Jaali—Only from the heart can you touch the sky. —Rumi
2022
MDF screen carvings, wood, & enamel paint; 10’ x 12’ x 14’
Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center
Oklahoma City
JAALI II is an iteration of the JAALI series I started in 2012 pioneering work with screen carvings of Islamic geometric patterns. The Jaali (Urdu for ‘screens’) installations were formative for me, in many ways demarking the transition into my current body of artistic research. I based the series on carved Islamic geometric patterns evoking Islamic architecture, which for me represented my cultural heritage. The Islamic geometric patterns are designed from a circle that is the symbol of unity. The multiple divisions of the circle create the variety of designs representing multiplicity within unity, and infinity in their continuous repetition, and harmony. The screen carvings dissolve the material surface representing the spiritual within the material. As the life I had built as an immigrant to the United States fell apart, I broke the screens I had designed, reassembling them into new structures. At a time of trauma and loss, the reconfigured forms were metaphors for life rebuilt, of creating new realities from broken parts, evoking hope, vision for a future, transcendence. Both formally and conceptually, the Jaali series initiated questions that still drive my artistic production: what role does one’s heritage play in the complex network of identity? What structures—social and literal—can we create from the ruins of the past? Destruction and resurrection, the cyclical nature of pattern, universality: these themes lie at the heart of my work.
© 2024 Sarah Ahmad. All Rights Reserved.