The painting Mindscape by Maliheh Afnan is representative of a wave of Lebanese, Palestinian and Iranian women artists and writers who came to prominence in the 1960s. Because Afnan was born in Palestine to Iranian parents, she witnessed and confronted the diaspora of 1948. As such, her art addresses themes of displacement, exile and memory of place. Afnan received a BA from the American University of Beirut and an MA in Fine Arts from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C. Afnan lived in Kuwait from 1963 to 1966, in Beirut from 1966 to 1974 and in Paris from 1974 until 1997, when she moved to London. Her work has been shown primarily in France and in London. Her first solo show, in a Basel gallery in 1971, was organised by the American artist Mark Tobey. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum in London, the Written Art Collection in Germany, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and the BAII Bank Collection in Paris. Later in life, while living in London, Afnan made a number of works focusing on her interest in texts and writing in Arabic, Persian and other languages. She assimilated a series of handmade books in which she reduced the actual writing into the forms of their lines and script. These carefully inscribed pages are references to childhood memories that showed a fascination with numbers and the written form, attempting to imitate the print and written texts she found.