Sobia Ahmad
Sobia Ahmad is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the transcendental power of everyday experiences, objects, and rituals through film, photography, and social engagement. She draws from non-western lexicons, specifically traditions of devotional poetry and oral storytelling from South Asian Sufism. Ahmad holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and is currently based between Pittsburgh, PA and Washington, DC.
With the awarded film, Ahmad will continue her project DEVOTIONS, which combines several years of alternative photochemical research, the concepts of Oneness and spiritual inquiry, and her engagement with the Pando aspen forest in Utah. Seemingly 47,000 individual trees, Pando is a forest of one tree interconnected by a single immense root system. Believed to be 80,000 years old, it is the largest known organism on land, spanning 106 acres.
Pushing the boundaries of the documentary form, DEVOTIONS explores inverses and “mistakes” in photographic processes as conceptual tools to challenge our habitual modes of ecological depiction and engagement. Centering themes of cycles, rhythms, and revolutions—the moon, moths encircling a light at night, and a circular image of Pando—this project considers the forest as both a physical and a mythic place where many entangled worlds and ways of knowing intersect. Most of the photographs are produced by hand-processing reversal film in a homemade coffee-based developer that leaves unexpected traces and inscriptions on the surface of the film. Ahmad is interested in how these artifacts might invite reflections on ecological reverence, deep time, and material alchemy.
