EXHIBITION CATALOGUE 2025-2026

Meet the Artist

Afzal Shaafiu (Afu)

Meet the Artist

Born in Male’, Maldives (1975), Afu has been a practicing artist since the age of 18. Trained in Graphic Design, he was a pivotal force in the advertising industry in his early career. He has a number of Maldivian postage stamps to his credit from his 13 years long service at the Maldives Post. Concurrently, he has also been making art and contributed immensely for the development of the art community in Maldives. In 2010 he shifted to focus entirely on fine art. Reflecting on social, political and environmental themes, his work has been exhibited in solo and group shows both locally and internationally, including Malaysia, China, India, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Japan, Germany, Tanzania, USA, Singapore and in the UK. A number of his works are in the permanent collection of the National Art Gallery of Maldives. He received the Maldives National Award of Recognition for Visual Arts in 2014. After graduating his Masters in Fine Arts with distinction at Bath Spa University (UK) in 2020, he has turned his focus to producing art that reflects on consciousness and mental wellbeing. He currently lives and works in Male’, Maldives.

instagram:
@afumeeha
https://www.instagram.com/afumeeha/

website:
www.afushaafiu.com
https://www.afushaafiu.com/

Contact:
afumeeha@gmail.com
+960 7570300

Color Without Name: A Poetic Topography of Perception

In Colour Without Name I am not using colour to describe, but to question, to shift it away from recognisable representation. For me, colour is not a substitute for something else; it is not a sky, not a tree, not even a memory, but a way of experiencing the world directly. I am interested in what happens when colour is detached from its usual role of depiction and allowed to exist on its own terms, as a field of feeling.

My process begins with collecting colours from daily life. It might be sunlight falling on a potted plant beside a concrete wall, the combination of a cup with multicoloured plates on a table, or the meeting of sea and sky at dusk. I condense these encounters into strips of colour much like fragments torn from experience, and use them as palettes. Once placed in the painting, the original context disappears. What interests me is whether those colours still carry traces of their
first mood or sensation, even when the form has completely changed. At the same time, I know each viewer will respond differently, since colour always passes through filters of memory, culture, and emotion.

Form enters my work through a process that resists control. I begin with large drawings of random shapes, made quickly and without thought, to avoid slipping into conscious composition. I then cut them into smaller fragments, each holding its own accidental balance, and redraw them onto panels. In this way, randomness survives and the image resists becoming too intentional or predetermined.

These paintings do not offer answers; they dwell in uncertainty. They ask: What if colour were freed from representation? What if it could be experienced as presence, as energy moving between us, as weather that shifts our moods, as a pulse felt in the body as much as in the eye? For me, colour behaves like all of these things: unstable, alive, and beyond language. It lingers, unsettles, comforts, and refuses to stay still. And perhaps it is in that refusal that it feels most alive.