The Geometry Of Light: The Wooden Lamp That Transforms Rooms
Pakistani artist Anila Quayyum Agha made this lamp with her own hands, it is not just capable of transforming ordinary rooms into architectural masterpieces, it also reflects humankind’s cultural intersections.
A shadow: apparition, stage, presence and sometimes absence, that shows us the inmaterial in an almost tangible manner; this is the subject matter that Intersections, by Anila Quayyum Agha is concerned with. Devoted to the concept of “intersection”, the Pakistani artist explores islamic geometrical patterns in sacred places as a motif and the metaphors that this can create within a gallery.
Her piece is an impressive wooden map which occupies two metres square and is suspended in the centre of the room; covering the walls with an intricate ghostly wallpaper. She herself forged the geometrical patterns which, according to her, emulate those found in the Alhambra and represents a type of intersection in the history of humankind. In the artist’s words:
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 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. I have given substance to this mutualism with the installation project exploring the binaries of public and private, light and shadow, and static and dynamic. This installation project relies on the purity and inner symmetry of geometric design, the interpretation of the cast shadows and the viewer’s presence with in a public space.
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