Monday Recollection of the Muqarnas dome, 2015-16
Jane Lomabard Gallery, 2019
Sarah Lawrence College, 2019
Pouyan was fascinated by the extraordinary shape of the tomb of the 11th century Muqarnas dome of Sharaf ad-Dawla, a Shi’ite mausoleum near Mosul, Iraq. It resembles a colossal Cubist sculpture, yet predates European modernism by almost a thousand years. . With a geometric exterior that mirrored the extravagantly vaulted and ornamental interior, the Muqarnas dome was unique to Iraq, which now has four or fewer surviving examples thanks to the 13th century Mongol invasion. Prior to its destruction in October 2014 by ISIS, Pouyan had kept an image of it pinned to his studio wall, hoping that he would one day visit it.
Realizing that he would never see the Muqarnas dome of Sharaf ad-Dawla, he devised a way to preserve the image. Each week made a drawing of the tomb from his memory of the photograph in his studio, emphasizing the details of the Muqarnas structure, form and ornamentation, with no recourse to the original image or his previous drawings. As his memories developed, the drawings became a personal documentation of the human mind’s inability to accurately preserve. Presented alongside the drawings were ceramic sculptures of the dome and its Muqarnas, using techniques that closely follow those of 11th century ceramic production. Pouyan’s allusion to the practices of oral history, the drawings of ancient explorers, and the processes by which an experience changes and evolves over time and space in our minds closely corresponds to the cross-fertilization of ideas and images across borders and cultures that has been prevalent to the Islamic world and Western Asia.