NARS Fellows Interview
2024 Session III, International Artist Residency, Brooklyn, NY

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

 I’m a multi-media artist, working largely with installation. My trajectory as a professional artist has been very unorthodox. I did my undergrad work in Lahore, and then my MFA years after immigrating to the US, after a period of displacement and trauma, while rebuilding life. Seeking an art career from a small urban center in the American South is unexpected – even peripheral. My foundational training has therefore been implicitly engaged with centers and margins: who is an insider and who is an outsider in the art world. For example, Tulsa might be considered marginal to the American contemporary art scene, but within Oklahoma, it is central. Thus, cities like Tulsa or Memphis play important roles as bridges between the local and the national – or even global. My furthest-reaching work in these cities was set out in public: at a nature preserve, or public libraries, a hospital. This fall I’m participating in a show, “Across Common Grounds: Contemporary Art Outside the Center” at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. It’s exciting to be a part of this shift towards linking contemporary art practices across communities. For me, art has incredible potential for creating these bridges.

How do you describe your practice?

My practice is enmeshed with nature and exploring how engagement with the natural world can effect healing. (Conversely, how disconnection or estrangement from nature is harmful, even signifies marginalization: people who are most vulnerable to climate disaster or living in urban areas devoid of green space. Or are prevented from accessing it due to other reasons – like safety.) My practice is always growing; at NARS I started articulating it as “always becoming.” My art builds on itself: revolving around a core set of themes. Themes of displacement and belonging; renewal and resurrection; cosmic interconnectedness illuminated through Sacred Geometry and recurring patterns in nature, human body, and cosmos; communal healing, ecotherapy-the sublime, restorative potential of nature; broken parts reformed literally and spiritually, creating new unified wholes; making a place for oneself in the world after dislocation and uprootedness; environmental racism, confronting the ‘nature gap’ experienced in marginalized communities; unearthing micro and macro histories embedded in landscape as a concept writ large: physical, cultural, historical, personal—these themes lie at the heart of my practice. I seek to merge acknowledgement of trauma with the faith and hope that a future can be rebuilt on the ruins of the past. My work is both a reckoning and a refuge, a means of resilience and healing. Yet my work is also always finding new expressions, new angles, new specifics. For example, recognizing a parallel between Tulsa’s 1921 Race Massacre and the US drone attacks on Pakistan – both forms of racialized state-sponsored violence. Then too recognizing that climate collapse is another iteration of that violence: larger, slower, more meta – but still always affecting the people who already live at the margins. The refugee tent – or tents more broadly as signifiers of temporary shelter – are especially evocative. They are both more connected to and more vulnerable before nature. The tent’s structural porousness also links it to many of my other works that consider permeability: the Jaali series, Quilting Patterns, Cosmic Veils.

 What gets you into a flow state?

Walking is a form of meditation for me. It opens me up to the world. It’s visual wonders. There is a euphoria in it. I’m so sensitive to the environment around me, that I’m constantly inundated with new ideas for work. More work than I could ever produce in a lifetime.

Can you tell us a bit about your studio installation?

I’m so grateful to NARS for the opportunity to install “Our shadows are our wings”! It was the third in a series of “Unearthing Stories From The Core” studio installations – the first and second were in Santa Fe and Tulsa, respectively. (I have a video that illustrates their evolution.)

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. In this New York body, detritus from the streets transmutes into altars to resilience and healing. These found items find a home alongside geologic and botanic materials from biologically threatened lands in my native Pakistan and adopted home in the U.S. Gold leaf evokes the alchemy of transfiguration from banal to precious, from devastation to hope.

Substantial parts of New York 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. Images of this rebirth are juxtaposed with those of destruction in Gilgit-Baltistan, home to the longest glaciers outside polar regions and Pakistan’s most ethnically diverse region. As the glaciers collapse, causing environmental disaster, landscapes of majestic beauty also contain extinction and erasure. As an immersive, all-encompassing space, “Our shadows…” invites visceral understanding of environmental catastrophe and healing as part of larger patterns, putting the ‘local’ into dialog as a call for policy change.

Was there a moment of your fellowship that stuck out to you—any I’m-going-to-remember-this-for-life moments?

I received so much amazing feedback on my work during time spent at NARS and met so many people whose support was deeply moving. Hrag Varnatian’s reaction was especially poignant; he visited my studio, and we had a long talk. He saw immediately how the density of the space reveals a deep-seated trauma response and advised that it’s time to let the wounds air and breathe. This meeting was a treasure to carry forward, to feel so seen by someone for whom I carry such admiration.

Over the time at NARS, I developed an especially wonderful relationship with another resident, Celeste Viv Ly, and we went out to looks at sites like the Red Hook Grain Terminal together. I connected with NY-based friends, Pyaari azaadi, Amy Rosenblum Martín, Jinny Khanduja, Sania Samad: role models, soul sisters. New and old. Touring Freshkills park with Shannon Erickson took my breath away. I fell in love with Sunset Park and Bay Ridge rooftops. 

Your artist's statement addresses time, and sort of decolonizing our sense of time. How do you imagine a year? What is your preferred measure of time?

This is such an amazing question, thank you for asking it. The idea of “decolonizing time” obviously has myriad interpretations and nuances. It can be thought of in anti-capitalist terms – rejecting the idea that we exist to be monetized. It can be used in a socio-cultural sense: viewing some societies as ‘timeless’ whereas others are marked by inevitable ‘progress.’ My work and my thought processes are deeply multivalent, so I embrace this variety, and its slippage. Personally, I often think of non-linear time in terms of radical trauma and healing: what causes time to expand and contract? How does the past linger, even project forward into the future. In this understanding, a year could never be contained: it encompasses the past and extends forward into the future. This notion of the continuity and the cyclical so evident in nature, is part of the reason I find it so centering.

