FAMILY PORTRAITS
2013. Series of mixed media works (photographs, paintings, drawings) based on family-photos
In Family Portraits, Quraishi explores both the presence and the absence of himself and his close family in the greater Middle East, fact mingling with fiction, identity becoming a series of hypothetical statements. In a series of carefully doctored portraits featuring his mixed Yemeni father, his Uzbek mother, their siblings, his sisters and himself he provides a poignant personal testimony of the vagaries of history and how personal identities get irremediably caught up in them.
Part of these series are photographs called M Portraits (2012) which are photo-paintings on canvas dealing with the paternalistic iconography of the grand-father as the tribal leader cum warrior.