Noorain Inam – Before the Curtain Falls

Slip House is pleased to present Before the Curtain Falls, the first United States solo exhibition of Karachi-born, London-based artist Noorain Inam. There is a peculiar sense of anticipation in Inam's paintings, as though an event has just occurred, or is about to. Houses tilt against rolling hills, animals wander through improbable landscapes, and solitary figures occupy spaces suspended between memory and imagination. Fires blaze, stars fall, and empty theaters await an audience. The lyrical, folkloric imagination of early twentieth-century modernism finds an echo in Inam's paintings, refracted through the intricate compositions and layered narratives of Indo-Persian miniature painting. These scenes suggest fragments of a larger narrative, yet its beginning and ending remain elusive. Like a stage set moments before the curtain falls, Inam's paintings inhabit an interval between revelation and departure. Among the rich constellation of influences informing Inam's practice is Greek mythology, particularly the figure of Dionysus, the god of theatre and performance, whose associations with transformation and altered states of consciousness resonate with the surreal undercurrents of her paintings. She also finds a parallel in Pina Bausch's Café Müller (1978), in which performers stumble through a room crowded with chairs and tables, their movements oscillating between intention and disorientation. Inam recognizes a parallel with her own painting process in this choreography, where familiar reality gradually gives way to the unpredictable logic of dreams. Trained in Indo-Persian miniature painting, Inam approaches the canvas as a space where multiple stories unfold simultaneously. Growing up in Karachi, surrounded by textiles, furniture, films, and objects carrying familial histories, she developed an attentiveness to the ways meaning accumulates in material things. Drawing from literature, folklore, and personal recollections, her compositions weave together recurring motifs that resist fixed interpretations. In Alice Oswald's Nobody (2019), a poetic reimagining of Homer's Odyssey, Inam finds a compelling tension between the desire to conquer the unknown and the willingness to surrender to it. This interest extends to the possibility of disappearance, of leaving ordinary life behind and imagining what might exist beyond it. These varied references come together in works such as A small inventory of stories, in which Inam considers the peculiar afterlives of objects and the stories we attach to them. Inspired by an auction of David Lynch's personal belongings, anonymous collections of discarded possessions, and a man searching a Cornish beach with a metal detector, the painting reflects on the human impulse to collect, preserve, and assign meaning. Inam reassembles some of these found treasures in her own composition: a porcelain frog, a curtain, or a misplaced keepsake becomes a vessel for memories whose origins may be uncertain or entirely imagined. Throughout the exhibition, Inam invites the viewer into worlds that feel at once intimate and unfamiliar. Her paintings unfold like stories told from memory, where details are embellished, chronology becomes uncertain, and the distinction between fact and invention gradually dissolves. Rather than offering a resolution, they linger in the moments before the final act, when anything might still happen. Noorain Inam (b. 1998, Karachi) lives and works in London. She received her MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2022. Noorain Inam was the recipient of the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Residency Award for Emerging Artists (2023). Recent exhibitions include On New Romanticism, Slip House, New York (2026); Multiple Times, Indigo+Madder, London (2025); We Sinful Women: The Library Project, SOAS Library, London (2025); and Go Back to Sleep, It's Just the Wind, Indigo+Madder, London (2024). Her work is in several prestigious collections including the Samdani Art Foundation, Taimur Hassan Collection and HSBC Art Collection.