Lace of Stars is a solo exhibition by Fariba Salma Alam, incorporating photography, projection mapping, textile and tile installation. A central theme to the works is a fractured female body capable of corporeal ascension, and an interplay between cast shadow, silhouette, foreground and space. Religious and secular allegories—with themes of migration, travel and fantasy— also inhabit Alam’s narrative influences. The name Lace of Stars refers to a constellation and a fantastical backdrop, reminiscent of the Islamic parable The Night Journey or Mir'aj, in which the prophet Mohammed takes a mystical voyage from Mecca to Jerusalem riding a creature half-angel, half-horse.

Alam’s visual influences include biological patterns, mathematical diagrams, pixels and architectural blueprints. Imbued with feminist scholarship of woman as discourse rather than real human—the ambivalent or suspended female form—Alam juxtaposes the silhouetted, soft female body against cold, discordant geometrical patterns. The symmetry of Islamic architecture and reductive lattice motifs provide a formal reference point for Lace of Stars, anchoring Alam’s process and visual language.

In the projection installation Bare Branches, geometric abstractions of female soldiers and animal horns, animating hidden, fighting, latent forces, emerge from a grainy silhouette. Alam plays on the notion of flight and nature’s tenuous balance in A Million Goodbyes. Diaphanous textile printed with a black and white image of a heron perched on branches is installed as suspended handkerchiefs. The same heron appears in the ceramic tile piece Lacuna-- tiles that trail into a wall corner, like architectural and abstracted lines referring to interrupted geometries.

-Shrine Empire

Image: © Fariba Salma Alam