Asma Kazi (b. Kuwait) is an Indian multidisciplinary artist based in Pune, whose practice explores speculative ecologies through richly layered paintings, drawings, and digital media. Her work imagines otherworldly realms where biomorphic forms, botanical structures, and geometric patterns come together to create surreal living environments that are part field guide, part fairy tale, and part scientific observation of a world yet to be discovered.
Drawing from her academic background in Zoology and Business Strategy, alongside earlier professional roles at GE Card Services and Cushman & Wakefield, Kazi approaches her art as both biological inquiry and imaginative world building. Her practice synthesizes evolutionary biology, chaos theory, magical realism, and science fiction, resulting in intricate compositions inhabited by curious organisms, hybrid life forms, and evolving landscapes that hover between the familiar and the fantastical.
Kazi embarked on her artistic journey in 2012 and has since participated in exhibitions across India, the United States, and Europe. Her work has been exhibited at Akar Prakar (New Delhi), TAO Art Gallery (Mumbai), Vida Heydari Contemporary (Pune), AKG Micro Gallery (Chicago), Garrett Museum of Art (Indiana), OCAM (Davos, Switzerland), and other exhibitions in the United States and India. She has also collaborated with Hachette Books India, Zee TV, Hoshruba Repertory, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s HitRecord. Her speculative fiction story “Bahameen” appears in the anthology Magical Women (Hachette Books India).
Across mediums, Kazi creates immersive visual narratives where organisms, myths, memories, and imagined futures intermingle. Inviting viewers to wander, linger, and make unexpected discoveries, her work unfolds as a series of enchanted terrains that celebrate curiosity, transformation, and the endless capacity of life to reinvent itself.
Artist Statement
Beyond our vision and perception bias, there are worlds that operate on rules different from our own and realms where reality intertwines with the fantastical, it is a space where unseen forces shape worlds beyond comprehension. My art practice inhabits this threshold. I paint speculative ecologies where the sacred and the profane, the organic and the synthetic, the ancient and the futuristic coexist in charged proximity. These imagined environments feel all at once dangerously alien and also familiar. With these works I allow for organic destiny. It is an exercise in following the breadcrumb trail and connecting the dots to all the moments in time when I have felt most captivated by life.
Being a surrealist self taught artist, my art resides between worlds and pulls from the language of my diverse interests and influences : childhood memories from Pune and Kuwait, illustrating biology journals, magical realism and speculative science narratives, chaos theory, evolution and the enchantment of the natural world. These influences converge into a visual language that is rooted in contemporary ecological realities and yet is untethered from them due to its surrealistic expression. I am interested in symbiosis between species, materials, mythologies, and timeline, especially at moments when systems appear to be on the brink of rupture or transformation.
Dimensionality is vital to my process. My work is an exploration of our age of mutating ecosystems, of the ever increasing chaos and the constant friction between rigid systems that fray at the edges, often making way for more vibrant, flexible, inclusive systems, that metamorphose and morph into lush bio diverse ecosystems of plankton, plastic, Pan’s labyrinth and jelly beans. It’s a thinning of the veil between the real & the surreal. These works are not dystopias but sites of transformation, portals where collapse and regeneration share the same terrain. And my visual language of regeneration in times of collapse is layered, vibrant, sometimes plastic/unnatural, sometimes acidic and wildly alive.
At its core my art is a celebration of resilience, and a representation of how life finds a way to bloom in even the harshest of terrains. It is also a personal cartography of sorts. Having moved through stark and lush geographies, I approach each of my works as both expedition and divination. In my work, my canvas becomes a site of navigation, where memory, mythology, and ecological speculation converge. Each of my works invites a kind of treasure hunt, it is a call for adventure, and an invitation to journey into the unknown.
Education
MBA Marketing, MIT School of Management, Pune, India
BSc Zoology, Pune University, India
Diploma in Software Engineering, Pune, India
Exhibitions
2025 Cartographies of Mischief, group show with Ether Project at Akar Prakar, New Delhi, India
2025 Everybody’s Elsewhere, group show with Ether Project at DAF, Indore, India
2025 Showcase of miniature works at Garrett Museum of Art, Indiana, United States
2024 Interwoven Dimensions, online group show with TAO Art Gallery, Mumbai, India
2024 The Center of the Universe Tastes like Raspberry Sour sticks and Popping Candy,
exhibition of miniature art at AKG Micro Gallery,Chicago,United States
2024 I Interpret, group show at Nine Fish Art Gallery, Mumbai, India
2024 Kaleidoscope, group show at TAO Art Gallery, Mumbai, India
2023 Common Ground, group show at Vida Heydari Contemporary, Pune, India
2022 The Davos Tentacle, VR and in person show of digital art at OCAM, Davos, Switzerland
2021 I’m Speaking, online group show with PXP Contemporary, United States
2019 Ancient Tongues and Tales, group show of fantastical works at Fernie Brae, Portland, United States
2014 Prakriti, group show with Indian Art Consultants
Publications
2021 All She Makes Magazine – Issue 2
2021 Amazing Entries | Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Art Prize 2021
2020 Podcast : Three is a Company – The Career switcher’s Season
2019 Magical Women Cover Magic, How It Was Made | Purple Pencil Project
2016 101 Women Artists Whose Work Will Leave You Speechless| Polkadot Cafe
2016 Big Bad List of Women Illustrators, Designers & Visual Artists From India | Cupick
2015 80 Leading Illustrators From India Tell Us About Their Favorite Work| Polkadot Cafe
2014 Reverberations, a series of five artworks published in the Spring 2014 issue of Folio – A Literary Journal at
American University
2013 Zoology, Excel Sheets and Drawing Outside The Lines | DZine Trip