Intersections: An Installation/Sculpture

Abstract

With a New Frontiers Grant 2012-13, I explored intersections of culture & religion, dynamics and interpretations of space, as they thread through cultures and emerge as varied expressions that redefine themselves with the passage of time. In this piece a motif that represents certitude is explored to reveal its fluidity in Islamic sacred spaces and is meant to uncover the contradictory nature of intersections; which are simultaneously boundaries and also points of meeting. The Intersections project takes the seminal experience of exclusion as a woman from a space of community and creativity such as a Mosque and translates the complex expressions of both wonder and exclusion that have been my experience while growing up in Pakistan. The resultant wooden frieze emulates a pattern from the Alhambra, which was poised at the intersection of history, culture and art and was a place where Islamic and Western discourses, met and co-existed in harmony and served as a testament to the symbiosis of difference. This installation project substantiates this mutualism, exploring the binaries of public and private, light and shadow, and static and dynamic.