My practice reimagines Islamic calligraphy through a contemporary lens, where abstraction, materiality and personal narrative meet. Working across painting and sculpture, I approach calligraphy not as a fixed system of language but as a living visual one — moving between legibility and embodied experience.
Growing up in Afghanistan, where artistic practice was dismissed and calligraphy was restricted to observation alone, I encountered the form not as creative expression but as devotional obligation. My work responds directly to the tension between inherited tradition and the need to make something new, refusing to accept that reverence and innovation cannot coexist. Calligraphy becomes a form of resistance — challenging the assumption that the art must serve a fixed function of prayer. Through that resistance I investigate the cultural and spiritual weight of sacred text while preserving its reverence.
Within the work I disrupt conventional calligraphy through layered composition, gestural mark-making and unconventional materials — wood, fabric and copper. These are not chosen for their physical properties but for what they carry symbolically. Wood echoes the gesture of the reed pen; copper speaks of fragility; fabric bears devotion. Together they transform the materials into a phenomenological space that invites contemplation through disciplined making, so that the act of creating becomes an act of worship.
My work navigates the relationship between devotion and reinterpretation, drawing on Islamic calligraphic practice to explore identity, devotion and perception. I aim to show that within Islamic calligraphy, reverence and reinvention are not opposites but operate in unity.