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Fanaa is the eclipse: Zahra Mansoor
Sanat Initiative
January 2026
AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
by Max Diallo Jakobsen
“I don't think this marriage will be possible because your couch cannot sign the Nikkahnama.” The officiant delivers this news plainly in Zahra Mansoor's film Doomed Love Trope, shot entirely within her Paris studio. The marriage fails not for lack of devotion but because the beloved, a purple velvet couch, cannot perform the signature required by Islamic marriage law. But the film is arguably less about impossible matrimony than about the object at its center: a couch that has become the anchor for Mansoor's salon practice, that has traveled with her across residencies and geographies, and that makes all the work possible.
What to call it, even? A couch, a sofa, a chaise longue, a character, a person? The instability of the name tracks how the object has exceeded its category. Mansoor acquired her now-signature purple couch during her residency at Cartels in La Défense. She found it on Leboncoin. She had been reflecting on Impressionist paintings (think Édouard Manet's Olympia) and Mansoor wanted something similar in her studio to “form a theater around.” Where Manet and his contemporaries arranged their models for an external gaze, Mansoor uses her purple velvet acquisition to pose and position herself and her friends for each other, conjuring a certain kind of collective intimacy that is felt all across her oeuvre.
For Mansoor, this all connects to salon practice in its oldest sense. In eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe, salons created spaces where intellectual exchange could happen outside official institutions. In South Asia during the same period and much earlier, the mehfil tradition brought together gatherings centered on poetry and classical music. And in twentieth-century New York, artists like Andy Warhol understood the Factory as an extension of the studio, where making scenes and making art were the same activity. Salon culture has always been inseparable from art making. Mansoor's practice brings these traditions together in a form that moves between different arrondissements in Paris, Karachi, and wherever she might find herself next.
Mansoor's salon practice began at 59 Rivoli, the legendary artist squat in the center of Paris. She hosted evening gatherings there, inviting musicians and artists, shifting the lighting, creating floor seating, transforming a private studio into collective space. After acquiring the couch soon after and bringing it to her new space at Poush in Aubervilliers where she stayed for a year, the practice really found its anchor. She would pose people on it, drape fabric, arrange textiles and cushions. Her paintings document these gatherings while the gatherings conversely generate imagery for the paintings. For Mansoor, the social and the artistic cannot be separated.
By the time I visited Mansoor's studio at Poush in June, this method was fully formed. The space, like many repurposed studios, retained its industrial bones: exposed brick, tall white walls. And right at the center of it all, the couch. Positioned on thick patterned rugs in deep reds and burgundies, cushions and fabric in purples and mauves draped across it. Paintings in various stages hung on the walls, almost all featuring the same purple color palette of the very studio I was standing in. The same figures returning again and again. We circled around the couch as we talked, neither of us sitting down. Maybe the space was not yet activated for evening hours when overhead lights would give way to lamps, when the studio would transform into something else entirely? Or maybe it simply held itself apart, maintaining its position as more than furniture? I was certainly aware of it as a third presence.
What Mansoor has been developing is a practice where the studio is inseparable from the work. Her paintings show figures reclining, bodies loosely rendered, dissolving into fabric. Evoking the people who actually sat for these evening gatherings, whose presence activated the space. In such a way, the work documents social practice while formalizing it. And the couch makes this possible because it provides the stable center around which everything else can shift.
When Poush closed earlier this year, Mansoor took the couch with her. It now resides at an undisclosed location, continuing its work. Some things as we learn, require protection, privacy, a location known only to those who need to know. As Mansoor's practice develops, the question of how her salon culture travels becomes especially compelling. She moves between cities and residencies, building temporary homes in spaces not designed for permanence. Maybe permanence is itself something to be wary of?
In Doomed Love Trope, after the marriage ceremony fails, Mansoor performs a lip sync of Mehdi Hasan’s Mujhe Tum Nazar Se (From Your Gaze) , the frame's edges blurring in citation of early 2000s music video aesthetics. Then she lies immobile on the couch, eyes closed. We do not know if she is sleeping or dying. And then the film cuts to a newspaper headline: "Broken Heart Kills Zahra Mansoor.... Artist Dead at 25, Found Lifeless in Her Studio." The character dies there, on the purple velvet, surrounded by evidence of the life she built. She lives and dies by this space, by this object.
But Mansoor the artist continues, and so does the couch. Somewhere at that undisclosed location, it holds the next gathering, anchors the next painting, and makes the next iteration of this practice possible. The film opened with a promise: "An old, worn out, tired, tired tale that we like to hear over and over again." The tale of forbidden love, of devotion to impossible objects, of chosen family and building homes in temporary spaces, of making art inseparable from the social life that sustains it. Some loves cannot be formalized but they persist anyway, witnessed only by those present in the room.