Zain Alam

Visual Description: Meter & Light: Day by Zain Alam is an installation featuring video projection on three walls of a room, unified by one rhythmic sound. The audio includes ambient instrumentals, breathy whispers, and gentle tapping. The visual imagery playing includes the artist himself rocking back and forth in nature, rosary beads being thrown into a small crater of sand on the beach, and fingers bumping against each other at a steady pace.

Curatorial Description: Meter & Light: Day by Zain Alam is a three-channel installation enacting in miniature the interlocking rhythms of time in Muslim life: breath, utterance, daily prayer, and more. The gentle clacking of rosary beads or tapping of the finger, for example, evoke keeping count during meditative recitation. The sun’s changing position in the sky dictates prayer five times a day. Despite being filmed in locations as disparate as Staten Island and Morocco, the scenes feel like they belong together with their quietly disciplined marking of time’s steady passage. While bathed in ambient sights and sounds, the viewer is invited to consider Islamic sound and visuality as distinctive, melodic, contemporary, and a challenge to values of supreme authority over individual human perception.

About

Zain Alam is an artist & composer of Indian Pakistani origin. Described as “a unique intersection, merging the cinematic formality of Bollywood and geometric repetition of Islamic art,” Alam’s work has been featured in Vice, Village Voice, and The New York Times. He completed his graduate studies in Islamic art and philosophy at Harvard University, He is a 2024 Nawat Fes artist-in-residence in Morocco and NYSCA Composer/Compositions awardee at work on the installation project Meter & Light.