Shabir Ahmed Mir plays with forms and illusions
A theory on the illusion of weight comes from managing sensory perception, thereby influencing visual direction. Shabir Ahmed Mir’s work is founded on these perceived directions; he transforms heavy metals into delicate curves of Arabic words.
The dualism of reality is a dominating phenomenon in Mir’s affection for calligraphy and the malleability of his sculptures. His process appears to be speaking of a relationship between the physical world and a world of ideas, allowing us to perceive reality in a different (Mir’s) way. To an extent, his display of elements and language is similar to the allegory of Plato’s cave; the artist has been freed to understand different possibilities of weight, light, and optical illusion, and now he may choose from the many possibilities, for his audience. Mir’s visual language has two baselines: the physical and the non-physical; his work adds philosophical qualities of a spirit to the energy of atoms. He has his own truth, and the shapes and flows in his compositions have their own unknowns. For the viewer, admiring the possibility precedes questioning it because the work cultivates inherent human curiosity.
Contrast in art practices is a commonly used principle to begin with, but it doesn’t have one path; its roots in philosophy are used to assess the logic and possibly break away from the already existing. In any space, Mir’s work is not a classification of angles; these are personal symbols representing his viewpoints.
Image: Untitled, Shabir Ahmed Mir, recycled aluminum, all copyrights retained by the artist 2023.
