Sumayya Vally

South up 🖤 A drawing is a proposition, a prayer for another world. An argument for a world as we insist it to be. A Necessary Fiction - an ordering of the world from our perspectives across time - fantastic mythological visions and imaginative interpretations of scientific inquiry. Mythologies, dreams, memory, cosmologies, gossip, ritual. The slipping between them. The refusal to separate what was never separate to begin with. Mabrook @raltouq @sara.endipity @aminabdiab @nimportekii From the archives of: King Abdulaziz Public Library, Riyadh; King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archive, Riyadh; Biblioteca Civica Bertoliana of Vicenza; Cremona State Library; Saudi National Museum, Riyadh; Leiden University Libraries; Qatar National Library, Doha,

MANY A MOONLIT CAVEAT Queen @lynetteyiadomboakye ♥️🌹🌹🌹 @jackshainman

Aleppo, @hashmizarina 🖤 Across the cities of our worlds there were streets where scholars, mystics, merchants and wanderers travelled to be together in the same places. They were intellectual climates. Perhaps this is why intellectual centres have always frightened the agendas of the unjust. Thought is unruly. Imagination travels faster than borders. A gathering of minds can reshape everything. And so when such places are harmed, we lose those precious, electric points of connection - places where differences meet and make something new. The hybridity of the world itself. In recent history - Aleppo, Damascus, Baghdad - cities holding knowledges built over thousands of years, hurt in a matter of seconds. In this era, it is not difficult to name the cities in the world that come to mind when we think about the cities of the future that hold our intellectual climates. The cities that resonate as home for so many of us, that hold our friendships, our loves, our hopes, that resonate with our senses of belonging, the ingredients and atmospheres for our work and our worlds to take shape. None of us is safe until all of us is safe. May Allah protect the lands, the seas, the skies that hold so many of our homes, and the homes of those we love. May the places where we have come to gather - full of possibility - continue to become new centres of thought and imagination for the worlds still to come. May those worlds in the making honour the work of our ancestors and the rights of our children - and may they bring about a world more beautiful, more just, more truly liberated from the prevailing darknesses threatened by them.

Monir Farmanfarmaian looked up at the mosaic of mirrors that covered the Shah Cheragh mausoleum walls and ceiling, the moment that reshaped her artistic career. “The very space seemed on fire, the lamps blazing in hundreds of thousands of reflections,” she wrote in her memoir. “I imagined myself standing inside a many-faceted diamond and looking out at the sun. “It was a universe unto itself, architecture transformed into performance, all movement and fluid light, all solids fractured and dissolved in brilliance in space, in prayer. I was overwhelmed.” 2nd last and last slides - mirror mosaics from the Golestan Palace, Iran.

Among the most beautiful buildings of the Golestan complex is the Imarat-i Badgir, built by Fath Ali Shah in 1813. Remarkable for its tile-decorated wind catchers, this building is comprised of a main talar and its adjoining rooms with four wind catchers at the corners of the building. The interior walls and ceiling of the building’s talar are decorated with mirror and tile work, glass and mirror paintings, and stucco carvings. The wind catchers are tiled in blue, yellow, and black. The Imarat-i Badgir also has a howz khaneh (pond house) in the basement, which worked with the four wind catchers to circulate and cool air by passing it over pools of water. The Golestan Palace was built as a fortress for the Safavid empire in the 16th century. In 2013 the palace was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In its present form, it comprises several different buildings and halls, including the following: the Imarat-i Takht-i Marmar, (also called the Marble Throne Building, Iwan-i Takht-i Marmar, or Iwan-i Marmar, 1759), the Khalvat-i Karim Khani (Karim Khani Palace, 1759), the Talar-i Almas (Diamond Hall, 1801), the Imarat-i Badgir (Wind-catcher Building, 1813), the Talar-i Aaj (Hall of Ivory, 1863), the Shams al-Imarat (Shams-ol Emareh, or Sun Building, 1866), the Talar-i Salam (Reception Hall, 1874), the Mouze-i Makhsous (Special Museum, 1874), the Talar-i Ayeneh (Hall of Mirrors, 1874), the Imarat-i Brelian (Talar-i Brelian, or Hall of Brilliant Diamonds, 1874), the Kakh-i Ab’yaz (White Palace, 1890), and the Chador Khaneh (Tent House) As a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Golestan Palace is protected under international law—namely the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and the 1972 Convention in regard to the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Iran has a total of 29 UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Intentionally damaging UNESCO World Heritage Sites constitutes a war crime, according to the International Criminal Court. 2nd and 3rd images of similar mirror 🪞 mosaic from Chehel Sotoun, Isfahan

