In Fustat, a historic district of Cairo that was once the ancient Islamic capital of Egypt and a major trading center, centuries-old pottery known as Fustat ware has been excavated throughout the area. Typically featuring a luster glaze in a wide range of hues to produce an iridescent effect, the surfaces were sometimes incised with designs. For artist Ibrahim Said, who was born in Old Cairo and grew up observing the ceramics industry in the dozens of workshops comprising the area’s Pottery Village, past meets present in richly ornamented sculptures.
The artist’s new solo exhibition, Shaping Time at Yossi Milo, delves into traditional craft with a contemporary twist. Said recently completed the inaugural Metropolitan Museum of Art and Vacheron Constantin Artisan Residency, which granted the artist access to The Met’s collection over an 18-month period and influenced this new body of work.
Said considers time “not as a fixed progression from past to future, but as a layered condition in which histories and imagined futures continually overlap,” the gallery says. Drawing on Islamic and ancient Egyptian art, the artist expands up on the definition of a vessel, creating ceramic bodies linked by concave pillars or curved bands in a dualistic dance.
In addition to time, Said explores traditions associated with life after death and relationships between the permanent and the ephemeral. The precision with which he approaches symmetry and layers the sculptures with patterns such as latticework also serves as a reminder of passing time in the inherently labor-intensive process. The gallery says, “His works look backward and forward simultaneously, treating time as material, and suggesting that shaping an object is also a way of shaping our relationship to time.”
Shaping Time opens today and continues through January 9 in New York. See more on the artist’s Instagram.
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