Foundations
April 25th, 2012
I made this sculpture in response to Michael Sell’s “Erasing Culture: Wahhabism, Buddhism, Balkan Mosques.” I constructed five pillars out of a variety of materials. The five pillars, of course, refer to the ritual practices that are said to be the foundation of Islam, the shahadh, fasting during the month of Ramadan, prayer five times a day, the zakat, and the hajj to Mecca. Sell’s article and the presentation we watched in class about the destruction of Balkan Mosques got me thinking about the other foundations of faith and culture. The article highlights the importance of physical space, and so that is why I depict five physical pillars in my sculpture. As much as The Five Pillars of Islam are significant to the practice of faith, so is the need to have a space that conveys particular meanings, histories, and cultures such that the people who use that space feel as if it is there own.
The first pillar is made out of wooden brick and stone the blocks, the last pillar out of leafy material, in order to convey the place nature and the natural world has in worship. The three middle pillars are created out of various synthetic papers and fabrics in order to emphasize the human role and input not only in the creation of worship space and the sort of representation they entail, but also because these divine creations can be integral to an individual’s sense of self and how people imagine their relationships within the society. That the pillars are all made out of different materials is meant to impress upon the viewer the diversity of expression in Islam.
There is a book resting on the pillars. Its spine in one picture says faith and its spine in the other one says culture. This is to suggest that faith and culture entail knowledge, but that knowledge depends on certain structural realities that make possible spaces for the spreading of the knowledge.
