Tracing Symmetries

Tracing Symmetries is an image-based exhibition that invites reflection on the future of Islamic geometric arts and architecture. Combining a selection of her vast personal archive of research photography with experiments in digitally manipulated works, artist Safoura Zahedi invites audiences into conversation with monuments in seven historically significant Islamic regions: Spain, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Uzbekistan, and India.

In this exhibition, as in her practice, she merges analogue practices with digital craft to ask: How do patterns endure, migrate, and transform? How can they break down cultural barriers toward cross-cultural connection? And how might they offer a lens for imagining the future of craft and design?

The exhibition is designed as eight modular triangular prisms, echoing the dynamism of the geometric traditions captured through Zahedi’s photography. Together, these prisms form a reconfigurable eight-pointed star. Moving as exhalations outward or inhalations inward, the structures offer varying spatial journeys — a reference to the ‘Breath of the Compassionate’ motif and the four-fold geometric system commonly found across Islamic regions.

Tracing Symmetries invites audiences to journey from one region to another, tracing, retracing, and imagining geometry in their own way.