The British Museum has commissioned Hormazd Narielwalla for its forthcoming exhibition of Zoroastrian art and culture, opening in 2027. Curated by Shiva Mihan, the exhibition will place his new painting in the Islamic Gallery: the artist’s ancestors, rendered as a Persian Garden. This commission brings a living Zoroastrian voice into one of the world’s great encyclopaedic museums, and the Middle East Department has placed the work on the cover of its annual newsletter.
In the words of the editor of Diar Academy:
“To understand why this matters, you need to know how Narielwalla works. Born in Mumbai to a Parsi family, he trained as a fashion designer before finding his material in the workrooms of Savile Row. There he learnt that tailors destroy the bespoke patterns of deceased clients; without the body, the pattern has no use. He began rescuing them. For nearly two decades, these discarded templates have been the ground of his practice, their lines and notches forming what he calls beautiful abstractions of the human body. Each pattern carries the trace of a person who no longer exists. So when he builds a Persian Garden on this surface, the metaphor is exact. The cypresses, the fire temple, the mounted figures all rest on drawings made for absent bodies. A garden of ancestors, constructed from the outlines of the dead. Memory as material, not just subject. His work sits in the collections of the British Library, the V&A and institutions across New York.”
