Discover Emerging Voices, Collect Lasting Value
To reconnect heritage, culture and stories across territories and generations.
We believe that every piece of art has the potential to link people to each other, to places unseen, and across timelines
Our Vision
Christine Das
Acrylic on canvas
2019
91 by 122 cm / 35 ⅞ by 48 in
Price: POA
This portrait explores the quiet convergence of the human and natural worlds. A woman rests beside her spirit animal, a Malayan tiger, both poised low to the ground in the stillness before movement. Their unwavering gaze extends beyond the frame, drawing the viewer into a shared moment of instinct, awareness, and resolve.
Rendered in a restrained palette of soft grey acrylics, the composition dissolves the boundary between woman and tiger. Flowing strands of hair merge seamlessly into the tiger’s stripes, suggesting that the wild is not an external force but an intrinsic part of our identity. Rather than depicting dominance over nature, the work evokes kinship, reminding us that intuition, resilience, and belonging emerge through our connection to the living world. At its core, the painting is a meditation on identity, coexistence, and the untamed spirit that endures beneath the surface, inviting us to reconsider the invisible threads that bind humanity to the natural world.
Upcoming Exhibition
Rhizoscape: The Living Network
Rhizoscape: The Living Network brings together artists from South America, Africa, and Asia whose work shows that nature and community cannot be separated without losing something essential.
Date: 19th February to 4th March 2026
Location: The Bomb Factory - Marylebone, 206 Marylebone Rd, London NW1 6JQ, United Kingdom
Come Join Us!
Curated for Collectors
Daira is a global platform for showcasing contemporary artists from emerging markets.
We bring together artists and collectors through exhibitions, storytelling, immersion, and cultural connection.
Contemporary Calligraphy
Calligraphy holds a foundational place in South Asian visual culture, historically bound to sacred texts, architectural ornament, and disciplined repetition. In many countries, the tradition has long been upheld as a visual language of faith, geometry, and beauty in a way that bridges spiritual and material worlds. Yet, like all artistic practices, calligraphy is not static.
In the hands of contemporary artists, it is a site of transformation where inherited techniques are unraveled and reassembled to speak to the present.
Childhood
Childhood explores the universal yet deeply personal experience of childhood, reflecting on the innocence, joy, curiosity, and complexities of growing up in Pakistan, capturing both the playful moments and the challenges of navigating early life.
Featuring both emerging and established voices, it offers its viewers a look into a rapidly evolving art scene defined by technical mastery and conceptual depth
Price: POA
Acrylic, rose pigment, and gold leaf on canvas
2026
218 x 152 cm; 86 x 60 in.
–When the City Learned to Kneel –
The engines slept with keys still in their veins,
Their silence louder than the loudest rains.
Red traffic lights kept preaching to the dead,
While vines translated all they ever said.
The avenues remembered every tire,
Still scarred by haste, ambition, smoke, and fire.
Abandoned cars stood patient, row by row—
As if they’d learned what people never know.
The towers watched with windows full of dust,
Their steel surrendered to the bloom of rust.
No voices rose to bargain, curse, or pray;
Even echoes had forgotten how to stay.
The weather carved its sermons into stone,
Reminding all that nothing’s ever owned.
The roots beneath the asphalt did not grieve;
They simply took back all we chose to leave.
We crowned ourselves with monuments of pride,
While Heaven watched in undisturbed silence wide.
When every tower bowed before the sod,
The ruins left enough room to hear God.
Yet somewhere, through a windshield split with time,
A single flower reached the morning climb.
It knew no triumph, carried not a creed—
It simply answered every buried seed.
Perhaps that’s how the gentlest futures start:
Not with a kingdom, but a quiet heart.
For every city swallowed by the wild
Becomes, at last, the earth’s forgiven child.
Cities in Flux
Cities in Flux captures the dynamic spirit of urban centers in the world's emerging nations. This collection moves beyond postcard panoramas to delve into the vibrant, often contradictory energy of rapid change. The artwork portrays a palpable sense of becoming—where gleaming new developments rise beside dense, historic neighborhoods, and traditional ways of life adapt within a swirling, globalized present.
Through a mix of mediums, the pieces explore the human experience within these transforming landscapes. They find profound beauty in the textured layers of everyday life: the curated clutter of a market stall, the determined gaze of a commuter in motion, the geometric patterns of informal settlements against a sunset sky. This collection is an intimate observation of resilience and identity, celebrating the individuals and communities who are the true architects of these evolving cities.
Vinay Dixit
Oil Paint on Canvas
2025
Each pieces: 91.4 x 91.4 cm; 36 x 36 in.
