“Springtime in Barzakh”
Art by Saba Taj
Oil paint, trims, shisha embroidery, sparkles, thread on canvas.
Two panels, 36” x 72”
“Springtime in Barzakh”
I began this painting in late March, after moving my studio back home. In this series I am thinking so much about barzakh. In the Quran, barzakh is described as the place where the two seas (salt and freshwater) meet. It is neither, and it is both. It is the in-between. Between the real and the imaginary, the wild and domestic, the spiritual and physical, the self and other, between binaries. A place where we can be neither (a third thing), and we can be both.
In other words, it is a liminal space. In Islam, it is where our souls reside after death but before the Day of Judgment, left to reflect on our lives and our deeds. This liminal waiting room reminds me of now. There is no one way to characterize our current circumstances, but I notice that in this pause, spring is bursting louder than ever before. During this time, I’ve been making a lot of eye contact with birds. I planted seeds for the first time since I was a child. I squealed when they grew into seedlings. Miraculous, mundane.
“If...we see the human and the natural economies as necessarily opposite or opposed, we subscribe to the very oppositions that threatens to destroy them both. The wild and the domestic now often seem isolated values, estranged from one another. And yet these are not exclusive polarities...There can be continuity between them, and must be.” -Wendell Berry