“Integrated in a singular aesthetic, Nasreen Mohamedi’s drawings and photographs differ in their spatial orientations and therefore in their phenomenological bearing.  The pen-and-ink (and graphite) drawings made with precision instruments are airy grids, angled geometry, black shafts cutting across the surface. Later her compass suspends the wide arc of an archer’s bow in white light. Trajectories of farishte – angels of Islamic lore, the graphic configurations – wax and wane, and profiles are eclipsed like the moon herself. The photographs are earth-bound: sea, sand, asphalt highways, desert shelters courtyards, mausoleums. Empty and still and also all surface, the pictures have tones of grey, sharp shadows, perspectival lines. This implied “depth-of-field” is a mere signifier, word objectif. A full-bodied viewer covers the terrain, turns, stops short. Her footprints measure space. Nasreen is a daughter of the desert by choice. By elective affinity she adopts the saint’s vocation of walking, and in that stance merges (temporal) mortality with the (concrete) infinite, restoring oriental protocols of compassion along the way. Reconfirming a “universal” modernist language up to an including Minimalism, Nasreen’s work offers semiotic cross-referencing to mystical (Islamic/Sufi) traditions. And the question “is modernity out antiquity?” yields a qualified yes that is yet a qualified no. If modernity, like antiquity, offers a source for cultural hermeneutics, it is also a threshold: it brings art to the brink.”   -Geeta Kapur