‘The Call’ by Amina Ahmed

New Delhi’s Seven Art presents a solo exhibition by, entitled The Call’ the NY-based artist, educator and activist Amina Ahmed. Deeply interested in Sufi literature, music and belief systems, she has developed a lyrical visual a language based on the repetition of symbols, marks and geometry.

In what has been a core project for many years, she explores the theme of a journey toward the Divine using a single shape as an archetype, repeated to evoke a sense of remembrance or invocation. Drawing on the traditional culture in which she was raised, Ahmed sees the repetition of lines, or of drawing, as running across media and is inspired by the migration of symbols across various art forms.

Working with the drawn line, feathers, leaves and delicately curled strips of paper pinned to the wall or to gessoed boards, Ahmed’s core interest is in the symbolism, patterns and rhythms that connect all living beings. For ‘The Call’, she will show new drawings on paper and on carbon paper, several site-specific installations and a new video work with sound.

Mesmerized by the patterns and rhythms, the lines and shapes, the repetitions, and the obsessions, she simply relishes drawing. She terms her work as a way of entering a universe attuned to the ritualistic and symbolic meaning, necessity perhaps, of ‘making marks.’

Amina Ahmed was born in 1964 in Africa and is a Kutchi Turk Indian. She grew up in England and has lived in Iran and the USA. She is a graduate of Winchester School of Art and the Chelsea School of Art. She received her MFA from the Royal College of Art in 1991 and is an artist, educator, curator and activist.

Her work has been exhibited at the Africa Centre, UK, Queens Museum NY, Lincoln Center NY (with Engendered Human Rights Org), The Jersey City Museum, NJ, The RCA, London, among many others. She is married, has three children, lives in NYC and sleeps in NJ.

(Information courtesy: Seven Art, New Delhi)