Zarina Khan, born in Pakistan, employs pigment, painting and collage to create cut-out silhouettes of female characters with a focus on psychological landscapes, sparking associations with themes she is personally researching. These include sexuality, gender, patriarchy, violence, censorship. The protagonists of Khan’s works are deconstructed and rebuilt on the pictorial surface, which becomes a space to reassemble the figures as a new whole. By opening and contorting their body parts, the artist wants to fragment their origin stories and destroy existing hierarchies, with the ultimate aim of allowing these characters to become something or someone else. The intense brown colour used so voraciously across Khan’s works is a pre-existing palette inspired by Pakistan’s landscape, that she injects with personal meaning.

'Salma’s Arrival' is a point of access into the discussion around rape and violence against women. The mental health issues which follow from such acts of aggression sadly affect multiple women, whose claims to the truth are also often ignored, suffocated or prevented from being put forward in the first place. These violent forms of repressions are deeply embedded in the victims' skin, and metaphorically translated into the cuts of the body in Khan's collage. “Salma’s Arrival is a moment of rage at these constant repressions of her truth; it is a stance of defiance and survival. Her body is like armour, rigid and robust. Salma is determined to face her enemy with claws marked to the ready.” (Zarina Khan)

Part of Salma exists as an alter ego behind the main figure, almost unnoticeable, hidden in the midst of the pigmented, festering land devouring her body. In the state of turbulence saturating the painting, Salma stands strong, with her other self, amidst the storm.