Circumambulation, 2015, Charcoal on two L-shaped movable walls, 96 x 96 x 96 inches
For this work, I used texts from three previous artworks made during a one- month period. The statements extracted were composed of English and Urdu: “This is My Family,” “Neither Here Nor There” and “Bul Bul Ka Bacha.”* The letters are magnified, broken and abstracted. The abstracted forms overlap, swarm, float and wrap around two L-shaped movable walls. These walls were installed in a broken cube formation. The formation guides the viewer to walk around the work. The architecture becomes a sacred object or idol because of this movement. It was a first attempt to work directly on the wall. This work launched the use of stencil and wall drawing with charcoal. It also inspired my monochromatic aesthetic. The black text against a white background evokes simplicity: a newspaper, a page in the Quran, a phrase in a novel. The short, thick, angular lines in this work inspire the lines that make up the current stencils in “The Family” and “This is My Family.”
*Urdu for nightingale’s child
For this work, I used texts from three previous artworks made during a one- month period. The statements extracted were composed of English and Urdu: “This is My Family,” “Neither Here Nor There” and “Bul Bul Ka Bacha.”* The letters are magnified, broken and abstracted. The abstracted forms overlap, swarm, float and wrap around two L-shaped movable walls. These walls were installed in a broken cube formation. The formation guides the viewer to walk around the work. The architecture becomes a sacred object or idol because of this movement. It was a first attempt to work directly on the wall. This work launched the use of stencil and wall drawing with charcoal. It also inspired my monochromatic aesthetic. The black text against a white background evokes simplicity: a newspaper, a page in the Quran, a phrase in a novel. The short, thick, angular lines in this work inspire the lines that make up the current stencils in “The Family” and “This is My Family.”
*Urdu for nightingale’s child
