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"All life as we know it exists within the relatively thin atmosphere held to the Earth by gravity. The totality of air connects the scales of the body to the world. In my art, I give form to that which does not yet have one. For example, the fluid movements of air are hard to grasp; we cannot see the wind directly, only by the way it affects other substrates, like clouds or leaves. The task becomes one of rendering underlying social dynamics into a form perceivable by the senses, a movement analogous to that of conveying the fluid dynamics of air and wind which constantly surround us. For nearly 15 years, this task has been motivating me, hinging on the properties of air to unpack the metaphors it provides."
Haseeb Ahmed
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About
Haseeb Ahmed's art is a reminder that metaphorical thinking is a necessary condition for real aesthetic exploration of any subject, including science, where language is bound to precision rather than poetic forms. Recently highlighted by artnet as one of the breakout stars of the prestigious Gwangju Bienniale, Ahmed has structured his research-based artistic practice around the fluid dynamics of wind and water.His sculptures, paintings, installations, videos and public programs are conceived like a composition for an orchestra; a main theme is resolved through the interplay of many elements at once, including contemporary technology, historical facts, mythology, laboratory tales, and more. Although none of these are fictional (Ahmed is careful in pointing out that he invents nothing in his work), things are aggregated not to communicate efficiently but to evoke. The modes of impressionism come to mind: a depiction of something real, using the language of suggestion. -
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Stock Weather III
Ahmed’s recent installation, commissioned by the Gwangju Bienniale, led to an artnet article listing him as one of the breakout stars from the prestigious event. His work, Stock Weather III, acknowledges how both wind and global finance invisibly shape our daily lives, and gives them a form — that of this desert. Real-time fluctuations of stock prices control a series of fans, set in wind tunnels, blowing the sand around. Cameras nestled in the shifting dunes offer the perspective of a horizon line. The desert landscape evolves as the markets change and time goes on. It’s a sunset scene, the end of the day and perhaps the end of history. The question is — what kind of world is Capitalism producing for us?
Ahmed began his work with wind while completing his MFA at MIT, and continued his explorations through doctoral work at the University of Antwerp, Sint Lucas Antwerpen, and Zurich University of the Arts. From 2013 – 2016 he conducted the Wind Egg Experiment at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics. The project was later exhibited at the M HKA – The Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium. For millennia, ancient Egyptian, Arab, Indian, European and Chinese cultures shared the belief that animals and people could be fertilized by the wind, just as plants are. Fascinated by this theory, Haseeb Ahmed set out to provide evidence for the ancient hypothesis. In order to do so, the artist assembled a team of scientific and artistic collaborators to conduct the Wind Egg Experiment, the aim of which was to test the theory by attempting to impregnate a vulture with the wind. Through this work, Ahmed tested cultural mythologies, in a project moving from antiquity to astrobiology, which finally became a site for imagining technological alternatives to human reproduction.
Please find more information about the Wind Egg Experiment, and the trilogy of exhibitions that followed, by following this link.
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Haseeb Ahmed, "Wind Avatar", 2015 - 2019
Wind, smoke, delta wing, electronics, twitterbot, software, plexiglass, MDF. Dimensions variable. -
Wind Avatar
If the wind can fertilize, it must have agency. While looking at turbulence patterns, Ahmed discovered that these vortexes create a face-like form — the face of the wind. Strangely enough, this face also echoes ancient architectural decorations. Ahmed uses technology to create a "Wind Avatar", who represents all of the world’s winds. By shifting angles of a delta wing in a specially designed wind tunnel, we are able to change the facial expressions of the being, similar to those of humans. By connecting this tunnel to data from weather stations around the world, we can monitor the emotions of the wind, and perhaps even communicate with it. Going one step further, the artist has connected this technology to EEG monitors developed with the Brain and Emotion Laboratory at the University of Maastricht: these monitors link the avatar's expressions to those of the viewers, allowing us to briefly inhabit the wind.
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Library of the Winds
A subsequent work, the Library of the Winds, brings together 18 winds, the sound of which were collected by Ahmed in person or using meteorological data. Here, Ahmed contemplates how the wind helps us understand the modern obsession with origins and order, while questioning distinctions between sensual and mediatized experience, wondering what we think of when we think of the wind. Around the world, evening news broadcasts use air-powered lottery machines to blow a select few lives into Mega-Millions. The Library of the Winds has one too, and when a winning wind is selected, the Library moves to reproduce them, via DIY aeoliphones informed by actual weather data. As the aeliphones (or wind machines, used in theater and opera since the 14th century) begin to sing, the geometrically-patterned floor moves in concert, while the mirrored ceiling simultaneously counterrotates, in a dizzying motion. Just as the wind mediates many of our senses, the library addresses sight, sound, and orientation. -
Haseeb Ahmed, "Words on the Wind", 2022
Laser cut arches hot press archival paper, marbled acrylic paper, 52 x 38 x 4 cm - 20 1/2 x 15 x 1 5/8 in -
Words on the Wind
Words on the Wind is an ongoing series of mixed-media paintings. Ahmed trained an AI to identify the use of wind as a metaphorical device to convey emotions, and created an inventory of sentences for his ongoing project the Library of the Winds. Selected sentences (along with the metadata from the AI) are painted onto hand-marbled backgrounds based on flow visualizations and wind patterns. This juxtaposition reflects on how we superimpose meaning onto natural phenomena, adding cultural contextualization to the winds while combining ancient techniques with new technologies.
