The migration of individuals to different parts of the world in the last two decades has created a substantial shift in artists’ perception and depiction of reality. The potential of this movement reaches far beyond an embrace with globalisation. It requires artists to explore the potential of communication with the digital and the discussions we seek must be on the nature and purpose of the content that such initiatives carry.

The work of Toronto-based Pakistani-Canadian new media artist Faisal Anwar nearly dissolves the distances between the past and present, and the artist and viewers. It actually rests on the diversity of histories that people bring in the shared space of new media in an experimental approach that uses tweeting to imagine virtual realities. Social media as artistic form opens new connections of time and space. His process involves overlapping real time conversations as they are created through this medium into extensive geometric patterns from the grid of the Islamic garden.

In his work, ‘TweetGarden’ (2009/2010/2011), he wanted to find a collaborative engagement with people in different physical spaces and time frames. At the same time Anwar moves away from the arbitrary nature of new media into something more meaningful. Based on each time frame in which participants may be, each tweet becomes a leaf, and eventually a tree that converts many trees in the virtual garden. As the potential of this experimental approach unfolds, it allows any person, anywhere to participate in the making of the art and to be the artist. The work rests on the anonymity of the individual, as each is a collaborator in a collective project that continues to grow and as the artist notes that ‘the clash of time-zones ends’.

Faisal Anwar uses social media as an artistic form that opens new connections of time and space

More recently, Anwar created two interrelated interventions ‘Transformations’ (Sept-Dec 2016) and ‘CharBagh: A sensory garden’ (October 2016), both shown at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. Curated by Zulfikar Hirji, ‘Transformations’ is a four-person show of Canadian artists of Muslim origin, Ali Kazimi, Faisal Anwar, Jamelie Hassan, and Farina Chanda each of who use technology such as ‘3D stereoscopic video, social media, neon, optical lenses and industrial design to explore the inner life and its external expressions.’ The grid designed by Faisal on the model of the Islamic charbagh (four parts) is projected on translucent screens. To the audience walking in front of translucent screens, it appears to be a 3D experience of the bagh.

As the artist says, it creates a simultaneous interface between the static and the moving image. Since the data sets are extensive, the digital baagh has been growing fast. In the hashtags such as #Toronto, #confessions, #sensorycity on Instagram, for example, people write about their associations of the city. These can also be tweets by which the audience build their context, start a conversation around it and see the pattern evolve.

In ‘CharBagh: a sensory garden’ there are colour-coded geometric patterns projected the wall of the museum facade. Each pattern is a tile represented by a single tweet. Therefore, the tile-work populates as the conversations continue. This visualisation is an innovative part of Toronto’s ‘Nuit Blanche’ – a yearly event that continues through the city from dusk to dawn.

Faisal says that from the beginning, his discussions with the curator were about doing a large-scale projection on the outside facade of the building to juxtapose (his) digital garden in dialogue with the beautiful, real garden outside the Aga Khan Museum’. When it happened, “it felt that the calm waters from the ponds facing the museum, through reflections connected the two, and the extended image stretched from wall to water, to the row of trees, all still, quiet, calming and alive.” The stationary and symmetrically aligned water bodies facing the projection were interacting with the grid within which the symmetry was disturbed and changed constantly through the participation of the audience.

To the artist, the water became a strong entry point to a larger context, forming a metaphysical space of baagh, pattern and grid. Some people tweeted, while others just watched the changing reflections.

The beauty of this form perhaps lies in its meditative nature, which disintegrate connections of the past and present into a whole, even if it’s momentary.

Transformations is on view at the Ismaili Centre, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, from September-December, 2016.

‘CharBagh: a sensory garden’ was held at the Aga Khan Museum for Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s annual all night art event, October 1, 2016.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, October 23rd, 2016