Array

2024

60 pages of a magazine, astronomical data, digital photography

 

In ‘Array’, Asad Raza takes the magazine as medium for a site-specific artwork. The sixty-page work traces the journey of radiation from across the universe to the Earth, with two destinations: first, photosynthesized by trees into the paper on which Pina is printed, and finally, bouncing off that paper into the reader’s eyes. The artwork takes place as a dialogical union of particles, time and perception.

To create these images, Raza collaged telescope data from the Cosmic Microwave Background, other galaxies, other stars, and our sun, combined with photographs of forests in southern Germany. The forests Raza photographed surround the ruin of the convent where Hildegard von Bingen, who believed light was alive, lived 900 years ago. The exhibition comes to rest with two minimal images: first, Raza’s photo of the magazine’s paper stock, printed on that same stock, and lastly, a blank, unprinted page of the magazine.

Accompanying the exhibition is a conversation between Raza and Karen Barad, physicist and Distinguished Professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and ‘The Tree Daughter’, a newly-commissioned work of short fiction by Akil Kumarasamy