↑ JaNamaaz (جانماز)
(w/Method)

Emerged as a political response to the escalating precarity faced by Muslim communities in India. Conceived as an experimental woven surface, the work is constructed using roll caps (tiny gunpowder-laced strips commonly used in children’s gunfight games) embedding latent violence directly into its fabric. It reflects a system of governance that operates through selective permission and regulation, producing hierarchies of belonging in which certain acts of faith are rendered suspect. Rooted in the Persian origins of the word janamaz - ja meaning “place” and namāz meaning “prayer” the work repositions the place of prayer as an unstable and potentially dangerous site, mirroring how worship has become entangled with surveillance, control, and the threat of intervention in contemporary India.

Visibility itself becomes a liability: acts of prayer render certain bodies hyper-legible and therefore vulnerable. The right to worship shifts from an assured freedom to a conditional allowance, negotiated through presence, posture, and compliance.

Drawing is inspired by janamaz used in my home while growing up, the work carries domestic ritual into a public terrain. Prayer persists here not as resistance but as necessity, repeated and embodied under conditions of uncertainty. JaNamaaz II bears the image of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, extending the work beyond its immediate geography to invoke a shared grammar of contested worship. Across these sites, the prayer mat functions less as an object of devotion and more as a document, recording the conditions under which belief is enacted and made precarious.