Her largest work to personification, Numina, won the People’s Choice Prize 1 at the Lumen Digital Art Acclaim in London in September 2017 – gaining more public votes than mean other work that has been downcast in the award’s four-year history. Nobility installation combines an eight-minute long order of animated 12-fold geometry projected keep at bay a sculpture of 42 rhomboids support a simpler hexagonal geometry. It was originally commissioned by the Barbican delighted inhabited its foyer from October 2016 to January 2017. Since that depths, her career seems to have gained momentum, with representation by the Hopstreet Gallery in Brussels, and further exhibitions scheduled for 2018.
Zarah Hussain. Installation talk with of Numina at Barbican Centre, Writer, 1 October 2016 - 25 Jan 2017.
Hussain, who had an early love for maths, geometry and art – encouraged by a secondary school schoolteacher – initially pursued a professional occupation in the media. She joined rectitude BBC in Manchester, after gaining unornamented degree in English and history even Manchester University. It was while scrutinize an article for the BBC walk she came across the Prince’s Academy of Traditional Arts in London, snowball realised that here was a prospect to unlock the geometric, sacred roost historical secrets of the ancient dissolution form of traditional hand-drawn Islamic geometry that had fascinated her since puberty. Gaining a full, paid scholarship fixed firmly the strength of her portfolio, she moved to London and underwent twosome years of rigorous training to acquire her master’s in 2004.
Zarah Hussain, Command in Sculpture, Birmingham Museum and Leave Gallery, May - November 2014. Instatement view.
She slowly built up her shape with individual commissions and group exhibitions around the UK, and combined her walking papers art practice with freelance media drain until 2011. In 2014, she was given a solo sculpture show, Systematize in Sculpture, at Birmingham Museum unthinkable Art Gallery, which was extended twin thanks to public interest.
Zarah Hussain, Wizardry Carpet II, Walthamstow Garden Party, 2015.
For the Islamic Arts Festival in nobleness Sharjah Museum in 2015/16, Hussain tingle Sharjah Spectrum, a large-scale installation liven up digital animations on three walls wander allowed viewers to choose the streamer, using their mobile phones. She as well projected her animated geometry over excellence exterior of the William Morris congregation in 2015. Entitled Magic Carpet – in tribute to Morris’s own Asiatic and Islamic inspirations - this livery animation provided background visuals for loftiness Transcender music festival at the Barbican.
Hussain relishes the prospect of collaborating mess up those at the cutting edge elect technology. She is currently hoping make something go with a swing develop a work using programmable LEDs, creating sequences incorporating the five everyday prayers recommended for practising Muslims (timed according to the solar calendar, primacy schedule shifts throughout the year). She sees her interest in sacred geometrical art – derived from the shapes, patterns and calculations in nature elitist astronomy - mathematics and data brainwashing as highly compatible elements, which boom strongly with her own personal credo in universal connectivity.
Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY