Anila Quayyum Agha | A Moment to Consider

ANILA

QUAYYUM AGHA

ANILA QUAYYUM

DUALITIES AND INTERSECTIONS

BETTY SEID

Although she identifies as an outsider—as a woman (in Pakistan), an immigrant (in the US) and an artist using craft techniques (in graduate art school), Anila Quayyum Agha has adopted all these exclusionary identifiers and made them work for her. Being an outsider has given her a privileged vantage point from which she has proceeded intrepidly. With the pure symmetry of geometric form and the soft evanescence of cast shadows (themselves a visual duality), Agha confronts and sheds light on the seeming dualisms of public and private, light and shadow, static and dynamic, religious and secular. She has stated that her work seeks to represent the intersections, the places where binaries (as she calls the polarities of existence) can be explored and possibly resolved.

She creates a place for herself in those interstices of delicate balance through the visual metaphor of Islamic patterning.

The cube in A Beautiful Despair (2021), commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth, TX (and in other of Agha’s cube series) is a reference to the iconic Kaaba in Mecca. The Kaaba is the holiest of Islamic pilgrimage sites. Islamic religious spaces historically allow women to pray in separate, gendered spaces, yet culturally women have often been excluded from praying in those same religious centers. Agha responds to the beckoning light in a Muslim place of worship that is not necessarily welcoming by creating symbolic places of refuge. Her immersive installations

use the form that has this exclusionary association. Intersections and boundaries may shift according to viewer’s movement; however, within the conceptually and physically complex space, one is embraced—by light and shadow.

Agha’s use of Islamic art refers less to religion than to the culture that prevailed in a wide-spread geographic area over many centuries of history. Application of complex patterns to two-dimensional and threedimensional surfaces is a primary characteristic of Islamic art.

There are four two-dimensional design motifs in Islamic art: geometric, vegetal, calligraphic and, although largely prohibited, figural. Agha employs the first two with complex geometric patterns and lush vegetal forms. Her floral and foliate motifs, palmettes, blossoms and leaves are attached to scrolling vines in patterns known as arabesque. As for calligraphy, the adjective “calligraphic,” the use of the form and flow of writing, is more applicable to Agha’s practice.

Agha utilizes Islamic forms cleverly. She does not merely “lift” Islamic patterns, but recognizes “…[in the] underlying order of the cosmos and the natural world the symmetries found in nature” … [which] can be represented by the “purity and inner symmetry of geometric design.”

1 She retains the precise execution, the elegant arabesques, and the complex geometry. She also reinterprets the model of pierced lanterns that may have illuminated a mosque. She reworks them to her purpose. Artists of the past had to deal with Islam’s limitations on what could— or could not—be depicted and so concentrated their artistic energies on the ornamental. Craftsmen, left to their own devices, placed a premium on precision and demonstration of virtuosity (historically these great designs evolved when Arab mathematicians joined in the pursuit of complexity). So does Agha, but she symbolically softens the message of Islamic rectitude by deploying the hard geometries of Islamic patterns to cast shifting shadows. As she creates architectural installations from a female standpoint, she nonetheless maintains the precision of Islamic design.

Form is as important as function, particularly in Agha’s large immersive installations. Here another set of opposites unites—hard steel and amorphous light. In her hands, the traditional forms of her personal and communal history are transformed through the application of twenty-first century techniques and materials. Each of these installations has as its centerpiece an immense hollow steel cube. They are mega-versions of the kind of pierced metal lanterns used at Islamic sites. Islamic motifs are laser-cut into the steel walls and the interior is often lit by a single bulb. This construction challenges the orderliness of traditional design standards with the randomness of cast shadows. The polarities that Agha seeks to explore are presented as feminine motifs (organic floral arabesques) incised into masculine material (steel). Her interest in contradiction is further evident in the manipulation of light, creating sundry shadows—lighter and darker, crisp and amorphous, fractured and solid. Light and shadow give the appearance of lacy fragility that belies feminine resilience and the strength of nature.

For her light and shadow installations, Agha cites Islamic architecture as a source of visual inspiration, specifically the Tomb of Jehangir (Mughal emperor, r. 1605–1627) in Lahore, Pakistan, and the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. In addition to both sites’ abundantly carved and decorated surfaces, there are elements that suit Agha’s subtle challenge to the patriarchy of architecture. The jaali (carved marble screens) at Jehangir’s mausoleum allow for the flow of fresh air and are vehicles for intricate cast shadows. But the jaali also has the additional architectural function of defining the boundary of female confinement, behind which women may observe events while remaining invisible—outsiders. Agha recognizes in the Alhambra its significance as a place of East-West discourse, where history, art and culture intersected.