Price: POA
This series operates as an intimate visual inquiry into the overlooked rhythms of contemporary creative labor, focusing on moments of shared sanctuary among female artists in the studio space. Serving as a deliberate, reversed reflection on Vincent van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, which documented the exhaustive, grim weight of survival, these canvases explore a counter-narrative of communal warmth, nourishment, and emotional resilience.
Rather than a somber portrait of hardship, I wish to capture the cooking and sharing of Maggi a deeply nostalgic, ubiquitous food choice among young adults in India as an intuitive, self-preserving ritual embedded within periods of intense, often unappreciated creative exertion. Through open, texturally layered compositions, the paintings explore the fluid boundary between work and rest. I am searching for a visual language that can honor the invisible emotional scaffolding built during these brief interludes, capturing moments of genuine laughter, human connectivity, and shared vulnerability that sustain the self within a demanding urban metropolis.
Stella Ekpe
Oil & pastel on canvas
2024
122 x 91 cm ; 48 x 35.8 in
Price: POA
Déjà Vu explores intimacy, emotional distance, and the fragile space between connection and isolation. Positioned within a shared domestic setting, staged by myself and partner, it depicts two figures occupying the same room yet remain psychologically apart. Bathed in warm golden light and layered textures, the painting reflects on longing, repetition, the cyclical emotional rhythms that shape human relationships and whether human skin can function as a palimpsest.
Available
Works
Vinay Dixit
Oil Paint on Canvas
2026
152.4 x 213.4 cm.; 60 x 84 in.
Price: POA
A viral 2025 corporate scandal, The Concert explores the suffocating reality of hyper-surveillance, public morality, and the performance of human behavior under scrutiny. Much like a quantum atom changing its state when observed, human action shifts violently when monitored by a judgmental public eye. Set in a crimson-tinted liminal space, the canvas integrates anthropomorphic figures playing snooker, a game subverted here into a corporate battleground of power, jealousy, and sexual politics. Amidst those holding the cue of institutional authority, the background hums with the quiet distress of the rejected and unseen.
Price: POA
Acrylic, rose pigment, and gold leaf on canvas
2024
177.8 x 116.8 cm; 70 x 46 in.
A reflection on self-politics and the weight of choice, this piece contemplates how disassociation allows us to witness our lives as a series of impermanent, converging decisions.
May I Wonder?
Mid-summer with the sun out,
It’s the cold within that made me cry out.
I wonder what made you so sure.
When I always held open the door.
Was it denial or was it sanity?
As the curtains fall, proving it was all in vanity.
I wonder what gives you purpose to stay this true,
It’s getting cold for me but not as it is for you.
I can feel the strings being pulled,
Bound by emotions, life tangoes us through.
I wonder if we can adapt to the whip.
Be submissive now but feeling so unequipped.
Flow with gravity before it crushes you down.
Pray that whatever you fear will wash away without sound.
I ponder upon how could I not hear
The waves whisper so awfully near.
Place your hand over your mouth
Embrace yourselves, here comes doubt.
You’ll feel your gut drop
Praying for this clock to suddenly stop.
Struggling to make sense of now
Longing for what and how.
Cherish these wings, take them on a flight,
Don’t tie yourself down in this earthly life.
Nutritious should be your affection
Infectious should be your depictions.
Perfect perceptions within
Is a battle nobody against you, can win.
Daira connects collectors, institutions, and corporations with artists shaping contemporary narratives across underrepresented regions, offering early access to culturally significant work.
Bushra Khaalid
Oil Paint on Canvas
2022
76 x 83 cm; 30 x 32.6 in
Price: POA
Velvet cloth; not forgetting its nature, but forced into petals, folded and held until it performs as a flower, it was never grown to be. Red, oversized, arranged into a permanence no real flower has ever been granted. At its center, small and at the edge of fading sits, the one thing in this piece actually alive. Red color of velvet carries its own history before I ever touch it: the color worn by the brides in pakistan, when a woman is most looked at, most called beautiful, most still. I don't separate the flower from the woman from myself here. They arrive already tangled: one grown to be admired and cut, one dressed to be admired and settled, one painting them both because she recognized the unwanted force.
Emil Fais
Mix Media on canvas
2026
Round - 60 cm diameter ; 23.6in diameter
Price: POA
A thickly textured (impasto) painting encased in a circular frame features a introspective self-portrait of an astronaut. The outer helmet reflects the vast, cold darkness of the cosmos, yet within the visor lies a peaceful, hopeful world.
Their mind is an oasis—a vibrant field of yellow daisies under a cloudy blue sky—offering a serene and soothing vision of the future amidst the void of space. This work serves as a poetic visualization of inner escape and the longing for nature's beauty as a sanctuary for a quieter life.
Original texts from artists (Bahasa Indonesia)
Sebuah lukisan bertekstur tebal (impasto) yang dibingkai dalam bingkai melingkar menampilkan potret diri seorang astronot yang sedang merenung. Bagian luar helm mencerminkan kegelapan kosmos yang luas dan dingin, namun di dalam pelindung wajahnya terdapat dunia yang damai dan penuh harapan.
