EXHIBITIONS REVIEWS | January 08, 2026
Light as form, memory, and inner passage at the Sharjah Islamic Arts Festival 2025
Written by Laura Acosta
Lanterns of Continuity
The Islamic Arts Festival 2025, unfolding under the theme Siraj (Lantern), presents light not as spectacle, but as a mode of knowledge, memory, and inner orientation. Spread across Sharjah’s cultural institutions, the festival resists the logic of immediacy and visual excess. Instead, it proposes illumination as an ethical and spiritual act—one that mediates between the visible world and interior states of attention, belief, and reflection.
Rather than staging light as a purely optical phenomenon, Siraj frames it as a condition of awareness. Light becomes guidance rather than display, presence rather than assertion. Across its many sites, the festival cultivates a sensibility rooted in slowness, inviting viewers to recalibrate how they move through space, how long they linger, and how deeply they look.
¨Serenity¨, Aisha Alhammadi (UAE).
"Verdant Luminescence: The Garden of Light", Mahra Al Falahi (UAE).
A Constellation of Sites and Meanings
Curated as a constellation rather than a linear exhibition, Islamic Arts Festival 2025 unfolds through a rhythm of movement between venues, disciplines, and temporal experiences. Each site operates as a chapter within a larger narrative, contributing a distinct voice to an expanded understanding of Islamic visual culture today.
This dispersed structure reinforces the idea that meaning is not centralized or fixed. Instead, it emerges gradually—through repetition, variation, and encounter. Islamic visual heritage is not positioned as a closed historical system, but as a living language capable of translation, abstraction, and renewal. The festival asks not for consumption, but for navigation—between light and shadow, tradition and experimentation, material and immaterial.
"Aqwas" Neda Salmanpour (Iran)
"Slow Arc Inside a Cube" Conrad Shawcross (UK)
Light as Structure, Not Ornament
A defining strength of this edition lies in its refusal to treat light as mere embellishment. Across many works, light functions as a structural principle—organizing perception, shaping spatial experience, and directing bodily movement. Geometry, rhythm, repetition, and shadow are employed not to decorate space, but to discipline it.
In numerous installations, illumination is inseparable from process: folded paper, perforated membranes, layered surfaces, translucent materials. Light appears through filtering and restraint rather than exposure. Absence becomes as meaningful as presence. Shadow carries as much weight as brightness. The result is a quiet intensity, where clarity is achieved not through excess, but through precision and control.
These works ask viewers to adjust their pace—to notice transitions, gradients, and intervals. Light becomes something encountered gradually, often revealed only through time spent within the space.
"Nur" Patricia Mills (UK)
Contemporary Practice in Dialogue with Heritage
Throughout the festival, contemporary practices engage deeply with Islamic artistic traditions—geometry, calligraphy, architectural proportion, and the metaphysics of light—without resorting to literal replication. Heritage is treated not as imagery to be reproduced, but as methodology: a system of thinking, structuring, and relating.
This approach avoids nostalgia. Tradition is neither preserved in stasis nor abandoned. Instead, it is activated—embedded within material decisions, spatial logic, and conceptual frameworks. Historical references often operate beneath the surface, sensed rather than explained. Viewers are invited to feel continuity rather than decode symbolism.
In this way, the festival positions Islamic art as an evolving field—one that remains grounded in its philosophical foundations while remaining fully open to contemporary languages, technologies, and scales.
Material, Process, and Meaning
Between heritage and contemplation lies process. Throughout the festival, materials are treated as carriers of thought rather than neutral supports. Paper, metal, pigment, soil, and light are approached as active agents, shaped through repetition, folding, layering, and erosion. These gestures function as acts of translation — ways of thinking through making. Meaning unfolds gradually, emerging through duration and attention rather than immediate legibility, allowing each work to remain open, resonant, and grounded in human scale and experience.
Sharjah Art Museum. A constellation of contemporary practices where light, geometry, and material unfold as knowledge and inner orientation.
Spaces of Contemplation and Making
At the House of Wisdom, light-based installations transform the architectural environment into an inward-facing landscape. Here, light becomes a temporal and spiritual mediator—marking cycles, thresholds, and moments of pause. These works prioritize stillness over movement, attention over distraction. The space encourages a form of looking that borders on listening.
At 1971 Design Space, the dialogue shifts toward material intelligence and spatial experimentation. The emphasis here is on making—on how design, architecture, and contemporary art intersect through fabrication, structure, and material research. Heritage is tested through process rather than referenced through form. The space operates not as a platform, but as an experimental site where tradition is rethought through construction and spatial reasoning.
Together, these venues demonstrate the breadth of the festival’s curatorial vision—one that accommodates both contemplation and inquiry, spirituality and material rigor.
House of Wisdom · 1971 Design Space · Sharjah Calligraphy Museum. Spaces of thought and making, where heritage is activated through contemporary form, material intelligence, and reflection.
A Festival of Inner Orientation
What ultimately distinguishes Islamic Arts Festival 2025 is its resistance to speed. This is not an exhibition designed for rapid consumption or instant comprehension. Its power lies in duration—in the way light shifts over time, in the patience required to perceive shadow, and in the quiet demand placed on the viewer to remain present.
Under the guiding metaphor of the lantern, Siraj becomes more than a theme. It functions as a curatorial ethic. Light is proposed not as glare, but as guidance; not as dominance, but as care. Illumination becomes a path inward—suggesting that contemporary Islamic art is defined not only by form or technique, but by its capacity to hold space for reflection.
Here, seeing becomes a form of listening. And light, rather than announcing itself, teaches quietly.
—Laura Acosta
Chief Curator & Creative Director, Arttyco
Written in Barcelona, December 2025
✉ info@arttyco.com | 🌐 www.arttyco.com | IG: @arttyco
Laura Acosta, combines her background in architecture, interior design, and cultural management to create accessible and engaging contemporary art experiences. Her multidisciplinary approach emphasizes spatial awareness and deep audience connection.