The Seeker [the Search] and the Sought | A dance of transformation performed by process, outcome, stillness and motion.

Opening Ceremony including Dance Performance: Thursday Oct 1st 2026 5pm-9pm
On view until Mid November

“The birds gazed upon the face of the Simurgh and found nothing but themselves. When they looked at themselves, they saw the Simurgh. There was no difference between the seeker and the sought.” — Farid al-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds.

As an artist, I see a dance of freedom in this poem.

I have a habit of buying flowers, especially when I am sad. I watch them closely—not only when they are in full bloom, but throughout the brief span of their lives. Hungry for light, they turn. Thirsty for water, they bow. Restored, they slowly straighten again. Eventually, they dry, lose their color, and collapse. There is something in this performance of temporary beauty that feels like a dance to me—a dance toward freedom, a dance not unlike our own: we turn toward the light, we fall, we rise, and we begin anew, as if every stage were necessary for the next to emerge.

The Seeker [the Search] and the Sought approaches the artwork in a similar way. An arrangement of flowers and everyday objects becomes a still life. The still life becomes a drawing. The drawing alters the space. Layered images and torn pieces stitched to fabric preserve the process. The drawings, collaged fragments, and torn pieces of paper move from the wall onto a body. A still artwork becomes a garment. The garment comes to life through choreography and dance. Dance ends. The garment returns to the wall, and what was once in motion becomes still again. Only now, this still object carries within it the memory of the body that once moved through it.

Some of the arrangements are intentionally constructed, while others begin with an accident: a piece of fabric fallen onto cardboard, a drawing temporarily placed on a chair, or a piece of tape holding something in place. I have become interested in these unintended compositions because they pin me to the moment, almost like a sneeze, and because they capture something that a final, resolved artwork sometimes cannot: the moment when the work is still in the process of becoming.

What matters in The Seeker [the Search] and the Sought is not simply arriving at a final object; preserving the path that leads to its formation is an essential part of the work itself. In this dance of transformation, stillness and movement continually give way to one another. Bodies move and disappear. Drawings fragment and reassemble. Installations take shape briefly, then transform into photographs or fabric. Each stage carries something of the one before it, while becoming the material for what comes next. And through this process, the exhibition arrives at freedom not as a fixed state or final destination, but as something that emerges through transformation itself.

On soil where process and result are understood as one, flowers of freedom can grow. And if I watch my flowers carefully, it leads me to a realization: when the seeker and the sought become inseparable, there is no such thing as a mistake. Every line, tear, fold, shadow, stitch, accident, and movement becomes a trace of time—a necessary part of the work’s becoming.

A sidenote from Jet Laggard: In a sense, this exhibition invites us to think about how tools that hide the process inside a result-oriented black box can reduce our transformative relationship with process to a transactional one with product. And how sad, and how stressful, to live in a result-obsessed world where process is no longer valued.