Intersections is a title of a light-and-shadow-and-carving installation created by media artist Anila Quayyum Agha. The artist, born in Lahore, Pakistan, “works in a cross disciplinary fashion with mixed media creating artwork” that explores and comments on, among other issues, cultural multiplicity. The cultural influences were also crucial in this particular piece in which elaborately carved cube (measuring 35′ x 32′) with an embedded light source projects a dazzling pattern of shadows onto the surrounding gallery walls. The installation made from large panels of laser-cut wood meant to emulate the geometrical patters found in Islamic sacred spaces.
The artist herself comments on the work:
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.
Intersections is a finalist in the 3rd Annual See.Me: Year in Review Competition, and you can learn more about it here.
(via thiscollosal)
