Hatch Gallery is pleased to present Pakistani artist Ajea Zahid (b. 2000, Karachi) for the 12th edition of ASIA NOW, as part of the Third Space section. Zahid presents A Temporary Place, a new installation conceived in response to the historic architecture of the Monnaie de Paris.

Rooted in the act of looking, Zahid’s practice draws from observation and memory to construct figures and environments that exist somewhere between the familiar and the unknowable. Her paintings hold onto fleeting encounters, transient places, and subtle emotional states, transforming passing moments of observation into something enduring. Attentive to the ordinary and often overlooked, Zahid’s work lingers on people and environments, revealing the quiet emotional weight contained within everyday encounters.

This sensitivity to impermanence is closely connected to Zahid’s experience of moving between places. Her understanding of home has been shaped not as a fixed condition, but as something continually renegotiated through people, surroundings, memory, and departure. Painting becomes a means of slowing down this experience, a way of staying with what is temporary long enough for it to become visible.

For the Monnaie de Paris, this sensibility extends beyond the painting and into the exhibition space itself. A single large-scale painting is presented within a freestanding wooden structure conceived as a temporary architectural intervention. Rather than encountering the work as a conventional frontal display, the viewer experiences it through movement, approaching and moving around the structure to encounter the painting from different distances and perspectives. The act of viewing becomes physical, requiring the visitor to pause, approach, move away, and look again.

A Temporary Place is therefore conceived not simply as a structure for displaying a painting, but as a temporary place for looking: a space where the transient can be held, where the familiar can become strange, and