portrait Credit: Gabriel Barreto Ashfika Rahman
Ashfika Rahman is a Bangladesh-based visual artist whose practice is shaped by a deep social consciousness, influenced by her mother’s career as a social worker. She develops powerful alternative archives that centre communities whose histories are often erased or excluded from dominant narratives. Drawing on mythological, spiritual and folk traditions, she reinterprets these inherited forms within contemporary socio-political contexts. Working across various mediums, Rahman approaches image-making as a layered, research-driven process, documenting lived experiences of violence, displacement, cultural colonisation and resistance. Her work transforms documentation into a space of memory, testimony and critical reflection.
Alongside her artistic practice, she is committed to education and community engagement, including founding an alternative boat school in one of Bangladesh’s largest wetland regions.
Most recently, her work is featured in Framer Framed’s exhibition Wild Waters: Dams and And Deltas After Modernity (2026) on the inextricable links between water, colonial expansion and territorial exploitation.
Exhibitions
