Murals
I make mosaic murals. That sentence has been on a sticky note in my room since 2023, and it still feels slightly strange to type. Most of the public-facing work I do is text, code, or translation — the kind of labor where the artifact lives behind a screen. The murals are different. They have weight. You can put your hand on a finished one and feel the grout under the tile. The work doesn’t render. It sits in a room and makes the room into something else.
I want this page to do two things. First, place the murals inside the rest of what I do, because the connection isn’t decorative — it’s the same practice in four registers. Second, give you enough of the actual making for you to decide whether you want to commission a piece, and a clean handoff to the place where that conversation happens.
What the practice is
The thread between the things I make is arrangement. Translation is arrangement: I take a sentence in Pashto, hold it in my head, and decide which English word goes where so that the meaning survives the move. Code is arrangement: functions, services, data flowing in a sequence that has to actually work, not just look like it works. Philosophy — the thesis-shaped kind — is arrangement: you set premises in an order and let the implications fall out, and if you got the order wrong nothing follows from anything. Mosaic murals are arrangement at the most literal level. You put a tile next to another tile. You decide which color answers which color. You step back, and either the wall has become a thing or it hasn’t.
Mosaic-making in Afghanistan and Iran has a long lineage I’m not pretending to inherit fully. I’m not a master craftsman. I’m someone who started cutting tile in 2023 because I needed a kind of work that wasn’t sentences and wasn’t a screen, and the practice took. There’s a tradition of kashi — glazed ceramic tile work — that goes through Herat and Isfahan and the great mosques, and there’s a folk tradition of mosaic floors and walls that’s older and quieter. I work in a register closer to the second. Geometric where it wants to be. Figurative when the wall asks for it. Mostly I’m interested in pattern logic — how a small unit, repeated and varied, becomes a field.
The thing the practice teaches that I didn’t expect is patience as a structural value. Code lets you iterate in seconds. Translation lets you redo a sentence five times in a sitting. Tile doesn’t. Once the thinset cures, that piece is where it is. You learn to hold the whole composition in your head before you start, because the cost of a wrong move is real. That kind of patience changes the way I plan everything else. I don’t draft as much paper as I used to. I think longer before the first cut, in any medium.
The other thing — and this one’s harder to put plainly — is that pigment moves. The same blue tile reads green at four in the afternoon and indigo at eight in the morning. Cement matures and the grout darkens for a week after it’s dry. I keep a notebook of how specific tiles respond to specific lights, because the wall isn’t done when the last tile goes in — it’s done when you’ve watched the wall through a few full days. There’s a Camus line about the absurd that I think about while I’m cutting tile, although I’ll spare you the philosophy on a portfolio page.
What I make
These are placeholders for now — I’m currently extracting and curating the photo archive from a thousand-frame practice library on my phone, and the curated set will replace these as it’s ready. If you want to talk in the meantime, the contact lane is at the bottom.
— Kabul memory in geometric register, 2024. A small wall piece working off a Herat tile pattern I’d seen as a child, redone in colors that aren’t traditionally Herati. Roughly 60 by 90 cm. Stoneware tile on cement board, sealed.
— Tree, 2024. A figurative piece from a residency. The tree is a chinar — the Afghan plane tree — done in seven greens that don’t match each other on purpose, because chinar leaves don’t match each other in real life either.
— Pattern study, 2025. One of a series I’m working through, all built on the same hexagonal underlay with different palettes. Useful for a small bathroom wall, an entryway, a kitchen backsplash that wants to do more work than a backsplash usually does.
— Coastal commission, 2025. The first piece I built specifically for a client. Hospitality install. I won’t name the venue, but it taught me what hospitality grade actually means — the tile has to survive cleaning crews, not just visitors.
— In progress, 2026. Currently on the bench. I’m not posting commissioned work-in-progress until the client signs off, but this is one of the open studio pieces. It will probably go on a wall in the new place I’m moving into.
If you want the technical specs, the tile is mostly stoneware (a few porcelain accents on hospitality grade), the substrate is fiber-cement board for indoor and concrete board with crack isolation for anything that goes near moisture, and the grout is sanded for joints over 1/8 inch. I work in 60 cm modular panels for anything bigger than a meter, because that’s what fits in a freight crate without the tile cracking in transit.
Commission
I take on a small number of commissions a year. The full intake — pricing tiers, lead times, the configurator that walks you through dimensions, palette, and freight class — lives at the mural studio surface. That’s the operational lane. It has the proper quote form, the catalog, and the actual booking flow. This page is the narrative; that page is the storefront.
If you’d rather skip the form and just tell me what you’re imagining, email murals@zafarkhil.com with a few photos of the wall (or the room), rough dimensions, and what kind of feeling you want the piece to have. I’ll come back with two or three directions and a price range within a few days. I’m honest about what I can’t do — I won’t take a commission I don’t think I can pull off, and I’d rather refer you to someone better than ship you a piece I’m not proud of.
The murals stay in this practice because they’re the part of the work that doesn’t compress to a feed. Everything else I make ends up on a screen eventually. The murals end up on a wall in someone’s actual life. That’s a different kind of artifact, and I plan to keep making them as long as I have hands and a bench to work on.
— Sulim