“Our shadows are our wings”

by Sarah Ahmad

in conjunction with Allure of the Land curated by NARS Fellow Dylan Seh-Jin Kim

Opening reception Fri | Aug 30 | 6-8 pm

Sarah’s studio installation August 31–Sept 14 | by appointment

201 46th St, Fourth Floor Studio | Brooklyn, NY 11220

Please join me in my NARS studio (past main gallery, second-last studio on right) to experience my newest body of work. Held during the Session III International Residency Opening Reception, Allure of the Land, this Friday August 30, 6–8 pm. If you can’t make it Friday, I would love to host you for a studio visit by appointment August 31 - September 18, 2024. Every day, this setting evolves. Detritus from the streets transmutes into altars of resilience and healing. Enmeshed within the immersive sculptural collage of drawings, photo-collages, and natural geologic and botanic materials from biologically threatened lands in my native Pakistan and adopted home in the U.S. Projecting personal and inner psychic landscape juxtaposed with physical and cultural, inviting reckoning and reconciliation, reflection and meditation. Landscapes of majestic beauty, and of extinction and erasure—of lives & life-ways, ecosystems, of women’s craft & labor. Landscape of renewed hope, cultivating new futures.

My latest work engages the notion of always becoming: the ever-dynamic process of creation. Personally, as an artist; as a people, and as the earth seeks continually to heal itself. I confront environmental racism, writ large and small. From issues of access to green space, to large-scale climate catastrophe and its disproportionate burden on already marginalized populations globally. For me, immersive art may act a conduit to make tangible transformative encounters with the earth. My installations offer aesthetic sanctuaries, underscoring our (dis)connection with the earth.

“Our shadows are our wings” — title from Kaveh Bassiri’s poetry

*Restored Landscapes (Unearthing Stories From The Core)*, Governor’s Island, 2024

What does healing look like when brought to nature itself? Pattern governs the order of creation, how do we replicate it when brought to mend the ecosystems we’ve destroyed? Substantial parts of Manhattan rest on filled land: the refuse of our past. Most recently, the largest public park spaces are built atop landfills as we seek to repurpose that which we’ve cast away, but are unable to disappear. Freshkills park rests on a garbage dump, offering one of the most potent transfigurations imaginable: the reviled castoff detritus of everyday modern life, into precious urban greenspace. One day, the traces of this manufacture will become another layer in the Earth’s crust; my work documents this process of change.

This New York body develops my international Unearthing Stories from the Core. Shown above, elements of Alchemy of Disappearance fusing gold leaf, collaged images of glaciers in Gilgit, N. Pakistan, and other materia of the land itself. Gilgit is home to the longest glaciers outside polar regions and Pakistan’s most ethnically diverse region. And suffers some of the greatest global damage from climate disaster. This installation insists on a visceral understanding of ‘local’ environmental catastrophe and healing as part of larger patterns, putting them into the dialog as a call for policy change. It continually asks how we might relate to land outside colonial, capitalist modes of living—a future of belonging, outside territorial possession or extraction.

As a larger project, Unearthing Stories From The Core considers our enmeshment with the earth, asking: how are we altered by the environment we have altered? It looks at land(scape) as a repository concealing and preserving our history. Recognizing the connective tissue binding us to the earth as also literary, Alchemy of Disappearance recalls our stories: multiple parables within the larger narrative, building upon itself. A connection with the rhythms of creation. An unceasing process of healing. Of reuniting fragmented parts of oneself.

In NARS main gallery, you may see two of my previous works, including my very last available drawing from the Fractured Cosmos series, as illustrated in Shahzad Bashir’s groundbreaking A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT, 2022).

Allure of the Land

Season III 2024 International Residency Exhibition | Curated by NARS Curatorial Fellow Dylan Seh-Jin Kim

Featuring works by Sarah Ahmad, Maude Corriveau, Rachel Frank, Giuseppina Giordano, Visaya Hoffie, Shohei Katayama, Tina Lam, Celeste Viv Ly, Kanthy Peng, Heather Renée Russ, Sao Tanaka, Shuai Yang, and Jeehee Yoo.