractured geometric forms, layered pathways, circles, and shifting blocks of color to express displacement and the feeling of being scattered. Yet the fragments also begin to connect, suggesting that identity can survive separation. I wanted the painting to hold both things at once, what was broken and the quiet possibility of becoming whole again.
Why collect this work?
Mapping the Unmapped builds an apparently navigable interior, then disrupts its perspective with circles, cropped planes and competing scales. Mapping becomes less a record of location than a provisional structure assembled from fragments.
- Wardak states that he uses geometric forms to rebuild memories of Afghanistan without documenting the country literally. That intention helps explain why recognizable architecture remains present but resists geographic specificity.
- In the photograph, repeated door-like frames establish a strong central axis. A tiled floor recedes toward a distant opening, while oversized circular forms cut across walls and passages, making depth alternate between corridor, stage and flat design.
- The catalogue records oil on canvas. Here, the medium permits both sharply bounded colour fields and graduated modelling on the small spheres, creating tension between diagrammatic flatness and apparent volume. The photograph cannot establish exact colour or surface texture.
- The painting is especially pertinent to collections examining how abstraction can represent displacement without illustrating a single event. Its architecture preserves the idea of passage while withholding any secure route or destination.
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.
