A WINDOW TO EUROPE: THROUGH ART & LITERATURE
FEATURING SOBIA AHMAD
January 7 - 23, 2022
Plain Sight DC and the EU National Institutes of Culture in Washington, DC present A Window to Europe: Through Literature and Art, a series of short exhibitions featuring eleven visual artists from the Washington, DC region who will create work in response to eleven books by European writers, as part of the 2021 Europe Readr project. In this exhibition, Sobia Ahmad creates work in response to French illustrator Laurie Agusti’s book A Night Journey.
This exhibition is presented in partnership with EUNIC DC, the EU Delegation to the United States, and the Alliance Française of Washington.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION: When Sobia Ahmad read A Night Journey by French author Laurie Agusti, the themes of moving through darkness and fear of "the other" or "the unknown" reminded her of both a spiritual and a socio-political journey—of encountering one's own self and encountering those different from us. Inspired by this idea of light and darkness, Islamic mysticism, and recurrent dreams about Ahmad's grandfather’s rice fields, this series of weavings was created as a way to approach and access ancestral mythic imagination through contemplative rituals of prayer and repetition. This particular weaving is made from paper dyed in India ink and is the length of the artist's body, evoking a prayer rug, a dream space, and inherited memories. In her dreams, Ahmad often visit her grandfather’s rice fields in Pakistan, where she was born, and the courtyard of her childhood home. The title of the work, In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and of the Other, is a reference to Etel Adnan's poetry.
Sobia Ahmad's interdisciplinary practice maps how the personal and the political intersect. By weaving personal and communal narratives with current and historical socio-political contexts, she highlights the inseparability of the self and larger power structures. The work poses questions like: What confirms or dissipates our sense of belonging? What effects do policies have on our individual and collective psyches? And how can our deeply intimate struggles of belonging inform larger conversations about national identity, notions of home, cultural memory, and gender?
Born and raised in Pakistan, Sobia Ahmad moved to the United States at the age of fourteen. She graduated with Honors from the Bachelor’s in Studio Art Program at the University of Maryland College Park. Her work has been reviewed in several major publications such as Al Jazeera English, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post and has been included in multiple collections. She has exhibited internationally—including at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca, New York), Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles), Queen Mary University (London), Museum of Craft and Design (San Francisco), and the Women Filmmakers Festival at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.). Ahmad's recent achievements include the Wherewithal Research Grant by the Andy Warhol Foundation & the Washington Project for the Arts (2020-2021), a socially-engaged fellowship at Halcyon Arts Lab (2019-2020), and a solo exhibition at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington D.C. (2019).
Laurie Agusti (1987) studied art and is an illustrator. Her first book was published in 2014 and since then, she has been illustrating books for adults and children, including a new edition of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. She lives and works in Paris.
A Window Through Europe
This exhibition is part of A Window to Europe: Through Literature and Art, a series of short exhibitions featuring eleven visual artists from the Washington, DC region who are creating work in response to eleven books by European writers, as part of the 2021 Europe Readr project. Featured artists are Hoesy Corona, Alanna Reeves, Mike Thron, Michal Gavish, Julie Wills, MK Bailey, Antonio McAfee, Emily Fussner, Stephanie Williams, Lionel Frazier White III, and Sobia Ahmad.