Pikiran mereka adalah sebuah oase—hamparan bunga daisy kuning cerah di bawah langit biru berawan—menawarkan visi masa depan yang tenang dan menenangkan di tengah kehampaan ruang angkasa. Karya ini berfungsi sebagai visualisasi puitis dari pelarian batin dan kerinduan akan keindahan alam sebagai tempat perlindungan untuk kehidupan yang lebih tenang.
Artists We Stand Behind
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Ali Asad Naqvi
Ali Asad Naqvi (Lahore, Pakistan) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based Pakistan.
His study of Islamic calligraphy and Turkish illumination informs a materially precise practice grounded in line, repetition, geometry and the disciplined construction of form.
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Bushra Khaalid
Bushra Khaalid (Lahore, Pakistan) is a visual artist working primarily in oil paint, preserved flowers, hand-stitched cloth and acrylic enclosures,
Khaalid's large-scale canvases explore ecological loss, memory and femininity through the recurring image of the flower cut at its peak.
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Chrstine Das
Christine Das (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) is a painter living and working in Malaysia.
She is a contemporary Malaysian artist whose work explores the interconnected relationships between humanity, wildlife, and the living world
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Emil Fais
Emil Fais (South Sulawesi, Indonesia) is a visual artists based in Sidoarjo, Indonesia
Through meticulous ballpoint linework and mixed-media assemblage, he depicts environments marked by deforestation, pollution and encroaching urban development.
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Janet Adebayo
Janet Adebayo (London, UK) is a Nigerian-born visual artist working across painting, sculpture and mixed media.
Her paintings move between figuration and abstraction, using fragmented bodies and layered surfaces to reflect the imprint of lived experience
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Mikael Bhurgri
Mikael Bhurgri (Mirpurkhas, Pakistan) is a visual artist currently living and working in Karachi, Pakistan.
Working primarily in acrylics and hand-ground pigments, including a red made from roses grown in his own garden, Bhurgri’s large-scale canvases explore memory, place, and longing through surreal interiors and atmospheric abstraction..
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Raghu Neware
Raghu Neware (Nagpur, India) is an Indian painter whose abstract practice explores perception, consciousness and the elusive space between form and the undefined.
His practice, gathered under the ongoing Search of Eternity series, resists closure
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Shikha Gupta
Shikha Gupta (Gurugram, India) is a visual artist, art therapist and cultural practitioner.
Working in acrylic, natural pigment, thread, mud, turmeric and found objects, she treats the canvas as a site of excavation, building and stripping back layers to reach the implicit memories, familial conditioning and silent narratives that shape a life beneath conscious awareness.
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Shinjini Awasthi
Shinjini Awasthi (New Delhi, India) is an Indian multidisciplinary artist, designer and educator.
Stitching textiles into painted surfaces, she gives fragments of cloth a new life while drawing attention to the labour and histories they carry
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Sooim Lee
Sooim Lee (New York,USA) is a South Korean painter and printmaker.
Her early figurative works carry the nostalgic landscapes of her Korean youth. Later pieces trace the raw physical struggle of displacement before settling into the abstraction that defines her mature practice.
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Stella Ekpe
Stella Ekpe (Lagos, Nigeria) is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice explores memory, identity, home, femininity and the psychological landscapes of lived experience.
Working from self-portraits she stages and photographs herself, Ekpe treats her own image not as autobiography but as a point of departure for questions that extend beyond the personal: what is inherited, what is preserved, and what continues to shape us long after a moment has passed.
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Vinay Dixit
Vinay Dixit (Bangalore, India) is a contemporary figurative painter and design strategist based in India.
His grounding in visual art and design informs a materially attentive practice built on oil on canvas and ink on paper, exploring identity, belonging and the psychological complexity hidden within ordinary urban scenes.
Perspectives on Collecting
The Dispatch
Christine Das
Acrylic on canvas
46 by 46 cm.; 18 by 18 in.
2023
Price: POA
My Harimau is both a tribute and a warning. Honoring Malaysia’s national icon and apex rainforest predator, the work reflects the devastating reality that fewer than one hundred Malayan tigers are believed to remain in the wild.
Part of the artist’s PLIGHT series, the painting transforms an alarming statistic into a deeply personal encounter. It celebrates the tiger’s beauty, strength, and ecological importance while reminding us that its survival is inseparable from the health of Malaysia’s forests. My Harimau asks us to consider what is lost when a species disappears and underscores the urgency of protecting one of the nation’s most treasured inhabitants before it exists only in memory and art.
A monthly letter with new works, private view invitations and perspectives on collecting from emerging markets. No noise, just considered voices