Samir Mahmood is a Pakistani-born visual artist based in Dublin. His practice integrates traditional Indo-Persian miniature painting with research into queer identity, spiritual transformation, and the politics of migration. Originally trained in medicine, he brings a rigorous, research-oriented methodology to his artmaking, drawing from symbolic, philosophical, and historical frameworks that inform both the content and form of his work. Samir’s practice spans painting, textiles, objects, and video, with a consistent focus on challenging the heteronormative, patriarchal, and hierarchical tropes embedded in classical miniature traditions. His research draws on a wide range of sources, including Sufi mysticism, Christian iconography, Persian poetry, speculative theories of consciousness, and colonial archives.
This interdisciplinary inquiry informs his ongoing development of “queerscapes” – transcendental landscapes where bodies, ecologies, and architectural motifs interact in states of flux, tenderness, and rupture. He produces large painted scrolls, and intimate miniature works on handmade wasli paper, using historical techniques to subvert canonical visual codes through queered gestures and layered compositions. Frequently, his works stage encounters between the vulnerable body and institutional structures, mapping a journey toward metaphysical release. These hybrid visual forms propose alternative cosmologies where gender fluidity, mysticism, and diasporic experience intersect – offering a visual language of becoming that is both personal and political.
Visit Samir Mahmood’s website here
January – December 2026
Practice: Visual Arts / Painting / Drawing / Film & Video / Installation / Multidisciplinary Practice
Research Focus
Samir Mahmood proposes to explore how visual art can alleviate the burden of identity, particularly through research into South Asian Sufi shrine cultures. These shrines are complex spaces, spiritual, communal, and often chaotic, where music, scent, poetry, and movement merge into a kind of living archive. They present a different form of memory practice: one that doesn’t depend on fixed narratives or tidy categories. Instead, they function through repetition, rhythm, and affect. This is something he wants to explore further in dialogue with his visual practice.
More about the Dwell Here Residency
Dwell Here offers participants a simple proposition: to commit to this time and place while thinking deeply about its urgencies. Together we are curious to learn what can be activated or challenged through the process of dwelling. IMMA encourages reflection across the following themes to consider geographical, historical, political and cultural concepts of Ireland as a starting point to expand and connect international contexts through similarities and differences:
Technologies of Peace – to consider commemorative landscapes and memories of peace (as a dream, movement, or value) while generating perspectives on sustainable coexistence.
The Irish Paradigm – Welcomes artistic research that creates intimacy and connections, while celebrating the perceived agility and freedoms of operating on the periphery. As a small island on the edge of Europe, Ireland often has a challenging relationship with ‘the centre’.
The Museum as a Site of Vibration – consider how the museum and site can create new vibrations and rhythms within the built legacy of empire. How can museums make visible cultural shifts, including erased, censored or marginalised histories, as well as sustainability, planetary care, sharing and hospitality.