Anila Quayyum Agha: Flourishing Patterns

Anila Quayyum Agha: Flourishing Patterns presents light installation, sculpture, and works on paper by Anila Quayyum Agha, a Pakistani-American multimedia artist whose work employs renewed interpretations of blossoming Islamic arabesque and geometric design to project flourishing forms in light and shadow into the viewer's space that enable the artist to address the multifaceted experiences of womanhood, immigration, and cultural multiplicity. This exhibition brings together nine works linked symbolically through light and pattern in large and small scales that create an experience that is both intimate and personal as well as communal and enveloping.

Agha’s work aims to inspire a dialog among viewers on the complex, layered topics of identity, gender, and social justice by exploring the grey shadows of seemingly inherent, binary juxtapositions, of the boundaries established within those themes, and of the messages they evoke within each of us. The artist’s immersive exploration provokes contemplation, communication, and understanding about space, place, and experiences we all participate in or are subject to where gendered, religious, racial, and social divisions are often much more nuanced, layered, and changing – never simply black or white and shadow or light, static considerations.

 

Image Credit: Anila Quayyum Agha, Crossing Boundaries: Black, 2017. Laser-cut black lacquered steel and halogen bulb. As installed at Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions: at Asia Society, New York, NY, 2017 . © Anila Quayyum Agha

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