The Glass Mosque is a collaboration among composer Vijay Iyer, poet Bhanu Kapil, author Fred Moten, and artist Shahzia Sikander. The four are equal partners, stakeholders, and owners in this creative project.
The Glass Mosque as an artwork and a book formed around a collective rethinking of the mosque through spatial, material, literary, and musical pathways. The book project will be published in Spring 2025. The artwork, conceived of as a public sculpture, will take an additional three years to complete. The collaboration began in a public forum on October 10, 2022 and the project will take three years to complete. Initial funding for The Glass Mosque was received through a MacArthur Foundation X-grant in 2022 to support a public convening that engaged audiences around the topic.
Sikander coined the concept of The Glass Mosque. This project aims to extrapolate, interpolate, and rethink this loaded phrase through exploring the material and the spatial configuration and meaning of the “mosque” as understood by the four stakeholders.
Moten refuses the traps of set language and preconceived categories and channels deep knowledge of literature and music into this formulation. Composer and performer Iyer studies the materiality of glass, its physical properties as a metaphor that in fact shatters deep within the viewer any preconceived expectation tied to the spatial concept held by the often-politicized term mosque. Poet Bhanu Kapil unfurls themes and tangents usually sublimated in writings on the experiences of migration. She accomplishes this through psychiatry and psychoanalytic readings as frameworks that allow the melancholic story of India’s Partition to hold a central position in this exploration of the mosque as a metaphor.
The mosque is simply a place, material and immaterial, for gathering, for communing, for conversation, for study, for rest, for reprieve. It is also loaded with precedent. A form born everywhere, earthly, and ethereal, it is sometimes imbued with the mystical, the fantastical, the metaphysical, and always the phenomenological. The concept begs for a multifaceted creative approach.
