Home

Rajiv Menon Contemporary is pleased to present How to Hold a Wild Thing, a solo exhibition of recent works by New York based artist Sanié Bokhari. This new body of work encompasses paintings, glasswork, and textiles produced in the year following the birth of her first child. With its title, the exhibition casts motherhood as a foreign terrain of risk, wonder, and adaptation. Though adopting the language of an instructional manual, the works are not prescriptions, but rather descriptions of an unfolding process of discovery.

 

For the artist, meeting her daughter was like encountering a different species: every move she made was unpredictable, her frenetic energy untamable. This energy becomes the affective landscape of the exhibition. Bokhari’s intrepid paintings explore this undulating emotional wilderness— where everything is new, raw, wild. Her glass sculptures— produced in collaboration with her cousin, glass artist Ayla Bokhari—are subtle meditations on human fragility, interdependence, cooperation, and support.

 

Big cats recur throughout the show as metaphors for the unknown, the uncontrollable, the fears and anxieties that attend parenthood. Drawing from her training in Indo-Persian and South Asian miniature painting, Bokhari treats tigers not as naturalistic animals but as stylized, ornamental, and symbolic figures—watchful presences that signal danger without malice. Their stony-eyed presence serves as a reminder that that fear and uncertainty are not adversaries, but essential components of the natural order. 

 

Motherhood unfolds as a transitional space— one that extends Bokhari’s longstanding interest in navigating in-between spaces. Born in Pakistan, she immigrated to the United States to attend the Rhode Island School of Design’ s MFA program and has resided here ever since. Her works revel in liminal states and grapple with issues of immigration, personal memory, and the negotiation of self across time and space. In this new body of work, the focus becomes relational rather than individual. The exhibition is shaped by questions of ancestry, cultural inheritance and continuity as she considers how culture is transmitted, altered, or preserved over generations. In this way, the exhibition’s title takes on a secondary meaning: Bokhari not only responds to her child but also confronts and tends to her own inner child, learning how to hold herself within this new realm of experience. While caring for a child introduces anxiety and unpredictability, Bokhari’s practice becomes a space for grounding and reconnection to an independent sense of self—a parallel process of self-care that mirrors the rhythms of caring for another. 

 

Bokhari’s works combine stylized imagery from traditional South Asian illustration with bold, expressive brushwork, balancing heightened emotional sensitivity with strong formal rigor. Drawing upon the Indo-Persian manuscript tradition and her training at the National College of Arts in Lahore, she translates miniature techniques—layering, patterning, and compression of space—into markedly contemporary large scale compositions.

 

Her works transform personal experience into images that reach beyond self, offering immersive glimpses into a world that is shaped by the instinct to care, to adapt, to discover through collaboration. Rooted in art historical practices yet deeply personal, Bokhari blends the mythic and the memoir to find a wholly unique pictorial language to capture her experience of motherhood as a catalyst for continual learning and transformation.

 

Sanié Bokhari (b. 1991, Lahore, Pakistan) lives and works in New York, USA. She holds a BFA in Painting from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan, and an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Rhode Island, USA, where she received the President’s Scholarship and completed a fellowship with the RISD Museum.

 

Solo exhibitions include Shaam-e-Disco, Swivel Gallery, New York, USA (2024) and Alter Ego, KAPOW Gallery, New York, USA (2023). Group exhibitions include Visions of a New Order, New Order Arts, Pennsylvania, USA (2025); Call Your Mom, Kid Super Studios, New York, USA (2025); The River Never Runs Dry, Glass Rice, San Francisco, USA (2025); Exhibitionism, Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Los Angeles, USA (2025); Here’s Looking at You, Plato Gallery, New York, USA (2025); Under the Talking Tree, Kunsthall n, Copenhagen, Denmark (2025); The Past is a Country, Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Los Angeles, USA (2024).