Fariba Alam

"The Night Journey," 2007
Ceramic and acrylic
Courtesy of the artist
Estimated value: $1800
Starting bid: $500

http://faribaalam.com/splash.html

Fariba S. Alam is a Brooklyn-based photographer and video artist of Bangladeshi descent. Her work has been shown at The American Museum of Natural History, The Queens Museum, The Asia Society, Bose Pacia Modern, The International Center of Photography, Exit Art, and other venues in New York. Fariba has volunteered her creative services for Sakhi for South Asian Women and The Acid Survivor's Foundation in Bangladesh. She is a founding board member of SAWCC (The South Asian Woman's Creative Collective).

Fariba holds a B.A. in Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University (1998), with a focus on post-colonial theory. She is the recipient of a Fullbright scholarship (1998/1999) and holds an M.A. in Studio Art from New York University (2004).

Artist statement:

"My work incorporates tile work, colonial Indian photography, 1970s family photo archives, my own photography and painting in order to create fabricated identites and spaces. My most recent body of work, 'awhal,' uses Islamic, minimalist, and conceptual techniques of repetition and seriality. Through the form of repeating tiles inlaid with autobiographical tropes, I reconstruct history as present in the creation of space. I engage with the building of my own iconography in order to assert a self-defined utopia.

Conceptually, I'm also interested in rhythmic spiritual states and in the mystic and scientific idea that life unfolds in defined and continuous patterns. On the path to illumination, Sufi mystics move between these ever-changing spiritual states (or ahwal), experiencing a range of sensations such as constraint and expansion, fear and hope, longing and intimacy. Repetition assigns the forms with undulation and transcendental properties, thereby marking the tile installations as a sacred space."