Stations of the Cross 2018 was the third instalment of a project that began in 2016, in London. Curated by Dr. Aaron Rosen, Dr. Catriona Laing, and the Rev. John W. Moody, the exhibition took place at 14 iconic sites in Manhattan and incorporated old and new artworks to draw connections between the Passion and the plight of refugees. I worked on Station 4 (Jesus meets his mother) at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
My response to Station 4 encompassed a short animation and an installation of digital works. I used the narrative significance of this station to reflect on the centuries-old culture of remembrance developed by Shia Muslims around the figures of Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, and his mother, Fatima Zahra. Creatively retold stories of Husayn and his family, who were forced to go into exile and subjected to violence and persecution in the 7th century, provided migrant Shia Muslims, such as my grandparents, with some solace as they confronted their own displacement and trauma in the wake of the Partition of India (1947).
I was interested, too, in how Mary (mother of Jesus) and Fatima (mother of Husayn) offer, by embodying maternal devotion, a feminine counterpoint to otherwise (largely) patriarchal systems of religious expression. Through my multimedia response, I brought together these parallels in a theatrical manner evoking the art of medieval and late medieval Europe, Indo-Persian miniature painting, Shia passion plays, and South Asian folk religious art.
The animation incorporated original photographs of my female family members in mourning, modelled after figures of apostles in a 15th century altarpiece from the collections of the Met Cloisters in New York. I also worked with material that is used locally to adorn commemorative models of Husyan’s tomb and coffin in Muharram processions and liturgies, such as decorative paper, cloth, and paper flowers. Symbols like the hamsa, a variation of which is revered by Muslims as the Hand of Fatima or panja, recur along with various open-ended forms to suggest the fluidity of religious symbology and its adaptability to changes of locale, technology, and circumstance.
The two digital collages made to accompany the animation, Lullaby (I) and (II), are meditations on maternal sorrow and the act of keeping vigil. I was inspired by the female devotional practice, in Shia Muslim liturgies, of decorating and mourning/praying around an empty cradle symbolic of Husayn ibn Ali’s martyred infant son. I photographed devotional paraphernalia in the female wings of several Imam-bargahs in Lahore; then, looking to the dwindling genre of Islamic poster art for stylistic inspiration, I created elegiac, backlit images. In 2021, I was invited by Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, to give an artist talk on the work. The talk, in which I discuss the symbolic strands informing the artwork, can be accessed here.