When one has been displaced on multiple levels, uprooted, having to rebuild a broken life after destructive experiences, trauma and loss, one learns to reckon with – or even embrace –unpredictability and groundlessness. Further, as an artist, I live with a lack of security and stability on many levels. And given my unorthodox journey to professional art making, I’m forging a path where none exists.

There’s political time, personal time, community time, ancestral time. There’s physical time and metaphysical time; earthly, spiritual, experiential, subjective and relative time. My role as a parent is one key measure. My role as an artist, how my work evolves. How I see later ways that it’s effected change, that wasn’t evident in the moment I was making it – or even displaying it. After the summer I installed The American Dream at Oxley Nature Center, they started a public program about “forest bathing” and another program sponsoring a resident artist.  

Your work uses the act of breaking down, extracting, and rebuilding, do you find that you gravitate towards a specific material? Is there a material you feel best expresses that?

Also, a great question! I started working with the concept of destruction and rebuilding all the way back in 2012 with my first Jaali series. It was deeply resonant with my life at the time as I was remaking my own life. The act of breaking the screens I’d designed (“jaali” in Urdu) and creating something new and beautiful from the broken pieces was a process of resurrecting a future. It represented hope for me. The fragmented forms reunited into novel reconfigurations were metaphors for life rebuilt. It was emblematic of my personal situation. I’m drawn to this process in nature – the cycles of life, decay, and rebirth. For people who’ve lived through a trauma situation, the hope of a new beginning is a lifeline, and the natural world offers that. As a multi-disciplinary artist, I work freely across media. Concept and aesthetic often drive material explorations. I look for the material that will most enable me to realize my idea – and that’s often led to novel uses of materials, like with my Kelp Explosion print series (2019) or use of different films and materials in Cosmic Veils (2020). Sometimes nature itself plays a key role in ‘breakdown’ like with my fabric marigold garlands in The American Dream, which changed as they aged with weather and time over the course of the summer. Now I increasingly incorporate products of the earth itself: tourmalines, dried plants, salvaged leather, and gold – as an element with such rich history of symbolism.

As my practice is about rebuilding a future from the wreckages of the past, the process entails taking broken things—even my own drawings—into new realities and new worlds that transcend the destruction. I make visible multilayered temporalities through collage of past and present works; multiple works are happening within the amalgamation, indefinitely evolving. By collaging old drawings with new works such as in “Our Shadows, Our Wings”, I create a larger meta narrative. My drawings combine arboreal remnants scarcely distinguishable from porous rocks, breaking down and remaking fragments into new structures in drawings, collage, installations: Fractured Cosmos, Cosmic Identity, Fractured Cosmos installations.

Since my life is in another moment of transience, I’m gravitating towards economy of materials, supports that can be rolled up, folded, transported easily without taking up much space. That can be dismantled and reconfigured. Also returning to fabric, due to its rich history in my culture: sewing crafts I grew up with, patterns, dyeing. And I’ve started deconstructing my own past works, cutting up drawings and photographs to remake in sculptural collages. 

Are there certain routines that you developed over your time at NARS? In the studio, or in the neighborhood, for example?

Because my life has been so migratory, I am in many ways groundless (to cite the title of my 2015 MFA project). Paradoxically, this means my attachment to Place is all the more intense in the moment. I try to keep my habit of balancing nature walks and centering connections with green space. Walking through urban landscapes such as in NY, add another layer to this experience. I collected discarded detritus, anecdotal observations, unearthing micro histories that I research further and are woven into the fabric of my studio installation. Ornate and filled with gold leaf and jewel-toned walls, its atmosphere harked to a shrine-like sense of reverence. Adding to it each time I was in the space. It became its own kind of refuge. A sanctuary.  

One routine I developed was getting the Yemeni tea from Yafa Café to start the day. Cardamon infused Yafa tea from the neighborhood became a daily ritual. Sampling the variety of foods from around the world in the Bay Ridge and Sunset Park neighborhoods was a special treat.

How do you feel that the residency program and particularly the fellowship influenced your practice? How would you remember your season at NARS moving forward as an artist?

I would not have been able to come to NARS without the fellowship. Or New York at all at this time, other than as a tourist for a few days. The fellowship allowed me to expand my artistic circle exponentially. I connected with pyaari azaadi (formerly Jaishiri Abichandani) whom I admire greatly and met at a conference in California last year. As someone already familiar with my work, she has been invaluable for introductions and connections. At the same time, this has been an extraordinary moment of creation. Working with the idea of refuse and landfill as the source of Urban green space is a concept that I’d not be able to explore so currently or vibrantly within the U.S, outside of New York. It’s opened a fascinating new dimension in my creative practice. A special thanks to Junho Lee, Katherine Plourde, and the Nars staff, and my fellow cohort for such a memorable experience at NARS.

Would you like to share anything with the incoming residency fellows?

NARS is an especially precious opportunity for people like me, who come in from outside the area. The city has so much to offer and in a short amount of time, it is a challenge to cover so many competing interests, and new ones emerge. So many new connections came up once I was already in the city. Sometimes there wasn’t a chance to connect & the residency flies by in a blink. Consider that your project time must be flexible – once in NY people will suggest opportunities that you might not have known about. Commute time was also longer than I’m used to in Tulsa. Given all that, I’d recommend trying to extend the stay for another month, if possible. I had shows stacked up straightaway after, and it made my end-of-residency feel frenetic.

©2024 Sarah Ahmad. All Rights Reserved.