Agha’s drawings are often embroidered and embellished with beads. These works on paper are a more intimate response to history and memory than her large-scale installations. Rather they respond to the expectation that in Pakistan women sew. Female domesticity might suggest servitude, but it could also

create community. With these stitched pieces, Agha recalls her mother’s sewing circle that met annually to repair and restuff quilts (and no doubt shared a year’s worth of communal catching up). By imbuing her drawings with personal memory, Agha’s motive is clear: to redefine “women’s work,” i.e., craft, as valuable, if not equal to, painting and drawing.2 The turquoise and white stitching and precisely placed beads in Shimmering Memories 9 (2022) have been produced with the tools of “women’s work,” but the end result is purely elegant abstraction.

Agha’s most recent two-dimensional work continues to employ traditional Islamic geometries while also embracing contemporary technology and materials. A complex process of layering colored resins solidifies the patterns of her cast shadows and enlivens them with color. The Sum of All Its Parts (Mughal Gardens) I (2022) could be a diagram of such an occurrence. The cube is there in plan with a red dot and radiating dotted lines. They indicate the light source creating vibrant turquoise shadows. A formal influence for these works is pietra dura (“hard stone” in Italian), a technique of

Shimmering Memories 9, 2022

lapidary marquetry, mastered by the Florentines at the end of the sixteenth century. On the Indian subcontinent it is called parchin kari and was abundantly employed during the Mughal Empire (1526–1857) on buildings such as the Taj Mahal. Pietra dura designs often represent floral motifs, plants or geometric shapes. Precision is essential for the exact fitting of inlaid colored stones in complex arrangements.

The designs of Agha’s resin works themselves derive from a very particular Islamic figure, the shamsa

(“little sun” in Arabic). It is most often seen as the frontispiece in Islamic manuscripts, but also decorates architectural elements such as the interior of a dome or the pediment over a doorway. Typically, its structure is a repeating floral, vegetal or geometric motif that forms an elaborately detailed circle.

The shamsa-sun as a primal shadows-maker is a good fit for Agha—formally and inspirationally. She is in esteemed company appropriating the elegant design of the shamsa for her resin work. Albrecht Dürer created

The Sum of All Its Parts (Mughal Gardens) I, 2022 Deconstructed Paradise (Mughal Gardens – Sphere with Pattern) I, 2022

a woodblock print entitled The First Knot (pre-1521) based on an Ottoman shamsa that had previously been copied by Leonardo da Vinci. It’s not a huge leap from there to Agha’s Deconstructed Paradise (Mughal Gardens – Sphere with Pattern) I (2022). The Dürer print was exhibited recently in the June 2022 exhibition The Clamor of Ornament (The Drawing Center, New York). Interestingly, the curators of that exhibition defined ornament as “…embellishment, surface or structural, that can be lifted from its context, reworked, reproduced, and redeployed.”3

Lifting and redeploying indeed! Through a screen of Islamic-inspired patterns, Agha metaphorically illuminates her narrative by casting light (and shadows) on social, political, cultural and personal issues. Her visual response is not overt. Rather, her active pushback is via appropriation and abstraction of the forms that are characteristic of the cultures where she has felt an outsider: Islam and the West. Anila Quayyum Agha converts that exclusion into inclusive beauty, using the model of Islamic design as the means to convey her narrative.

1 Anila Quayyum Agha, in Nina Azzarello, “Anila Quayyum Agha on How Life Experience Led to an Impassioned Artistic Exploration of Light,” (Designbloom, 3 June 2021).

2 Ted Loos, “Anila Quayyum Agha Uses Patterns to Break Patterns” (The New York Times, 27 June 2022).

3 Will Heinrich, “If These Beautiful Ornaments Could Speak” (The New York Times, 3 August 2022)

Betty Seid is an independent curator, writer and lecturer. From 1995 to 2005, she was Research Associate and Exhibition Coordinator for South Asian Art in the Department of Asian Art of The Art Institute of Chicago. During her ten-year tenure, she curated and oversaw the installation of several important South Asian exhibitions.

Her exhibition (and catalog) New Narratives: Contemporary Art from India was the first to show 21st-century Indian art in the United States. It opened at the Chicago Cultural Center in July 2007 and traveled to other venues in the US. In 2011, she was the Consulting Curator for Roots in the Air, Branches Below , an exhibition of modern and contemporary art from India at the San Jose Museum of Art. Most recently she curated Alteration Activation Abstraction for Sundaram Tagore Gallery (NY 2019).

