Light: Visionary Perspectives celebrates the Aga Khan Museum’s 10th anniversary with a show that goes back to one of its guiding principles: the illuminating power of light, both figurative and literal. When the museum was being constructed, a letter from His Highness the Aga Khan to Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki outlined the importance of incorporating light into the design.
The mashrabiya pattern on the Courtyard’s surrounding glass casts intricate shadows, and the exterior was designed to reflect the sun. Light: Visionary Perspectives uses the atrium, collections gallery and courtyard of the museum, in addition to its temporary gallery.
Co-curated by the Museum’s Associate Curator Bita Pourvash and Special Projects Curator Marianne Fenton, the exhibition is on display from July 13, 2024, to March 17, 2025.
Light As Art
The works of an international roster of creators, including Canadian and local artists, examine light in many different an intriguing ways: a physical concept, through spirituality and religious tradition, symbolism and more.
London, Ontario based artist Jamelie Hassan’s simply illuminated letter nun casts a glow on the wooden floors. It’s the first letter in the word Nur, or light. In Islamic philosophy, light is linked to the idea of guidance, and passing along knowledge, and An-Nur, the word for light, is one of the names attributed to God.
South Korean artist Kimsooja’s piece To Breathe uses the museum’s courtyard as a proverbial canvas. The internationally renowned conceptual artist’s work is guided by her principle of “non-doing” and “non-making”, in creating an installation that reveals what is already there. She has installed a special kind of film over the interior glass of the courtyard, creating a dazzling kaleidoscopic effect that changes with the weather and position of the sun. It reveals not only colours, but the idea of pluralism, as the white light is defracted into a rainbow of hues.
Artist Anila Quayyum Agha, a native of Lahore, Pakistan, created the installation A Thousand Silent Moments (Rain Forest), which takes up a whole room from floor to ceiling. For her very first showing of work in Canada, she fills the room with light and shadow, emanating from a lighted, intricately carved box. As you walk into the space, you’re immersed by the interplay of shadows, shapes, and light.
Tannis Nielsen, an Anishnaabe-Red River Métis multidisciplinary artist and academic, explores Indigenous decolonization in her work, which often combines Indigenous science and quantum physics. Her work mazinibii’igan / a creation uses a soundtrack that recites the Anishnaabe creation story as a video loop displays a kinetic sparkle of light glitches. Nielsen noticed spontaneous light glitches appearing during time spent as a video editor, and she learned while researching the phenomenon that many scientists believe they’re remnants of the Big Bang that continue to spark their way through the universe.
Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Ghazaleh Avarzamani studied painting at Azad Art University, Tehran, and holds a Master of Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins University of the Arts, London, UK. A former Artist in Residence at the museum, her installation examines filtered light through richly coloured stained glass in patterns that use landscaping icons as design elements. The installation sprawls along a hallway.
Iranian-American artist Ala Ebtekar is based in California. His work, as his work for the show, Thirty-Six Views of the Moon, often use cyanotype prints with other artistic disciplines. The piece incorporates 36 aspects of the moon as photographed from an observatory over time, printed on pages of text that describe and talk about the moon.
Sir Anish Kapoor (b. 1954), CBE, is a British-Indian sculptor and conceptual artist with an international reputation. Born in Mumbai, India, to an Indian Hindu father and an Iraqi Jewish, he’s been based in London since the 1970s. He contributes two pieces in the show, both deceptively simple looking disks, one made of stainless steel, the other of lacquer on wood. The disks are concave, and as you approach them, the light reflects in different directions. You enter what feels like a separate space where your reflection appears in unexpected places.
Sanaz Mazinani’s Threshold creates irregular splashes of light that change with your placement in the room by using mirror mosaics in her installation. Born in Tehran, Sanaz is now located in Toronto, and works with large-scale installations, sculptures and photography. A video plays in the exhibition room, depicting explosion scenes from films that have been fragmented into a kaleidoscope. Along with the soundtrack, it has an unsettling effect, as if warning of the dual nature of light as both creator and destroyer.
Cameroonian-Belgian multidisciplinary artist Mallory Lowe Mpoka is based on Montreal these days. She explores issues of identity and family in a large installation — a kind of sculpture built into something like a lighthouse, made of photographs of family.
Phillip K. Smith III is known for creating light-based works. A native of Southern California, he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. Inspired by skyscrapers, he’s covered the walls of a room in bright panels of colour that wash over you as you enter, the hues changing subtly over time.
The Permanent Collection
The theme of light is also explored through the museum’s permanent collection, which includes an astrolabe, an ancient astronomical instrument, and the Opticae Thesaurus, the Latin translation of Kitab Al-Manazir (Book of Optics). It highlights the theme both literally and conceptually, as a significant work and piece of knowledge that was passed from the Islamic world to the West in the Middle Ages. The original text by Iraqi scholar Ibn al-Haytham dates from the 11th century.
There are also kid-friendly activities coordinated with the Ontario school curriculum that show the younger set fun ways to learn about the science of light.
Along with the exhibition, the museum often presents musical performances, either near the cafe on the main floor, or ticketed concerts in its performing space.
- Find out more, and get tickets to Light: Visionary Perspectives, [HERE].
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