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My work is situated within an inquiry into the ontology of change, examining how transformation operates across both quantitative and qualitative registers of reality. It engages the tension between the measurable and the experiential—between systems that structure perception and the phenomena that exceed them.
Repetition functions as a foundational condition within this investigation. Not as redundancy, but as a generative constraint through which variation, difference, and emergence become perceptible. Iteration produces time as both structure and experience, revealing how complexity arises from simple recursive processes. In this sense, repetition is not merely formal—it is epistemological.
The work draws upon a cross-disciplinary framework, including observational drawing, the history of the moving image, sound, systems theory, and Sufi philosophy. These references are mobilized not as influences in isolation, but as interrelated modes of thinking through time, perception, and transformation. The moving image, in particular, becomes a site where stillness and motion coexist—where continuity is constructed through discrete intervals.
A combinatorial methodology underpins the practice. Traditional media—drawing, painting, material processes—are brought into dialogue with digital systems that privilege precision, automation, and control. The handmade introduces variability, irregularity, and embodied knowledge, while digital processes impose structure, repeatability, and abstraction. Their interaction produces a dynamic field in which form is continuously negotiated.
Installation and performance extend these concerns into spatial and temporal dimensions. They function as integrative environments where image, sound, and movement operate as interdependent systems. Within these configurations, the work resists resolution, instead foregrounding processes of transformation, accumulation, and instability.
Ultimately, the practice is concerned with how form becomes—how it emerges through time, through repetition, and through the interaction of systems that both constrain and generate possibility.
Mariam Eqbal (b.1977) is a Pakistani-American artist working with drawing, installation, performance, animation, video and sound.
Eqbal’s work has been screened and exhibited across the United Stated and internationally, including, Great Britain, Columbia, the Netherlands, India, and Canada, as well as, in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Bogota, Columbia (2017), Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia (2017), and at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia (2015). Eqbal is a part-time faculty in the Department of Arts and Humanities at the University of Richmond, in Richmond Virginia, and an Affiliate Graduate Faculty for the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University where she also teaches animation in the Department of Kinetic Imaging.
mariameqbal@gmail.com
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