Award-winning mixed media artist Anila Quayyum Agha fills an entire gallery space with intricate shadows projected by an ornately carved wooden cube danggling in the middle of the room. Agha created this cube from large panels of laser-cut wood that were designed to resemble the geometrical patterns found in sacred Islamic spaces. Placed in the centre of the gallery, a light souce is embedded in the cube to project these elegant patterns onto the surrounding white walls.  

Agha shares:The Intersections project takes the seminal experience of exclusion as a woman from a space of community and creativity such as a Mosque and translates the complex expressions of both wonder and exclusion that have been my experience while growing up in Pakistan. The wooden frieze emulates a pattern from the Alhambra, which was poised at the intersection of history, culture and art and was a place where Islamic and Western discourses, met and co-existed in harmony and served as a testament to the symbiosis of difference. I have given substance to this mutualism with the installation project exploring the binaries of public and private, light and shadow, and static and dynamic. This installation project relies on the purity and inner symmetry of geometric design, the interpretation of the cast shadows and the viewer’s presence with in a public space. 

Learn more about this extraordinary work and the artist here. 

via COLOSSAL