Exploring Hybridity: Lubna Chowdhary's Conceptual Art Tools

Doubling, dualities, layering, opposition, boundaries and the spaces of intersection between them—these modes of relationality are often at the centre of the theories and discussions that animate fields like art and politics. Whether used to investigate the multiple effects of a work of art on its viewer or to understand an artist’s positioning in a postcolonial, globalised world, descriptors often come in pairs—Eastern/Western, sensual/rational or empire/colony. In the slashes that separate each of these terms is hidden a rich syncretism. This in-between space is what ceramic artist Lubna Chowdhary inhabits in her practice, as I see when visiting her solo exhibition, Double Consciousness, at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai. Chowdhary walks me through the colourful wall-mounted abstract ceramic pieces and small three-dimensional clay sculptures that are marked by an aesthetic and technical hybridity characteristic of her oeuvre. She tells me about her training in modernism at the Royal College of Art in London and the process of reconciling its minimal aesthetic and industrial techniques with her South Asian heritage. Chowdhary is the child of Pakistani parents who immigrated from Tanzania to the United Kingdom while she was young. She navigates the immigrant experience of bridging the chasm between these two cultures by endlessly layering their aesthetics, techniques and references, which fuse in her work despite their apparent contradictions. Each piece seems to speak a double language that is heard differently by each viewer as it filters through their cultural context. Walking into the space, one first sees the formidable work Verso Recto 1 (2025). The large ceramic piece is composed of precisely cut industrial tile glazed with geometric shapes in rich, contrasting warm and cool tones. Immediately, the medium of clay and traditional glazing marks the work with its distinctive imperfections—the small dips and pools of the drying glaze and fluid striations of colour break up the geometry of the piece, adding an organic and handmade dimension to the modernist tableau. “The ceramic tiles are industrial tiles cut using waterjets for precision and reflect the sort of modernist reverence for the machine, like in the works of artists like Donald Judd,” says Chowdhary, before going on to explain how this appearance is tempered by using glazed ceramic to create depth and sensuousness in the composition. She borrows and bends the clean lines and shapes of modernist art to create forms that recall Kufic calligraphy and the wide margins of ancient Eastern manuscripts. Verso Recto 1 and its companion on the opposite wall, Verso Recto 2, lie in the liminal space between both traditions, inviting viewers to join. Their titles put doubleness at the front and centre of the work, referring to the Latin terms for manuscript pages: recto meaning the ‘correct page’ or the ‘front page’ and verso meaning the ‘turned page’ or ‘back page’. In left-to-right languages (primarily Western), the recto page is on the right and is always read first. In right-to-left languages, the front page is reversed, lying on the left of the manuscript. Rather than reflecting this reversal in the order of the words (i.e. reading verso, then recto), the same words flip to refer to the ‘correct’ pages, meaning all manuscripts are read recto, then verso, although this can denote completely opposite ways of reading. This slippage of meaning, the internal reversal and complexity concealed beneath an unchanging standard, is what Chowdhary teases out in these layered works. It is also what W.E.B Du Bois, the African American academic, sought to describe when he coined the term ‘double consciousness’, which serves as the title of the exhibition. Du Bois said in his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” While he was referring to the experiences of the black community in segregated USA, the term has been embraced by postcolonial theorists globally since. Chowdhary captures this ‘peculiar sensation’ in her works, the doubleness at once representing the near-universal immigrant effort to reconcile split heritages into a coherent whole and the political effort to protect marginalised parts of one’s identity and culture against the violent, assimilating force of a dominant culture. Chowdhary’s response to double consciousness is rich with references from each hemisphere of identity. During our short conversation, she mentions almost a dozen artists—from Germany’s Blinky Palermo, Russia’s Kazimir Malevich and Britain’s Archigram architectural group, to Du Bois and his lesser-known forays into graphic design. She moves fluidly between descriptions of Western industrial organisation and the spirituality of Islamic geometry when describing the grids from her Folio series. These smaller works depict colourful intersecting lines and concentric circles, rendered with perfect geometry and graphic colour palettes. When viewed with their titles in mind, they take the shape of manuscript pages, with their text abstracted into colourful blocks and works like Folio 1 (2025) and Folio 8 (2025) take on the appearance of open books piled on a desk. Chowdhary’s explanations place the works in multiple, often contradictory categories, but their abstract appearance and promiscuous web of references make them flexible enough to flit between them. The individual hand-glazed ceramic tiles from the Marker series play with the viewer’s attention in a similar way to the Verso Recto works, if in a more direct manner. The thick, straight lines interlock to create forms that resemble grids (Marker 109), prison bars (Marker 104) and architectural floorplans (Marker 111), inviting the viewer’s eye to read and follow their geometry. Simultaneously, the transparency and layering of their glazes confuse this effort, their unctuous depth making the eyes pause and linger. The speckles and splotches of natural clay are only highlighted by their juxtaposition with straight edges. The very experience of viewing the works, as well as their technique and content, becomes doubled and synchronous. Chowdhary’s experimentation also extends to medium, using ceramics both as two-dimensional forms akin to paintings and as sculptural objects in her Polytype series. The works are small, easily scooped up, and their organic colouring and toy-like shapes seem to invite one to do so. They are displayed on a table, resembling architectural models from an as-yet unbuilt city. They are playfully geometric, imperfect and endearingly rough around the edges, not trying to hide their humble origins as a lump of unshaped clay. Chowdhary creates this appearance by meshing rudimentary industrial techniques and tools with traditional handmade ones. Some part of each sculpture is hand-shaped, while the circles are made using an extruder to form cylinders that are then cut up, in a process that she calls forming her own bricks. The phrase is metaphorically resonant, having the possibility to extend to the creation of hybrid identities and communities as well as structures. The resultant objects are full of individuality and personality, a result of embracing these handmade imperfections as seen in Polytype 2—little variations in the heights of columns, curves in lines, joints that don’t quite line up and the unpredictable coverage of the glaze, off-white with spots of terracotta. Circles, squares and crosses meet in different formations, playing with height, depth, stability and even movement. The shiny spheres in Polytype 6, 7 and 8 break the expectation of flat planes and straight lines to create a sense of instability that is dynamic and full of possibility. Polytype 8, with a large sphere balanced delicately on top of a set of hollow ceramic steps, buzzes with potential energy, almost inviting the viewer to give it a gentle push, rolling the sphere down the steps. For Chowdhary, these are ‘utopian objects’ blending the techniques and materials of the East and West to create structures that look handmade but modernist. She draws inspiration from conceptual architecture like Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes to create a vision for hybrid cities and forms of the future that could enmesh themselves in any environment and aesthetic. Double Consciousness takes the dilemma of conflicting origins, heritages and traditions and collapses it into fresh composite forms. She uses techniques familiar to postcolonial artists—layering, juxtaposing and doubling—to create works that are fusions rather than collages. Chowdhary’s references meet in an almost chemical reaction, leaving behind a compound that is far more than the sum of its parts. ‘Double Consciousness’ is on view from January 8 – February 21, 2026, at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai.