The Abstract Photography of Nasreen Mohamedi

A photograph by Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1992), reproduced on an invitation card for a 2013 exhibition in New York, rests on a shelf adjacent to my desk. The image is dominated by a fuzzy, grey ellipse that runs diagonally across it. Three white lines slice across the elliptical shape. It is impossible to tell whether these are overhead electric cables visible through a window, or reflections of lights from inside. Near the top of the ellipse is a short streak of white dots and dashes. At the bottom of the photograph, a row of structures blanketed in blurry white light suggests horizontal movement, possibly along a train track. It is a beguiling image, straddling light and dark, movement and stillness. It compels attention without offering release or revelation. The absence of an obvious subject transforms it into a portal for journeys of the mind.

This is one of 26 monochromatic, untitled and mesmeric images by Mohamedi from the 1970s on display at Frieze Masters. The photographs range from taut yarns on a weaving loom, to wind- and tide-drawn patterns in sand and sea, to painted road markings. They share a distinctive aesthetic, characterized by horizontality and low camera angles.

Mohamedi’s photographs reveal an artist deeply invested in the act of seeing as a repetitive and embodied practice.

Mohamedi’s drawings are venerated in the annals of late 20th-century Indian art. Through the repetitive arrangement of parallel lines and diagonal planes, her drawings appear to float, bending time and space. Precisely rendered in pencil, graphite and ink, they are often described as ‘spare’, ‘minimal’ and ‘cerebral’. Her cosmopolitan life – from Karachi to Bahrain, London, Bombay, Paris and finally Baroda – was marked by the childhood loss of her mother and the death of two brothers, stricken by the same genetic neuromuscular disease that shortened her own career. Her own progressive loss of motor functions made the act of drawing a demanding exercise, requiring immense concentration and a reliance on industrial precision instruments.

Mohamedi also took thousands of photographs. She developed only a fraction of them and never exhibited them, wary of her photographic practice being seen as source material for her drawings. But given the lighting, contrast, angles and cropping in these 26 images, I read them as drawings. These photographs have been made, not just taken.

This presentation is an opportunity to consider Mohamedi outside the tightly patrolled artistic conversations and contexts in which her work has habitually been placed: the formalism and geometric experimentation of the European avant-garde, the horizontality and spare aesthetics of American minimalism, the prominent instances of abstraction in India (V.S. Gaitonde and Zarina), and a light sprinkling of secular spirituality (Zen, Tao and Sufism).

Her photographs suggest that Mohamedi was as attracted to European modernism’s straight lines and right angles as she was to the niches, arches and lattices of Islamic architecture. Her interest, however, lies in structure rather than ornament. Her photograph of a courtyard at the 16th-century Mughal complex of Fatehpur Sikri ignores its more obviously photogenic features to focus on the geometric arrangement of paving stones. It is a visual parallel to the statement by her artist friend and contemporary Zarina that she did not consider the grid a modernist invention and therefore ‘never felt the need to separate it from the spiritual realm’.

Zarina’s cast-paper sculptures (of the same pools, courtyards, steps and niches that attract Mohamedi), her culturally loaded, ideographic woodcuts and works that explore darkness and light using Sumi ink and gold leaf, are eloquent interlocutors for Mohamedi’s work. Anwar Jalal Shemza, Zahoor ul Akhlaq and Lala Rukh are also part of this artistic conversation.

These artists were all born within a decade of Mohamedi, on both sides of the lines drawn at India’s partition in 1947. Their artistic formation was informed by an immersion in the Muslim cultures of South Asia that engage with the spiritual as lived experience rather than professed belief. The work that emerges from this milieu may resemble minimalism, colour field painting or geometric abstraction, but it has a different genealogy, works in different registers and resists assimilation into the European-US canon.

In both Urdu and Farsi, the concept of mashq means ‘practice’, ‘exercise’, ‘lesson’ or ‘drill’. It is commonly associated with calligraphy. Hindustani classical music has the analogous concept of riyaaz. Both involve a repertoire of repetitive exercises to approach perfection – which, of course, is never achieved as it is associated with the divine. Mohamedi’s photographs reveal an artist deeply invested in the act of seeing as a repetitive and embodied practice: of seeing as mashq.

Selected works by Nasreen Mohamedi are on view in the Spotlight section, exhibited by Volte Gallery on Stand S06.

This article first appeared in Frieze Masters, London 2024 under the title ‘Abstract Worlds: Nasreen Mohamedi’.

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_{Main image: Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled, 1970s, black and white photograph, 23 × 38 cm. Courtesy: Volte Art Gallery, Dubai and collection of Navjot & Sasha Altaf}