‘Everytime you check in, don’t forget – there’s an Uzbek scholar from the eighth century in your smartphone!’

Our history teacher was making a point about the development of Western culture as much as he was providing specs about our digital devices.

But his point – and one also being illustrated in a new art exhibition at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto – was that while much of what our culture and civilization has accomplished deserves merit, we should appreciate that much is rooted in the accomplishments of others, often made centuries ago.

Meet al-Khwarizmi.

Whether from present-day Uzbekistan or perhaps Iraq, the work of this brilliant young Islamic scholar, known as the father of algebra, had a profound impact on the advancement of mathematics in Europe following the dark ages – and much of our computerized world later on.

Today, he could even be called the father of the smartphone.

Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (c. 780-850 A.D.), was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer and historian. A Latinized version of his name gives us the word “algorithm”, and there’s not much we can do without them today. And art can show yus why.

And in many obvious and rather subtle ways, we cannot do without light, either. Physically, spiritually, technologically, we should all ‘give thanks for the light’*. Art shows us why.

The Aga Khan Museum’s latest exhibition, Light: Visionary Perspectives, appreciatively uses art to explore light as both a scientific concept and a visual medium, while also linking past knowledge with current events.

From the ‘Big Bang’ to moments of stillness, the exhibition uses light to explore how our perceptions, emotions, and understanding of the world came to be. The many contemporary art installations on display are often hypnotizing to look at, but they also offer moments of serious self-reflection.

There are also kid-friendly activities coordinated with the Ontario school curriculum that can show the young ones some fun ways to learn about the science of light.

Using an array of electrical components, LED lights, photosensitive materials, video loops and more, the exhibition features installations by a wide-ranging group of prominent international and Canadian artists, including Anila Quayyum Agha, Tannis Nielsen, Olafur Eliasson, Kimsooja, and Anish Kapoor, among others.

In addition to shining a light on Muslim scholars, the exhibition spotlights the Opticae Thesaurus, a 16th-century Latin translation of an 10th-century text on optics which again shares ancient wisdom and insight, this time into how light interacts with our eyes, how we interact with light.

As well as the art, the exhibition explores how light interacts with the Museum itself, and its noted architecture and physical design.

From its daily playful interaction across the surrounding pools and the solid granite exterior of the building to the specific patterned rainbow-like shadows cast inside its courtyard, light always has an impact on Museum visitors, be they inside or out.

In that vein, artist Kimsooja layered the Courtyard’s surrounding glass with a special film that “makes the invisible visible” for visitors even before entering the exhibition itself.

Ambient daylight is turned into a kaleidoscopic rainbow and, as time and weather change, various colours float through the space. Like white light shone through a prism, To Breathe reminds the viewer that the much greater whole is made up of many individual elements.

But once entering the formal exhibition, Museum-goers are confronted with the power of creation.

Projectors move light imagery across, up and down a large, darkened space. Like shooting stars and masses of energized plasma, the light projections energetically move across the walls, up to the ceiling and down into a seemingly bottomless pit (created by a mirror-like reflective floor covering).

These projected light sources are accompanied by the narration of an Anishinaabe creation story, an Indigenous perspective on the Big Bang and what’s believed to be the beginning of the universe.

Created by Tannis Nielsen, an Anishnaabe-Red River Métis multidisciplinary artist, the looped digital video installation actually allows for multiple beginnings – and middles and ends. Indigenous science, creation myths, quantum physics, electromagnetic energies, lights and sounds are all combined in her piece, called mazinibii’igan / a creation.

Everywhere there is light, there is shadow. Everywhere there is darkness, there can be light. All light is an amalgam of many differences.

These compelling, unifying, liberating themes may best be shown in the exhibited work of Anila Quayyum Agha, called A Thousand Silent Moments (Rain Forest).

In this, her first showing of work in Canada, she fills the room with light and shadow, emanating from a lighted, intricately carved box. Multiple LED lights cast multiple shadows through the carved box onto the surrounding walls. From this seeming chaos of light and dark, one begins to see that familiar shapes can emerge, that constants do remain, that specific images are discerned amid this forest of shadow and light.

There are many other fascinating and beautiful artworks in the exhibition, exploring the impact concept of light as seen through digital media, photography, fabric and textiles, stained glass, even moonlight.

The last artwork on display as a visitor walks through the exhibit space proper is in its own space, one at least partially defined by several tall LED-and-glass modules architected as the two opposite corners of a room.

Two Corners, by American artist Philip K. Smith III, encloses an open space and then bathes it in a “choreography of colour”: the LED panels are programmed to gradually change the hue, saturation, and brightness or intensity of the coloured light they emit. Sometimes, the light is dimmed so much as turn to the glass LED panels into a mirror-like surface, reflecting the opposite corner as well as the people in the room, all seemingly afloat in a wash of ever-changing colour (the entire experience is well over an hour).

But in about five minutes or so, the artist himself describes and explains Two Corners, as part of the newly-updated Bloomberg Connects art app, in which the Aga Khan Museum is but one of dozens of the world’s leading galleries and museums to participate (and it was the first Canadian museum to do so). Also featured in the free app are other images, artists’ statements, curatorial perspectives and more from the Light exhibition itself, the Aga Khan Museum in general, and the many other museums and galleries featured.

Marking the Aga Khan Museum’s 10th anniversary, the Light: Visionary Perspectives exhibition is co-curated by the Museum’s Associate Curator Bita Pourvash and Special Projects Curator Marianne Fenton.

This special show not only explores various physical properties and symbolic elements of light, but it also underscores how we all can be inspired by what light allows us to perceive – through our eyes, our hearts, our minds.

As Dr. Ulrike Al-Khamis, Director and CEO of the Aga Khan Museum, said when the exhibition opened: “Light, in all of its manifestations, is a powerful metaphor for the positive change that we are aiming to drive in everything we do at our Museum. This exhibition reminds us of light’s power over darkness and the crucial role of creativity in showing us new, hopeful horizons. Over the past decade, we have consistently looked to the arts to provide light and enlightenment, with the aim to contribute to more inclusive, pluralistic communities.”

*In that sense, in many other ways, we should ‘give thanks for the light’. The idea is embodied in an old Indigenous prayer, attributed to Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who died fighting in what’s now called the War of 1812:

“When you rise in the morning,

Give thanks for the light…”

And all it lets you do.

-30-

More articles on Aga Khan Museum