Myrna Ayad

Discover how the region’s artists celebrate the beauty of symmetry, pattern, and accuracy, drawing from Islamic art and nature

ART BASEL online - From Tangier to Teheran

… ‘There is something sublime to it; as though it belongs to a higher order,’ says Berlin-based artist Timo Nasseri. ‘When I think of these patterns, I see that what we have is a cut-out of the infinite. It doesn’t end somewhere, and it can go on forever.’ Nasseri’s first live encounter with Islamic art and architecture happened in the Iranian city of Isfahan – ‘it burnt into my eyes in 1999’ – and he was further exposed to it a few years later while visiting the Central Asian nations of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan, as well as western China. He was not practicing art then, but the sights he encountered provoked a deep desire to decipher and to analyze what he saw; it became almost scientific. ‘It was a puzzle I had to solve. I needed it to make sense and I had to take it apart to understand,’ says Nasseri. Some of Nasseri’s dizzyingly beautiful sculptural work such as Parsec and Muqarna works feel like scooped out sections of a mosque’s dome or bits of its mihrab (a niche in the wall of a mosque indicating the direction of Mecca). To create these large-scale works entails drawings that take up 5 months of experimentation, ‘and sometimes despair,’ all in the name of reaching a perfect state of symmetry. ‘Everything I do has to be symmetrical,’ explains Nasseri. ‘It’s a brain thing, it’s an order, it helps me understand.’ …

Myrna Ayad