Hafsa Murtaza, , 2025
Oil, cyanotype, and blockprint on Japanese paper marouflaged on board
30 x 40 inches, individual boards (60 x 40 inches, two boards installed together)
Piecing Together the Moonlight Garden’s Moonlit Reflection is a diptych multimedia work collaging a culturally nuanced understanding of the seventeenth-century Mughal Mehtab Bagh, or Moonlight Garden, in Agra, India. The four-part night garden had a riverfront octagonal pool, reflecting the Taj Mahal as if it were a carpet, flattening reality to conform to Muslim perceptual and representational practices. Now an archeological site, the garden was flooded and destroyed, its pool misperceived through European myths as the foundation of an unfinished “Black Taj” mausoleum, conforming to a Renaissance understanding of linear space.
The work puts into dialogue culturally specific ways of seeing that inform Islamic and Western perceptions of what a garden is. Print media, painting, and photography are seamlessly combined, while Western mimetic and Islamic non-mimetic representations are conflated. Cyanotypes, a European-invented photographic process, create fragmented blueprints of an imagined Mehtab Bagh. North American and South Asian birds and flowers are realistically painted in oils, complicating the garden’s topography. The Mehtab Bagh’s misrepresentation is paralleled with the now mechanized ninth-century Ajrak block-print textile tradition, with the Taj Mahal recurringly rendered in Ajrak’s red and navy colours. The work asks: Can representation recreate an experience of reality?
Hafsa Murtaza, Under the Moonlight: The Mehtab Bagh and Ajrak (Top Panel), 2025
Oil, cyanotype, and blockprint on Japanese paper marouflaged on board
30 x 40 inches
Hafsa Murtaza, Under the Moonlight: The Mehtab Bagh and Ajrak (Bottom Panel), 2025
Oil, cyanotype, and blockprint on Japanese paper marouflaged on board
30 x 40 inches
