Conversations: Over Circles
Cultivate is pleased to present a screening of new work by artists Sobia Ahmad and Monroe Isenberg. Conversations: Over Circles is the first in a series of performances by the artists. Their collaborative body of work explores a shared interest in their Islamic and Jewish mystical traditions and ways of knowing. Through contemplative repetition, they create reimagined rituals that approach a communion with the invisible. The artists believe these silent conversations are pathways towards (re)connection and intimacy with land and place. As they walk and enter into dream-like states that tune their consciousness and perception, they activate their relationship with each other and the ground.
The Conversations: Over Circles screening took place on February 22, 2020.
Born and raised in Pakistan, SOBIA AHMAD moved to the United States at the age of fourteen. Her interdisciplinary practice maps the various ways the personal and the political overlap. Ahmad graduated in 2016 with Honors from the Bachelor’s in Studio Art Program at the University of Maryland College Park. Her work has been reviewed in several major publications such as Al Jazeera English, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post and has been included in multiple collections. She has exhibited internationally—including the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in New York, and Queen Mary University in London. She received a Vermont Studio Center fellowship award in 2018, is the 2019 recipient of the Next Generation/Sanctuary Artist Fellowship at VisArts in Rockville, MD, and is a 2019-2020 Halcyon Arts Lab Fellow in Washington, DC.
MONROE ISENBERG’S work engages minimalism, light, space, sound, and reacts to phenomena natural to our world. He is a 2019 graduate of the MFA program at the University of Maryland College Park. Isenberg is the recipient of multiple awards, grants, and residencies including the 2019 tristate Trawick Emerging Artist prize, International Outstanding Student Achievement Award winner (2017), and included in the 2020 Aesthetica Art: Future Now anthology in the UK. His artwork has been exhibited internationally and is held in public and private collections across the United States. Most recently, Isenberg was invited to participate in the fellowship program at the Lunga School in Iceland in fall 2019.