"Inspired by Islamic mysticism and recurrent dreams about my grandfather’s rice fields, these weavings were created as a way to approach and access ancestral mythic imagination through contemplative rituals of prayer and repetition."

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SOBIA AHMAD - Pennsylvania, USA

Sobia Ahmad is an interdisciplinary artist pursuing her MFA at Carnegie Mellon University. Working with weaving, community engagement, and time-based media, she explores tactility and slowness as an ethos for engaging with our inner lives, and for experiencing various spiritual dimensions of social and ecological engagement. Ahmad’s work has been reviewed in Al-Jazeera and The Washington Post and has been exhibited at the Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca, NY), Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles), Queen Mary University (London), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Women Filmmakers Festival (Washington, D.C.). She received an Allegheny County Arts Revival Grant (2022).

"My interdisciplinary practice maps how the personal and the political intersect. By weaving personal and communal narratives with current and historical socio-political contexts, I highlight the inseparability of the self and larger power structures. The work poses questions like: 'What confirms or dissipates our sense of belonging?' 'What effects do policies have on our individual and collective psyches?' 'And how can our deeply intimate struggles of belonging inform larger conversations about national identity, notions of home, and cultural memory?'"

ART INVENTORY