Artist Statement:

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Taiba Akhtar is a Birmingham based Artist and Printmaker temporarily covering as Senior Technician within the Birmingham School of Art. Her evolving interest in language and communication binds the spoken, written and the read. She is particularly intrigued within the intaglio field, surprised by the wonders of etching and the magical nature of engraving. Her visuals stem from time and the passing of time, entangling thoughts, feelings and actions.

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Layering intensifies her journey of self utilising the mundane from day to day life, belief and conversations increasing her desire for palimpsests. Innately, her recitations of Quranic verses add to amalgamating, recording and decoding. Despite majority of the translations unknown, others recited simultaneously globally and specifics based on occurrences yet all allude to meditation, contentment and healing.

 

Akhtar’s manipulative gestures reinforce an array of emotions and expressions; rhizomatic with her experiences enabling an enhanced ritual understanding. Her abstraction of language becomes performative, through the guise of writing, reciting and rewriting.

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Quite baffling and hidden is the shift in orientation, English from left to right, Arabic and Urdu from right to left. For the purpose of printmaking characters must be reversed encouraging a focused mindset reminiscing childhood, memorising and spelling thus leading to parallels between languages, their interchangeability and personal resonance.

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