Narmin Kassam
Narmin Kassam is a Canadian artist whose practice blends personal exploration, self-expression, and healing with a commitment to women’s empowerment, gender equality, and cultural diversity. Working with a distinctive technique of layering paint and paper on wood panels, she creates vibrant works that celebrate feminine strength, resilience, and identity. Kassam’s art has been widely exhibited across Canada and internationally, with features in Art Seen Magazine, New Visionary Magazine, Al-Tiba9, and the Arts to Hearts Project: 100 Emerging Artists of 2024. Her collaborative public murals can be found in Ottawa, Toronto, and Calgary. In 2024, she was longlisted for the Women United Art Prize in the Collage and Fibre Art category.
Beautiful Voice
By Sfumato
Narmin Kassam’s solo exhibition, Beautiful Voice, is a vivid tribute to women’s strength, resilience, and cultural diversity. As an African-born woman and former refugee, Kassam draws on her own lived experiences to give voice to unsung stories of empowerment and solidarity. Through her layered technique—combining decorative papers from Japan, India, and beyond with expressive paint on sturdy wood panels—she creates a dialogue between fragility and resilience, individuality and collectivity. The works on view extend beyond painting, including an immersive installation and short film that expand the narrative into a multi-sensory experience. Each figure represented in her pieces embodies beauty, identity, and history, their simplified yet expressive features resonating with emotional depth. Clothing and head wraps, inspired by traditional African textiles, add cultural vibrancy and symbolic richness to her compositions. At the heart of Kassam’s practice is her layering method: textured papers and pigments merge into collaged skin tones and patterned garments, mirroring the complexity of women’s lives and the resilience woven into their stories. This process is both artistic and meditative, offering her a spiritual practice while inviting viewers into a space of reflection and connection.
Beautiful Voice is a celebration of women as leaders, mothers, sisters, and partners, and an urgent reminder of our shared responsibility to uplift their voices.
In Kassam’s hands, art becomes not only a form of personal healing but also a collective call for recognition, inclusion, and empowerment.
