Artist Statement:

 

Taiba Akhtar is an artist and printmaker based in Birmingham. Akhtar’s practice explores the organic nature of handmade marks inspired through religious and cultural entities, communicating a sense of language and mark making, adjoined to materials and processes. Notions of home, belief, permanence and impermanence integrate the visual and verbal, unfolding different motifs and hidden meanings.

 

Akhtar’s use of language becomes blurred and obscured with an emphasis on displacement and fluxity, juxtaposed within her interplay of symbols and scripts. Layering intensifies Akhtar’s journey of self, derived from the constant recitation of Quranic verses, of allusion to meditation and intuition. Similarly, forms of visibility and unintelligibility correlate to time and the passing of time, entangling thoughts, feelings and actions.

 

Akhtar’s narratives vary across the seen and heard reassembling what was there, what is there and what might be, centralising a palimpsest. Her 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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