Immersive intimate art

Through pain and hope, Anila Quayyum Agha creates artworks that captivate the eyes of the viewers and examine the feelings of loss and belonging. Her creations reflect her culture and identity, and through creative authenticity she showcases her personal story as a female Pakistani artist. 

“Having lived on the boundaries of different faiths such as Islam and Christianity, and in cultures like Pakistan and the USA, my art is deeply influenced by the simultaneous sense of alienation and transience that informs the migrant experience,” she said in her artist statement. 

Agha is a multidisciplinary Pakistani-American artist who works with mixed media. She makes art that examines global politics, cultural diversity, mass media, and social and gender roles in today's cultural and global context. She is best known for her large-scale illuminated cube installations, in which she integrates her concepts on patterns with Islamic architectural techniques.

“This consciousness of knowing what is markedly different about the human experience also bears the gift of knowing its core commonalities and it is these tensions and contradictions that I try to embody in my artwork,” she said. “Through the use of a variety of media, from large sculptural installations to embroidered drawings I explore the deeply entwined political relationships between gender, culture, religion, labor and social codes. In my work I have used combinations of textile processes such as embroidery, wax, dyes, and silk-screen printing along with sculptural methodologies to reveal and question the gendering of textile work as inherently domesticated and excluded from being considered an art form.” She received her BFA from the National College of Arts in Lahore and an MFA from the University of North Texas. 

Agha’s work has been exhibited both in national and international exhibitions and has received numerous prestigious awards such as the Efroymson Art Fellowship, the Cincinnati Art Museum’s 2017 Schiele Prize, and the DeHaan Artist of Distinction Award.

As a Pakistani immigrant, Anila Agha explores her complex experience through these installations of steel cubes lit from the inside, casting dazzling shadows that transform the room into an immersive painting. With these Islamic, geometric-patterned shadows, she invites the viewer to feel a sense of hope and reflection between the light and shadows. 

Taking reference from South Asian designs such as embroideries and Islamic architecture and alternating it to fit her aesthetic designs, she described this process: “It’s like going back to my roots and changing it to fit where I’m now.” For this reason, she builds artworks that seem both unique and familiar at the same time.

In addition to her suspended light installations, Agha develops wall-mounted sculptural pieces, such as her Flowers series (2018), which examines love and sorrow inspired by the contradictory feelings she had following her son's wedding and her mother's death, both of which occurred in the same year.

The flower designs symbolize her mother's beauty and femininity, while the silver threads represent the threads used in wedding gowns in Pakistan.

Agha's artworks tend to explore opposites, contradiction, and duality, including those around intersections of identity and culture. She believes that her real essence lies in encouraging inclusivity in art. That is why her work pushes to represent the unnoticed, authentic craftsmen who were forgotten with time despite their importance and influence over traditional crafts and art history. 

“My experiences in my native country and as an immigrant here in the United States are woven into my work of redefining and rewriting women’s handiwork as a poignant form of creative expression,” she said. “Using embroidery as a drawing medium I reveal the multiple layers resulting from the interaction of concept and process and to bridge the gap between modern materials and historical patterns of traditional oppression and domestic servitude. 

The conceptual ambiguity of the resulting patterns create an interactive experience in which the onlooker’s subjective experiences of alienation and belonging become part of the piece and its identity.” 

Anila Agha has a new exhibition titled A Moment to Consider in Sundaram Tagore New York. The exhibition opened its doors on September 8th and will be available for a month, in this exhibition she presents new paintings, drawings, and light installations. The show’s centerpiece is an immersive large-scale light installation commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Texas in 2021. A Beautiful Despair is part of Agha’s award-winning cube series, which has garnered critical recognition and drawn crowds in museums and public spaces around the world since 2014.