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The Sand Reckoner
Expanding on the Library of the Winds, the recent film The Sand Reckoner follows the scirocco wind from Venice where it causes the acqua alta flooding, to its origins in the primordial dried lake beds of the Egyptian Sahara. We cannot see the wind, only the way it shapes ecologies, cultures, and architectures, which have intertwined Egypt and Italy for millennia. As we move with the scirocco, we encounter Goethe’s palm at the Orto Botanico in Padua, the wind rose of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, the harbor of Alexandria, the Pyramids of Giza, the ancient whales of the Fayyum Oasis, and the strange formations of the White Desert. The search for the scirocco wind inevitably leads to the question of origins: focusing on the otherwise invisible or ubiquitous movements of the wind trains audiences to detect the invisible forces that shape our daily lives, be they natural or social. The Sand Reckoner is designed to work like a memory game: it relies on viewers recognizing repetitions of elements to create meaning out of circumstances. The maximalist film is shot in forty-two locations.
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Anemophilous: Lovers of the Wind
As a manner of disseminating and transforming his research and productions, Ahmed creates scrolls to offer a non-linear mode of comprehension, much needed to understand our world today. His series Anemophilous: Lovers of the Wind depicts a perennial love affair between certain plants and the wind, as they chart various aspects of other works: his film, The Sand Reckoner, as well as earlier experimentation that led to it, drawing on 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. All of these works strive to show a phenomenon itself as opposed to documentation of it, but with works on paper, Ahmed’s skillful mark-making and calligraphy translate complex research into gorgeous gestural maps that combine his fascination for craft and historical production with his belief that some art must be state of the art and incorporate new knowledge and technologies.These are rendered on high-grade Egyptian papyrus, grown along the Nile and fundamental for visual and linguistic development. Papyrus reproduces with the wind, and became an ancient motif that represents growth, vigor, and youth. The scrolls are laced with date pollen, which cultivates the harsh Western Egyptian desert, where a single male date palm can fertilize 300 female palms. Humans have found their own use for this pollen, taking it as a supplement for virility. The scrolls' mounting system includes sand from the Sahara, as well as Velcro, an industrial example of bio-mimicry. -
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Fountain of Eternal Youth
Parallel to his work with wind, Ahmed has also been working with water for the past five years. In his series of unique sculptures titled Fountain of Eternal Youth, water infused with Human Growth hormone (a common anti-aging medication) runs through the sculpture, evoking ancient mythology to understand our contemporary drive to defy ageing caused by oxidation. Its mirrored surface, reminiscent of the myth of Narcissus, invites us to reconsider the valuation of our bodies over the bodies of water and the life they contain. The association between the flow of fluids and the flow of time has been forged since antiquity, and the regulation of the flow of water was one of the first ways of measuring the passage of time. Here, due to light and sound interventions, the water drops appear suspended in the air before reversing gravity and floating upwards. At the same time, the water drips down into pipes that fill before pouring it back into the basin, reminding us that time does not stop. This contradiction in cause-and-effect is analogous to the lifesaving necessity of pharmaceuticals and the imbalances they create in the natural environment, as well as the role technology plays in contemporary mythology and aspirations. With its octagonal base and 8 clocks, this particular fountain refers to the tower of the winds, an ancient Greek building thought to be the world’s first weather station, housing a water clock. Hence, this fountain marries the artist’s fascination for wind, water, and time. -
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Haseeb Ahmed (b. 1985) is an American artist who lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
Ahmed received his Masters in Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, US) and completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC, US) in sculpture and architecture. As a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy (Maastricht, NL), Ahmed won the Designers and Artists 4 Genomics Award with his work The Fishbone Chapel and initiated the project Has the World Already Been Made?, which has been exhibited internationally including at the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (SE). The trilogy of exhibitions surrounding his work The Wind Egg culminated with a solo exhibition at M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (BE), curated by Nav Haq and the conclusion of his PhD in practice-based art from the University of Antwerp (BE). In 2024, he was commissioned to create a large-scale installation, Stock Weather III, for the 15th Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju, KR).His work has been exhibited internationally at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (US), the Museum Bärengasse (Zürich, CH), De Appel (Amsterdam, NL), ArtLab EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH), Werkleitz Festival: Model and Ruin (Halle, DE), STUK (Leuven, BE) and Frestas - Trienal de Artes (São Paulo, BR), the FRONT triennial (Cleveland, US), Digital Art Festival Taipei and the BOZAR (Brussels, BE) among others. Ahmed is also a part time professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and maintains a rigorous writing practice, with recent publications featured in Afterall, Spike Art and Conceptual Fine Arts.
Haseeb Ahmed: Introduction
Current viewing_room
Over the last 10 years, Haseeb Ahmed has structured his research-based artistic practice around the fluid dynamics of wind and water. His work, which combines objects, installations, and films, is often collaborative and draws from the hard sciences, blending art and aeronautics, myth and technology to create new narratives. With his experimental and often speculative approach, Ahmed looks at natural phenomena and the cultural connotations they carry - throughout history, and in light of their present-day implications in a shifting landscape.