This sense of theatricality and layered time permeates her broader body of work. In paintings, especially those in muslin, a material with deep roots in the Indian subcontinent and a fraught colonial legacy, Ahmed reclaims the textile as a site of resistance and storytelling. Muslin becomes a portal in itself: once a luxury good extracted through colonial trade networks, it now returns as a medium through which diasporic memory and feminist critique are inscribed. Ahmed’s distortions of masculine figures are rendered in exaggerated scale, caricatured gestures, and destabilizing color palettes, undermining both colonial structures and contemporary patriarchal nationalisms. The figures are at once performative and unraveling, their authority undone by Ahmed’s wit and visual strategy. Ahmed’s work uses humor as a critical mode of reconfiguring the past, in order to approach the continued psychic effects of nationally-imposed patriarchal structures and historical violence. In this way, Ahmed’s depictions traverse multiple registers of time. The ghostly shadows in her work destabilize existing boundaries. In the work, color spills outside of the line, refusing the line as a demarcating fact, emphasizing the excesses of history and the return of the repressed. By re-animating the performance of the nation-state and building from the theatricality of state performances, Ahmed’s work emphasizes the ways in which national identities are not natural but are highly choreographed and staged. These portals are not a simple escape into an imagined world, rather they demand a reckoning with the constructed nature of borders and the bodies that move across them.

Ahmed’s layered and distorted installation allows us to engage the figure through an alternate perspective and scale, inviting the viewer to consider how the border is not simply a geographic fact but also a psychic wound. For Ahmed, the geographic border, and the continuous line drawn by the artist function as a haunting boundary, which appears both visibly and invisibly across both national and diasporic contexts. Her portals offer no single point of view, instead, they splinter our vision and fragment cohesive narrative, drawing viewers into a zone where contradiction, history, and absurdity coexist.