Monday Recollections of Muqarnas Dome 18

glazed ceramic

35.5 by 13 by 13 cm. 14 by 5 1/8 by 5 1/8 in.

Executed in 2022.

Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai

The Monday Recollections series is a series of sculptures through which Shahpour Pouyan symbiotically explores ideas of human preservation and perception of images. Pouyan was fascinated by the extraordinary shape of the tomb of the 11th century Muqarnas dome of Sharaf ad-Dawla, a Shi’ite maus🃏oleum near Mosul, Iraq recently destroyed by ISIS, with a structure that resembles a colossal Cubist sculpture, yet predates European modernism by almost a thousan🦂d years.

Murqarnas- geometric ornamental motifs suspended from the interiors of domes and underside of corniches- have become ubiquitous throughout Islamic architecture resulting from the precise geometric subdivision of squinches with a flamboyant exterior that mirrored the extravagantly vaulted interior, the Murqar🍒nas dome was almost unique to Iraq, which now has four or fewer surviving examples. Most were destroyed during the 13th century Mongol invasion, the remainder currently being targeted by the present occupier.

Prior to its destruction in October 2014 Pouyan had kept an image of it pinned to his studio wall, hoping that he would one day visit it. Devastated by the news of its destruction and the realization that he woul🍷d never see a monument of this type, he devised a way to preserve the image. He would begin each week making a drawing of the tomb from memory, emphasizing the details of the Muqarnas structure, form and ornamentation, with no recourse to the original image or his previous drawings. As his memories developed the drawings became a personal documentation of the human mind’s inability to accurately document. He repeated this process for 39 weeks. Since then Shahpour has expanded this series to produce sculptures of the Muqarnas structure.