Hamra Abbas was born in Kuwait in 1976 and currently lives and works between Boston and Lahore. Her artistic practice draws from a wide range of sources and manifests in diverse forms and media. Abbas’s works often originate from encounters or experiences, such as an image, icon, or gesture, which she manipulates by altering their scale, function, or medium. Through these transformations, she seeks to deconstruct the act of seeing by reconfiguring images that belong to collective memory. Unrestricted by subject matter or medium, Abbas adopts an investigative approach to art-making, producing a rich and holistic body of work that engages with themes of cultural history, sexuality, violence, ornamentation, devotion, and faith.