Hafsa Murtaza, The Moonlight Garden's Moonlit Reflection Installation, 2026.
Photograph by Toni Hafkenscheid, displayed in the Blackwood Gallery
Hafsa Murtaza, Fragment of a Pavilion Textile, 2026.
Acrylic on Japanese paper
126 x 39.5 inches
Fragment of a Pavilion Textile (2026) is an acrylic painting on a ten-foot-long Japanese paper scroll, with the silhouette of half of the Taj Mahal. Imagery of trees and flowers derives from seventeenth-century Mughal carpets, while realistically rendered birds and abstract lily pads reference Western representational traditions. The scroll appears as a red landscape on the wall, while the painting of water pools onto the floor. Muslim perceptual traditions understand gardens through textiles, as Mughal Emperor Jahangir (d. 1627) wrote prose paralleling a garden of roses with a flower-patterned carpet. Garden pavilions were often covered with floral-patterned textiles to simulate an ever-blooming garden, contrasting the exterior mortal landscape. My painting references this tradition by fragmentarily immortalizing an experience of looking out from the Mehtab Bagh’s now extant textile-covered pavilion to the Taj Mahal across the river.
Hafsa Murtaza, The Moonlight Garden's Moonlit Reflection Installation, 2026.
Photograph by Toni Hafkenscheid, displayed in the Blackwood Gallery