Whosoever is stung by perfect love,
He dances out of tune,
He dances out of step! --Bulleh Shah
My artwork facilitates the creation of spaces that break habitual order. I believe that stepping outside of routine causes a disruption that allows one to reach a creative domain with a multiplicity of perception. Edward Said calls this state 'contrapuntal'- a way of being with a heightened awareness of simultaneous realities. Islamic mystics or the Sufis’ tariqa, (way of life) follows along the same trajectory of dislocation. Many of them actively choose homeless wandering over fixed localization. Ahmet T. Karamustafa explains that this kind of nomadism is not a withdrawal from society but a creation of a 'social wilderness at the heart of society.' For the Sufi, the insistence on remaining separate from social and economic norms is carefully constructed to enable transcendence through time, location, and relational limitations.
My own interest in inducing transitory conditions through an artwork is based on my personal experience of relocation. Much of my adult life has been shaped by my achievements and losses as an immigrant to the United States. I believe that the experience of displacement is also a place of possibilities since it requires one to embrace the unknown. Questions about one’s condition surface through exposure to perceptual and situational irregularities. A productive unsettlement implicates the viewer in the process of making a subjective meaning of an artwork. This personal understanding is an outcome of a work that creates room for the association of ideas and for the possibility of alternative interpretations. Furthermore, by employing poetic metaphors and repetition I intend to evoke feelings of familiarity in objects/locations that may be unfamiliar. My work is suggestive, it is in flux, and it is conditional. I am not committed to any one media but to an approach of building an unrestrained community of objects, images, and bodies, all in a dialogue with each other.
Essential to community and communication is the unsharability of most experiences. A representative example is our disassociated relationship with images of pain and death that circulate commonly in the media. What is the purpose of being together under the umbrella of community and what is the use of language when they fail us and we have to rely on a mystical exchange to understand the other? My recent work tries to address these questions through building relational bridges by meditating on shared realities. These works are durational and communicative events that aim to generate an esthetic of socially shared meaning through open-ended and complex interactions among people.
Art is an awareness of something greater than us that exists between us: this consciousness represents a relational aesthetics to me.
The art-making process allows freedom to transcend cultural and institutional boundaries and the art venue functions as an alternative space for cultural research since it is set at the margins of the dominant values of society. This is an arena to form communities that are constantly shifting and expanding, embodying Sufi ideals of a shapeless unity. The form of my recent works is defined through singular narratives and the culmination of these narratives happens beyond words, through participatory actions, and the sharing of time and space. These interactions include communication, miscommunication, and silence.
He dances out of tune,
He dances out of step! --Bulleh Shah
My artwork facilitates the creation of spaces that break habitual order. I believe that stepping outside of routine causes a disruption that allows one to reach a creative domain with a multiplicity of perception. Edward Said calls this state 'contrapuntal'- a way of being with a heightened awareness of simultaneous realities. Islamic mystics or the Sufis’ tariqa, (way of life) follows along the same trajectory of dislocation. Many of them actively choose homeless wandering over fixed localization. Ahmet T. Karamustafa explains that this kind of nomadism is not a withdrawal from society but a creation of a 'social wilderness at the heart of society.' For the Sufi, the insistence on remaining separate from social and economic norms is carefully constructed to enable transcendence through time, location, and relational limitations.
My own interest in inducing transitory conditions through an artwork is based on my personal experience of relocation. Much of my adult life has been shaped by my achievements and losses as an immigrant to the United States. I believe that the experience of displacement is also a place of possibilities since it requires one to embrace the unknown. Questions about one’s condition surface through exposure to perceptual and situational irregularities. A productive unsettlement implicates the viewer in the process of making a subjective meaning of an artwork. This personal understanding is an outcome of a work that creates room for the association of ideas and for the possibility of alternative interpretations. Furthermore, by employing poetic metaphors and repetition I intend to evoke feelings of familiarity in objects/locations that may be unfamiliar. My work is suggestive, it is in flux, and it is conditional. I am not committed to any one media but to an approach of building an unrestrained community of objects, images, and bodies, all in a dialogue with each other.
Essential to community and communication is the unsharability of most experiences. A representative example is our disassociated relationship with images of pain and death that circulate commonly in the media. What is the purpose of being together under the umbrella of community and what is the use of language when they fail us and we have to rely on a mystical exchange to understand the other? My recent work tries to address these questions through building relational bridges by meditating on shared realities. These works are durational and communicative events that aim to generate an esthetic of socially shared meaning through open-ended and complex interactions among people.
Art is an awareness of something greater than us that exists between us: this consciousness represents a relational aesthetics to me.
The art-making process allows freedom to transcend cultural and institutional boundaries and the art venue functions as an alternative space for cultural research since it is set at the margins of the dominant values of society. This is an arena to form communities that are constantly shifting and expanding, embodying Sufi ideals of a shapeless unity. The form of my recent works is defined through singular narratives and the culmination of these narratives happens beyond words, through participatory actions, and the sharing of time and space. These interactions include communication, miscommunication, and silence.
