In Conversation: Anila Quayyum Agha
The artist behind “Shadow of Time” chats with Philbrook’s Senior Curator of European Art.
By Sarah Lees
Sarah Lees: Much of your work uses simple forms, but you connect these forms with significant, challenging issues and current events. How did you arrive at this combination?
Anila Quayyum Agha: Creating abstract artwork requires ingenuity to apprehend and reveal issues and connections to world events. And artists I think can no longer work in isolation but need to participate in the contemporary environment to make sense of history in the making.
I enjoy simplicity in works I admire. But simplicity to me doesn’t mean simple mindedness. Layered, complex ideas in experiential form can provide enduring influence to an audience. I often think of experiences that have left a lasting influence on my own psyche and use similar methodology to create connections, meaning and experiences for my audiences. I realized during graduate school that as a woman of color, my art would have influences and ideas that may not be easily accessible to a western audience. Thus, the integration of experiential methodology in my artwork has allowed for more expansive practices. I also think content creates longevity within my work, allowing connections to the conceptual underpinnings and concerns that are central to me and my being.
SL: How do you think about the concept of beauty in art?
AQA: During graduate school, I was familiarized with the concept of the banality of beauty in Western art discourse. However, having been raised in the East, I was also familiar with the concept of the sublime or spiritual in the presence of beauty. I suppose to please my professors I tried to eschew my natural inclination to make objects that were beautiful in concept and craft. After graduation and with experience, I decided to be true to myself. I believe good art often is the outcome of brutal honesty. And now I see the tide changing to accommodate beauty within the larger art world. I think there may also be a slightly better representation of diverse global artists who don’t belong to the Euro-Western traditions and an emergence of under-represented art historical scholarship. This is producing a confluence of ideas that are broader and possibly more inclusive, and expanding the standards of beauty.
Creating work that provides contrasts within people’s lived experiences, such as male/female, light/heavy, fragile/strong, light/dark can help tap into encounters with the sublime. I also think that such encounters allow for a deeper impact than passively viewing art objects does. I wonder, too, due to the fluidity of life, whether experiencing art and beauty might have a deeper effect that could continue to enrich one’s life far into the future.
SL: You have degrees in textile design and fiber arts; do you think those studies inform your work even when you’re using laser-cut steel to make six-foot forms?
AQA: Textiles have clothed and cocooned humanity in safety and comfort. They provide a record of the history of humanity. And through textiles we have developed innovative technological processes and methods visible in the history of industrialization. I also believe we can learn a great deal about regional and global trade and politics — including processes like colonialization — through the history and development of textiles. The artist Yinka Shonibare is an excellent example of the kind of deeply conceptual work that is possible with textiles.
By using a variety of media, from large sculptural installations to embroidered drawings, I explore the deeply entwined political relationships among gender, culture, religion, labor, and social codes. In my work, I have used combinations of textile processes such as embroidery, wax, dyes, and silk-screen printing along with patterned sculptural methods to reveal and question the gendering of textile work as inherently domesticated and excluded from being considered an art form.
My experiences in my native country of Pakistan and as an immigrant here in the United States are woven into my work of redefining and rewriting women’s handiwork as a poignant form of creative expression. Using materials such as metal and wood in my sculptural works to show delicacy, or embroidery as a drawing medium, I reveal the multiple layers resulting from the interaction of concept and process and bridge the gap between modern materials and historical patterns of oppression and domestic servitude. The conceptual richness and ambiguity that results from this process creates an interactive work of art in the sense that the viewer’s subjective experiences of alienation and belonging become part of the piece and its identity.
SL: How does the concept of identity (of various kinds) figure into your work?
AQA: Within my art practice, exploring the perceived cultural and social polarities — such as the masculine-feminine, public-private, definite-amorphous, and religious-secular — permits me to delve into controversial topics that reflect upon topical themes of cultural identity, global politics, mass media and social/gender roles. The use of a variety of media — [from] large-scale sculptural installations to intimate embroidered drawings — to question my place within these binaries allows me to inquire into the validity of our broad cultural acceptance of them.
Mixing reflections and shadows with solid forms and often transposing the resulting effect, my artwork aspires simultaneously to be perceptually soothing and conceptually challenging. To clarify, my work is not about monotheistic religions, but a contemplation on the nature of boundaries and alienation, and on the power of dialogue to transcend the barriers of gender, race, religion, and culture that prevent the true intersections and exchanges between cultures.
I am fascinated by the interplay of presumed opposites that are never quite so: male and female, the definite or the amorphous, the geometric and the organic. In my work, these concerns emerge in an exploration of topical issues, such as joy and grief, safety and danger, life and death, the seen and the unseen.
Within these works, I examine the amoebic transparency of sorrow, and its ability to reflect and inflict light and darkness. I work with materials that are transparent or ethereal, that inhabit the limbo of loss, a space between visibility and invisibility, reality and unreality, light and shadow, real and unreal. These materials appear fragile, but are often resilient, hardy, even stubborn — just like sorrow — when cut, pushed, pulled, scraped, or sewn together. The conceptual ambiguity of the resulting patterns in the artwork creates an interactive experience in which the onlooker’s subjective experiences of alienation and belonging become part of the piece and its identity.
Materials such as heavy steel, cut with delicate lace-like patterns, reflect and refract light. They represent space that belongs to one more than the other, evaluating color, gender, race, creed, and the cycles of life and death. In addition to questioning the assumptions behind the geometric or non-figurative form as certain and static, my work also provokes an investigation into questions of authenticity, which are central to the post-colonial condition.
The intertwining of light and shadow, original and derivative, are at the core of the various renditions of the pattern. They mirror the post-colonial quest for originality and purity and ultimately circular geometric pursuit where primary form can only be imagined and never really captured. In a contextual milieu, where difference and divergence dominate most conversations about the intersection of civilization, my artwork explores the presence of harmonies that do not ignore the shadows, ambiguities and dark spaces between them, but rather explore them in novel and unexpected ways.
Anila Quayyum Agha: Shadow of Time is on display November 10, 2019 — February 16, 2020.
Sarah Lees is the Curator of European Art at Philbrook Museum of Art.
