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A line inhabits its own space. And as such, it is not a component in a work but instead is a work by itself. Similarly, Nasreen Mohamedi (1937 – 1990) does not use line to represent an image; line is the image. Developing aphoristic meditations in her practice, she unfolds points of departure that reflect a process leading her to master the space that reason dominates or tries to. The strength or purpose of the line is enhanced by being doubled, tripled, and quadrupled or even cut out. It communicates and emphasizes the fluidity of life in opposition to any attempt to a fixed reading and offers a reflection on the many simultaneities in our contemporary world, its interrelations, and superimpositions. The artist’s lines are that existential aspect of life, seen as tangible orientations within a space that is at once closed and open, ordered, and chaotic. It is with great sensitivity and painstaking precision, but also deliberately leaving scope for error, that she scores her art – inscribing it as it were.

Whether or not Mohamedi saw herself as a photographer one does not know, however her practice can be linked by what at times might seem like an extra photographic impulse – in a world of her own making: whether amidst the urban environment of built spaces and road signs; of environmental phenomenon like patterns on the beach; or, else, of unusual shapes like using refractors for the graphic contrast of light and dark. All lending towards a minimalist aesthetic by constructing or documenting abstracted photographic geometries and trajectories in space. The use of lines in these photographs vary in thickness, scale, length, and direction emphasizing the notion of ‘line’ that retains its strength and independence regardless of its specific location or form. Is there then an attempt to represent the relationship between them? Infuse in them life’s energy and simple matter, merging both the perceptual and conceptual knowledge in ever changing forms? Does Mohamedi, through these photographs of lived, used, and unused spaces – of waiting, living, walking, and crossing – capture these anonymous signs of time? Yet does she also allow them to occupy a relatively silent space that attests to the artist’s journey from traces of her own environment through to abstraction? For instance, the paper cut outs placed at slightly variable angles to one another produces a dynamic  visual relationship between the lines, creating a sense of movement, experimentation, and spontaneity.

The artist makes visible how she understands this complex relationship between line, space, place, and the poetics of discovery that are within its frame, alluding perhaps to Walter Benjamin’s perception of a drawing where the mobility agent is a point, shifting its position forward. In his essay ‘Painting, or Signs and Marks’ (1917), Benjamin expresses a related idea when he observes that drawing exists at another level within the human psyche – it is a locus for signs by which we map the physical world, but it is itself the pre-eminent sign of being 2. Mohamedi’s black and white photographs, prints and cut outs emphasize in abstract form the relationship between line and thought or idea, exploring through abstraction the conflation of inside and outside, micro and macro, thought and action where it is not a window to the world, ‘but a device for understanding her place within the universe’.