Layla Kassan

AVA Exhibition: As Natural As Daylight: Plants, Memory & The Edge of Belonging (Group Show) 20.11.25 - 24.01.26

Layla Kassan (b. 2003, East London, South Africa) is a visual artist in her final year of study at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. Her practice engages themes of grief, memory, and explores how loss alters one’s relationship to home and belonging. A central material in her work is the marigold, a flower significant in Hindu mourning rituals, from which she extracts pigments to create watercolours.

These handmade pigments are combined with fragmented transfers of family photographs, producing ghost-like images that hover between presence and absence. The unpredictability of these transfers mirrors the uncertainty of grief, while her use of negative space suggests rupture, longing, and the traces of what once was. Through these processes, Kassan constructs imagined spaces in which the corporeality of grief exists.

Instagram: @laylas.gallery