We have always been big fans of Pakistan-born artist Anila Quayyum Agha’s mesmerizing art. In 2014, we raved about Intersections, a captivating wooden cube that cast dreamy shadows with a single light bulb. Fortunately for us, Agha is still creating intricate installations in this style, with her most recent, radiant piece being All The Flowers Are For Me.
Like Intersections, All The Flowers Are For Me plays with light and space. Suspended from the ceiling of an otherwise empty room, the steel, box-like structure features ornate and elaborately detailed laser cut-outs of floral patterns and geometric motifs. When lit from the inside, the cube casts lace-like shadows onto the walls, floor, and even the ceiling, bathing the entire space in dancing light and “covering and beautifying all that are in it.”
All The Flowers Are For Me was recently featured in Agha’s solo show, Walking With My Mother’s Shadow. Inspired by her son’s wedding and grieving over the loss of her mother, the exhibition’s installations spotlight her conflicting emotions. “Within these works she examines the amoebic transparency of sorrow, and its ability to reflect and inflict light and darkness,” the show’s press release states. “Anila worked 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.”
Beautifully crafted and conceptually poignant, All The Flowers Are For Me sheds new light on Agha’s awe-inspiring art.
