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2026

  • Approaching Perfection by Travis Diehl & Zain Alam, The Eden Assemblage 
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    “Alam’s recent work with sound and video cites the way abstractions like beauty and proportion can be names for God. Just as Islamic art derives from geometry and algorithms, Alam’s work has structuralist underpinnings. Meter & Light, a multichannel video project, takes cues from the rhythms of Islamic devotion. There are dramatically lit closeups of prayer beads and of hands moving across invisible Arabic text. For Night, the newest section, Alam constrained the piece according to Islamic tradition by avoiding showing faces and only using sounds made by the human body, such as snaps, slaps, and vocals. He processed the audio to create looping ticks and tones reminiscent of experimental electronic compositions of the 1970s. In all, his work infuses distinctly contemporary, digital forms with elements that haven’t changed for centuries, emphasizing their common structure. “



2025


    “This more recent work of Alam’s, Meter & Light: Night, answers, or rather opens the possibility of answering, how one might locate the immaterial. One might do so through the work of patterning. A pattern has no beginning or end, or if it does this is merely the limit of its physical appearance, not its essence. It is everywhere the same and everywhere different. And while I can isolate sections of the pattern and from the sections think I understand how they repeat, never can I say I’ve captured the pattern, for the pattern is the whole thing coming together and the whole thing is what eludes me. Yet the pattern helps point me to that immaterial space. The adhan is a pattern. The geometric motifs of carpets and tiles are patterns. Tradition is pattern. Time is a pattern and it is the pattern Meter & Light: Night is most interested in tracing.“






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“By the declining day, man is in a state of loss indeed.” (103:1-2)
زین العابدین