'Fractal’ Solo Exhibition Opens at XVA Gallery on February 7th

The familiar itch, when life is in pure chaos— your inbox a warzone, your group chat an unopened mess, and the world news is just a lot? What if all that chaos isn't random? What if it’s actually just one simple, annoying little pattern, copied and pasted infinitely until it looks completely out of control?

Opening February 7th at XVA Gallery, Pakistani artist Huma Shoaib’s solo exhibition 'Fractal' presents a body of work that treats chaos as a pattern in disguise. Running until March 5th, the show explores how the same perfect, repeating structures found in nature also underpin our spiritual ideals and, paradoxically, our endless conflicts.

Walking through, you’ll see this fascinating tug-of-war play out. She shreds pages from war history books, then reassembles them into serene, geometric compositions. She reduces lines of Sufi poetry from words to letters, and finally to a single nuqta —a dot— embodying the belief that all existence contracts to a minimal point. Ornate, mandala-like drawings are executed in jarring fluorescent pigments, questioning the authenticity of modern spirituality.

The works are intellectually restless with symbols like bees and birds, creatures without borders, floating across panels. The repetitive action in her pieces —the shredding, the realigning, the meticulous patterning— becomes a meditative ritual. She’s creating art from scratch, by patiently deconstructing the world’s noise to find a hidden, coherent signal.