Fariba Alam skillfully combines traditional imagery with a contemporary touch; classic ideas and time tested subject matter with new-age aesthetic values and forms. Her recent series tries to integrate abstraction, tilework and photography to re-imagine cultural artifacts, turbulent post colonial history and Islamic architecture.
The intricate arrangement of the tiles and repetition in it are indeed striking. It employs Islamic idiom, minimalist mode and conceptual techniques of repetition and seriality. In the process, it reassigns autobiography with transcendental properties, and reconstructs history as present in the creation of space. The artist explains, “I engage with the building of my own iconography in order to assert a self-defined utopia.”
The Brooklyn based video artist and photographer is of Bangladeshi descent. The pan-global sensitivities have shaped her work. Having done her B.A. degree in Middle East and Asian Languages & Cultures with a focus on post-colonial theory from Columbia University (1998), she holds an M.A. in Studio Art & Art Criticism from New York University (2004). In a testimony to her talent she was offered a Fullbright scholarship (1998-99).
This socially aware artist is a founding board member of SAWCC and is associated with Sakhi for South Asian Women and The Acid Survivor's Foundation in Bangladesh. She featured at the ambitious ‘India Xianzai’ museum show curated by Diane Freundl. Her work has also been shown at The American Museum of Natural History, The Asia Society, Bose Pacia Modern, The International Center of Photography, and other prominent venues in New York.
Apart from tile work, Fariba Alam is also known to incorporate paintings, colonial photography, old family photo archives and her own photography in her work in order to create fabricated identities and spaces. At 'Perspectives: Women, Art and Islam’ series, she exhibited her work along with five female artists who shared their viewpoint on personal relationship with Islam.
She displayed her original photography and painting done on ceramic tiles, alluding to mosaic-tile mosques. The images on the three pieces portrayed religious stories with personal voice, embodying the intersection of spiritual, cultural and personal aspects of her faith.
The intricate arrangement of the tiles and repetition in it are indeed striking. It employs Islamic idiom, minimalist mode and conceptual techniques of repetition and seriality. In the process, it reassigns autobiography with transcendental properties, and reconstructs history as present in the creation of space. The artist explains, “I engage with the building of my own iconography in order to assert a self-defined utopia.”
The Brooklyn based video artist and photographer is of Bangladeshi descent. The pan-global sensitivities have shaped her work. Having done her B.A. degree in Middle East and Asian Languages & Cultures with a focus on post-colonial theory from Columbia University (1998), she holds an M.A. in Studio Art & Art Criticism from New York University (2004). In a testimony to her talent she was offered a Fullbright scholarship (1998-99).
This socially aware artist is a founding board member of SAWCC and is associated with Sakhi for South Asian Women and The Acid Survivor's Foundation in Bangladesh. She featured at the ambitious ‘India Xianzai’ museum show curated by Diane Freundl. Her work has also been shown at The American Museum of Natural History, The Asia Society, Bose Pacia Modern, The International Center of Photography, and other prominent venues in New York.
Apart from tile work, Fariba Alam is also known to incorporate paintings, colonial photography, old family photo archives and her own photography in her work in order to create fabricated identities and spaces. At 'Perspectives: Women, Art and Islam’ series, she exhibited her work along with five female artists who shared their viewpoint on personal relationship with Islam.
She displayed her original photography and painting done on ceramic tiles, alluding to mosaic-tile mosques. The images on the three pieces portrayed religious stories with personal voice, embodying the intersection of spiritual, cultural and personal aspects of her faith.
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