The Sum of All Its Parts (Mughal Gardens) I, 2022, resin, 47 x 47 inches/119.4 x 119.4 cm

Deconstructed Paradise (Mughal Gardens – Sphere with Pattern) I, 2022, resin, 47 x 47 inches/119.4 x 119.4 cm

This Old Shade III, 2021, graphite, cutouts and embroidery, 30 x 22 inches/76.2 x 55.9 cm

This Old Shade IV, 2021, graphite and white beads, 18 x 24 inches/45.7 x 61 cm

Shimmering Memories 9, 2022, turquoise and white embroidery and beads, 30 x 41.5 inches/76.2 x 105.4 cm

Shimmering Memories 7, 2022, mixed media on paper and Mylar (laser-cuts, gold and green beads and embroidery), 41.5 x 43 inches/105.4 x 109.2 cm

Walk with Me My Beloved 5, 2022, mixed media (cutouts, white beads and gold thread), 30 x 30 inches/76.2 x 76.2 cm

Black and White, 2021, encaustic, cut paper, embroidery and beads on paper, 29.75 x 38.5 inches/75.6 x 97.8 cm

Kaaba (Blue and Pink), 2021, embroidery and beads on paper, 30 x 30 inches/76.2 x 76.2 cm

Kaaba (Gold and Pink), 2021, embroidery and beads on paper, 30 x 30 inches/76.2 x 76.2 cm

Circle the Kaaba (Silver and Gold), 2021, embroidery and beads on paper, 30 x 30 inches/76.2 x 76.2 cm

Mysterious Inner Worlds (Gold), 2021

Encaustic, charcoal, pastel, cut paper and Mylar, embroidery and beads on paper, 30 x 30 inches/76.2 x 76.2 cm

photo: Stefan Jennings Batista, courtesy of University of New Mexico Art Museum

From Above 1, 2022, mixed media on paper (paper cutouts and red embroidery and white beads), 30 x 22 inches/76.2 x 55.9 cm

From Above 2, 2022, mixed media on paper (paper cutouts and embroidery with chartreuse thread), 23 x 20 inches/58.4 x 50.8 cm

From Above 6, 2022, mixed media on paper (paper cutouts and embroidery with light-blue thread), 23 x 20 inches/58.4 x 50.8 cm

From Above 7, 2022, mixed media on paper (paper cutouts and embroidery with blue-green metallic thread), 23 x 20 inches/58.4 x 50.8 cm

Photo: Badri, courtesy the Philbrook Museum of Art, 2019

ANILA QUAYYUM AGHA

Anila Quayyum Agha (b. 1965) is a Pakistani-American artist who works in a crossdisciplinary fashion with mixed media. She explores global politics, cultural multiplicity, mass media, and social and gender roles. As a result, her artwork is a conceptually challenging mixture of thought, artistic action and social experience.

After arriving in the US from Pakistan in 2000, Agha attended graduate school to study fiber arts. Over time, she expanded her practice to include other mediums as her work became increasingly sculptural. While still a student, Agha was frequently told that as a woman, particularly a woman of color and an immigrant, she would never advance her career if she used techniques associated with craft or visual elements unique to Islamic culture. But after seeing exhibitions of the subversive embroidered paintings of Egyptian artist Ghada Amer, the hand-sewn story quilts by African American artist Faith Ringgold and the multimedia installations created using textile techniques by American artists Anne Wilson and Ann Hamilton, Agha knew there was space for the kind of art she wanted to make, which was authentic to her life experiences while also conveying universal truths.

Anila Quayyum Agha received a BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore, and an MFA from the University of North Texas. She resides in Indianapolis, Indiana, and Augusta, Georgia, where she is a professor and the Eminent Morris Scholar of Fine Art at Augusta University.

SUNDARAM TAGORE

GALLERIES

We have been representing established and emerging artists from around the world since 2000. We champion work that is aesthetically and intellectually rigorous, infused with humanism and art historically significant. We specialize in paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations with a strong emphasis on materiality. Our artists cross cultural and national boundaries, synthesizing Western visual language with forms, techniques and philosophies from Asia, the Subcontinent and the Middle East. We show this work alongside important work by overlooked women from the New York School. The gallery also has a robust photography program that includes some of the world’s most noted photographers.

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President and curator: Sundaram Tagore

Senior Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey

Director, Singapore: Melanie Taylor

Director, New York: Kathryn McSweeney

Registrar: Julia Occhiogrosso

Designer: Russell Whitehead

Editorial support: Kieran Doherty

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Text © 2022 Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Photographs © 2022 Anila Quayyum Agha

All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover: From Above 2 (detail), 2022, mixed media on paper (paper cutouts and embroidery with chartreuse thread), 23 x 20 inches/58.4 x 50.8 cm

ISBN: 978-0-9967301-9-8