Haseeb Ahmed’s work "Anemophilous: Lovers of the Wind" depicts a perennial love affair of certain plants and the wind. The artwork is rendered on a scroll of high-grade Egyptian papyrus grown along the Nile and was fundamental for visual and linguistic development. Papyrus reproduces with the wind and became an ancient motif that represents growth, vigor, and youth. The scroll is laced with date pollen used as a supplement for virility and to cultivate the harsh Egyptian Western desert where a single male date palm can fertilize 300 female palms.

"The Face of the Wind" discovered by Ahmed joins the god Shu’s ostrich feather which controls the flow of all air. These ancient thought figures and plants are swept up with contemporary representations of weather patterns into a turbulent and anachronistic vortex. Ahmed creates scrolls to offer a non-linear mode of comprehension much needed to understand our world today.

Ahmed draws on his earlier projects spanning from aeronautics research labs in the pursuit of human-wind fertilization to the staging of the world’s great winds as both natural and theatrical phenomena. His forthcoming film “Sand Reckoner” follows the scirocco wind that intertwines Italian and Egyptian ecologies and cultures for millennia. The scroll and the film feature the geometrical and spatial organization of the world’s oldest medicinal plant garden, the Orto Botanico in Padua, which effectively began with a collection brought from Egypt.