Misbah Wolf is a neurodivergent poet, performer, and multidisciplinary artist whose practice flows between poetry, portraiture, sound, and performance. Her work is concerned with presence — not permanence, but the flicker of aliveness that pulses just before disappearance. The intimate gasp of now.
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I’ve given you a photograph where you can store your grief:
let it leave your face, ignite and fade.
— Rooftops in Karachi
Her poetry has always operated as a form of ekphrasis, but inverted — not written in response to image, but as image itself. Each line is a shutter, a glint, a held breath. Her collections, Rooftops in Karachi (2018) and Carapace (2023), are deeply visual: saturated with mirrors, liminal spaces, hauntings, architecture, and emotional residue. The poetic voice becomes a lens — and the body, a kind of landscape.
The photograph, your spectral resin, will have no copies.
-Rooftops in Karachi
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Misbah’s evolution into photography is not a shift, but an expansion — a deeper falling-in. Her camera is not used to take, but to tend. What she seeks is that liminal interval between subject and self, between skin and meaning — la petite mort of identity, a rupture where something essential escapes. In this moment, when the human face breaks open — in vulnerability, mischief, weariness, desire — there is a jouissance, a brief, erotic knowing, where light both reveals and dissolves.
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She is a hidden female only visible to male insomniacs.
-Carapace
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Her portraits are acts of communion. Of reverent vanishing. The person in the frame is not exposed — they are shielded, held, and sometimes, released. Her use of light is devotional: it cradles, magnifies, veils, and betrays in turn. Each image becomes a site of tension — between being seen and remaining sacred.
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Our bodies are time, impenetrable teenagers apprehensive to speak in case we disappear.
— Carapace
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Misbah’s spoken word work, featured on radio, in performance spaces, and across SoundCloud, continues this act of holding what wants to vanish. Her performances often blur into music and field recordings — a form of somatic listening. Her voice carries the same tone as her photographs: low-lit, hypnotic, intimate, offering permission.
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This house will part with consciousness and dissolve into your lambent dreams.
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She lives and creates on Wurundjeri Country (Naarm, Melbourne), and is currently working on a body of interdisciplinary work where portraits, poetic fragments, overheard quotes, and ambient recordings will form a multi-modal diary of place, intimacy, and light. The goal is not to document — but to be with. To shimmer alongside.
Her work believes that to truly see someone is not to define them, but to honour their mystery.
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Tell me what means so much to you before I stop caring.
-Carapace