Almost a decade ago I spent time in Pakistan with Yasmeen Lari @barefootsocialarchitecture on a number of projects; including the restoration of a mosque in the Makli Necropolis with bamboo, lime and mud; and the construction of chullah stoves across Sindh. In collaborating with local women on the construction, Yasmeen described the methodologies of making the structures, embodied in the daily lives of the women - the correct consistency and suppleness of the mud akin to mixing dough, the formation of flowery clay funnels like those of delicacies. For me this spoke volumes on finding canon for construction in inherited literacies and available deftnesses. Here it is as a powerful accidental performance work being made by women from the Tharr desert in Sindh amidst the pouring London rain on Granary Square.

Annual vanishing act - Nagaur “Nagaur’s situation in the Marwär desert, with only brief seasonal rainfall, meant that to provide water for the city a number of systems had to be employed. Natural depressions in the ground both within and outside the city were enlarged to form reservoirs, some known locally as sagar, and others as talab or talã’o. The Persian form of the word, talab, is no longer common in other parts of India, and its continued use in Nagaur may be another indication of Nagaur’s links with the provinces to the west. These tanks collect rainwater, which also soaks through to the water table. Traditional step-wells or bä’olis were also built, often near the large reservoirs, and in addition a moat around the citadel collects rainwater. In the built up areas of the town, which are higher than the surrounding ground, there are few ba’olis.”

In response to @wael_shawky ‘s theme for the inaugural edition for @artbasel Qatar , Becoming. Wael described the opportunity for a platform in this geography to describe lineages, methods and forms from our cultures. For Mshrieb’s Barahat square, a thoroughfare between the two venues of the fair, we developed a majlis - In the Assembly of Lovers - a line attributed to Rabia Basri, the subtitle of which asks us to be a lamp, a lifeboat or a ladder. Our majlis is an inhabitable drawing of many layers and places across time - gathering lost gathering places from across the islamic world - Cordoba, Kashmir, Cape Town, Gaza, Damascus, Aleppo; to name a few. The engravings and forms in the majlis are drawn from these spaces - where poetry, commerce, ritual and dissent lived side by side. Each day, the forms in the majlis took on different configurations - a conversation or performance; - used simultaneously for everyday pause and gathering. I loved seeing it come alive and with different ideas and bodies across the week, gathering us in the same space with places and forums past from across our geographies. I made a recent promise to myself to remain always in a state of becoming - to be rooted and grounded but never fixed, to think about preservation as dynamic and alive, passed on from generation to generation; held in the songs, stories, rituals we inherit from our worlds. To endeavour always to situate our work within these heritages and to give them a future through our own commitment to remain becoming. Maybe that is always the project. ♥️ @almayassabnthamad @wael_shawky @artbasel @debellisvincenzo @njhorowitz @eliftemi @_counterspace @nicasabet @tomburketomburke

@marykatrantzou ‘s evolution of the @bvlgari ICONS - Serpenti, Monete, Diva’s Dream, Bulgari, Tubogas - orphic egg 🥚🐍✨ 🤍🤍🤍🤍

A thousand hues of bloom to celebrate @marykatrantzou ‘s @bvlgari ICONS 🥚🐍🤍✨ Congratulations beautiful being @marykatrantzou and team 🤍 only ever eternal light and always @ferdinandoverderi superstar as ever 💚

🤍🥚🐍 “The role of architecture is to tell us something about our place in the world - to situate our stories within lineages and to give them a future.” We spoke about inheritance, about what we choose to carry forward, about how home can hold weight in us without becoming heavy. I loved being part of this beautifully intentional and thoughtful collaboration with @bvlgari alongside @isabellarossellini @lindaevangelista @geewonii @chimamanda_adichie @marykatrantzou and @ferdinandoverderi asked us to reflect on how we carry culture for a little book - an amulet of words - each of us paired with a respective ICON bag. I penned some notes on finding home in a shifting world. To carry culture is to carry each other. In the Tubogas BVLGARI ICON Minaudière, like a mnemonic compass for the body, I carry my “Notes on Finding Home” A dream to be inside the dreamy vision of @marykatrantzou @ferdinandoverderi @ethanjamesgreen @gabriellak_j 🤍 #Bvlgari #CarryingCulture #bvlgaripartner

Palestinian women embroidering, Qalandia refugee camp, 1974-1975 @menavisuals