Latifa Zafar Attaii was born in 1994 in Ghazni – Afghanistan. A few years later her family migrated to Quetta, Pakistan. She studied elementary school there as a refugee. Later she moved to Afghanistan to continue her studies. After entering to Faculty of Fine Arts at Kabul University, she was awarded the UMISAA scholarship to study at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore – Pakistan. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts and Design in 2017.
She has had several group exhibitions in Dubai, Ajman, Abu Dhabi, Tehran, Goa, Lahore, Quetta and Kabul. She was also a part of the Young Subcontinent Project of Serendipity Arts Festival – Goa, Fadjr International Festival – Tehran and Almurabba Arts Festival in Ajman – UAE. She also won the Second Prize of the Allegro Art Prize 2021.
She currently lives and works in Tehran, Iran.
Statement: To be born, brought up, and live in a society where one is intrinsically deprived and forgotten as a female, isolated and labeled as the ‘other’ in one’s own homeland, femininity and ethnicity become one’s identity. Struggling with this identity in a patriarchal society, self-expression becomes a necessity. I express myself against these exclusions, deprivations, and expectations of society. I weave the pain; I stitch the untold stories that society refuses to see or to hear otherwise. Each stitch in my works has love, hatred, fear, hope and … attached to it.
