 A better place to cry 2012 |
 Installation view 2012 |
Artists Statement
"My work incorporates tile work, colonial Indian photography, 1970s family photo archives, my own photography and painting in order to create fabricated identites and spaces. My most recent body of work, 'awhal,' uses Islamic, minimalist, and conceptual techniques of repetition and seriality. Through the form of repeating tiles inlaid with autobiographical tropes, I reconstruct history as present in the creation of space. I engage with the building of my own iconography in order to assert a self-defined utopia.
Conceptually, I'm also interested in rhythmic spiritual states and in the mystic and scientific idea that life unfolds in defined and continuous patterns. On the path to illumination, Sufi mystics move between these ever-changing spiritual states (or ahwal), experiencing a range of sensations such as constraint and expansion, fear and hope, longing and intimacy. Repetition assigns the forms with undulation and transcendental properties, thereby marking the tile installations as a sacred space.
Fariba Alam is a visual artist, born in Massachusetts, with roots in Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Her work integrates tilework, archival photography, and self portraiture in order to create large scale photographs and installations.
Throughout her work, she reimagines cultural artifacts, geometric patterns in nature and Islamic architecture. She utilizes minimalist and conceptual techniques of repetition and seriality, reassigning archival photographs with transcendental properties, and reconstructing history as present in the creation of space.
