The Artistic Format
The idea of the project lies in bringing together the central role that contemplation plays in Aguéli’s thought and practice and to reflect on how such activities can take place in today’s technology driven world (see Conceptual Framework below.) The work will lead to the creation of a three dimensional landscape, an installation that the visitor can walk through. In the installation, the artists will bring together text, image, sculpture, sound and moving images. Texts will focus on fragments by Aguéli, about him and his contribution to art, Islam and thinking along with short quotes from select contemporary writers. Images will have a freer format and will focus primarily on found pictures that relate to the themes of the installation and will be sourced both from Europe and the Middle East. The videos will abstract and generated using the software TouchDesigner and they will juxtapose a wide variety of image sources. We imagine that images from Aguéli’s time and life will stand in stark contrast to images from contemporary life. The sounds will be sourced in a similar way. The use of sound will, of course, depend on if the context allows this without interfering with other work on display. The idea of the installation is that it is modular, so that it can be presented in a smaller or larger format depending on what is possible at each venue.
Conceptual Framework
In his talk about Ivan Aguéli, the English historian Mark Sedgwick starts his presentation by explaining the terms the “esoteric” and the “exoteric,” that are essential to Aguéli’s contribution. The first word is more well-known than the second and is often used as a synonym for the mystical or the mysterious. The word actually means “truth that is hidden inside,” which makes perfect sense since mystics turn their gaze away from the outside world and focuses on the processes in the human inner. Exoteric refers to that which is external. In religion it relates to what is or can be publicly known and especially to laws and/or to indications how we should live our lives.
As we know, it was to the Islamic esotericism that Aguéli devoted his life to and which interests me. Islamic esotericism stipulates that ““the possibility of obtaining knowledge by means of mystical illumination rather than mere rational conceptualization. […] Things in the world acquire an intermediary nature, and the world as a whole itself becomes a liminal entity between Truth (haqq) and its existential manifestations (khalq).”
This means that certain truths can only be achieved through “mystical illumination.” Agueli writes “In Islam, the doctrine of identity and unity is better developed than in other systems of thought. Its precious esoteric-exoteric quality derives mainly from its concept of collective reality as an indispensable agent for the transformation of personal reality into human universality or prophetic reality.”
In the project we will question if such reflections are possible in the late capitalism of the early 21st century, where it has been said that: “The hyperkinesia of everyday life deprives human existence of all contemplative elements and of any capacity for lingering. It leads to a loss of world and time.” The artist question of the project can be said to be: what happens to truth when contemplations is virtually rendered impossible?
Quotes above come from the following sources:
p.6. “The Story of Islamic Philosophy,” Bashier, Salman H.
p.230 Islam of the Global West. Mark Sedgwick – Anarchist, Artist, Sufi: The Politics, Painting, and Esotericism of Ivan Aguéli (2021, Bloomsbury Academic).
p.6 “The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering,”Han,Byung-Chul