Tafsia’s paintings are focused on dissecting memories. In her sketches, she untangles the muddle of archives, simplifying them into their most essential, telling components. A fan, for instance, is at the centre of a memory of a warm, late afternoon. She then continues to restore, rearrange and weave together the fragments of hazy, nearly forgotten moments, conversations, and observations in her compositions. Hence, the final image unfolds slowly; through a series of trial and error, Tafsia manipulates the natural act of misremembering to create a space that bears the weight of accumulated memories. In other words, she collects bits and pieces from several moments in time, merging them together in a singular space.

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Growing up in the chaotic city of Dhaka pushes her to search for a sense of calmness and balance in her work through careful choice of colour. Her oil paintings begin with a series of sketches and drawings based on records of past moments, observations, conversations, as well as the spaces within the home she grew up in—spaces that live in her. These drawings are then translated onto the canvas with a thin layer of a single colour, often burnt umber. The composition is refined and changed with a palette knife, using the tool as a way of drawing on the canvas. Over time, colours are added, reflecting the intended mood of the painting.

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Tafsia’s painting process mirrors the idea of misremembering—the more one revisits a moment in their episodic memory, the more it shifts and changes. In the same way, the more she reflects on a composition, the more likely she is to rearrange elements within the work, altering the narrative entirely based on how it feels at the time. This ongoing dialogue between intention and instinct allows the work to evolve in a way that mirrors the unreliable nature of memory itself.