At the Seattle Asian Art Museum, the air shimmers with patterns of light and silence. Visitors step into Anila Quayyum Agha’s Geometry of Light—a cathedral of shadow and luminosity—where sacred motifs ripple across walls and faces like whispered prayers. For the first time in the museum’s 90-year history, a Pakistani-American artist commands the space in a solo exhibition, and Agha’s debut in the Pacific Northwest feels both historic and deeply intimate.

Her installations—most notably the spellbinding “A Beautiful Despair”—transform the gallery into a living lantern. A large laser-cut steel cube, suspended in midair, becomes the source of an intricate choreography of light. Each facet of the cube is etched with geometric and floral designs drawn from Islamic sacred architecture—motifs of balance, order, and transcendence. When illuminated from within, the patterns unfurl across every surface, enveloping viewers in a seamless interplay of precision and poetry.

Light, Shadow, and the Feminine Condition

Agha’s work is born from contrast—not only between brightness and obscurity, but also between belonging and exclusion. Growing up in Lahore, Pakistan, she faced gender-based restrictions that limited her access to certain spaces, especially sacred ones reserved for men. In her art, these early boundaries metamorphose into openings. By reimagining the architectural latticework of mosques and shrines, Agha reclaims the geometry of exclusion and turns it into a geometry of inclusion.

In A Beautiful Despair, the light does not simply reveal—it equalizes. Every visitor becomes both observer and participant, their shadow merging with the artwork’s glowing lattice. The installation thus becomes a metaphor for the collective body, were individuality dissolves into shared contemplation. The experience evokes awe, but also quiet rebellion: the act of transforming personal marginalization into universal reflection.

I create spaces that invite everyone in spaces where light and shadow are equal.

– Agha has said.

This equilibrium, both visual and conceptual, defines her artistic language. Her laser-cut sculptures, with their painstaking precision, are as much about the spaces they illuminate as the voids they conceal. In this balance of presence and absence, Agha mirrors the tensions of diasporic identity—caught between homeland and host land, between visibility and invisibility.

Geometry as Memory, Light as Healing

Beyond the central cube, Geometry of Light also includes textile works that echo Agha’s training in fiber arts. Threads and patterns intersect like constellations, tracing connections between craftsmanship and spirituality. These quieter pieces extend her vocabulary of pattern into softer realms—woven meditations on resilience and care.

The exhibition feels almost devotional. It invites the audience to slow down, to listen to the rhythm of light, and to witness how mathematics can become emotional, how geometry can remember. Agha’s world is not abstract—it breathes. It holds memory, grief, and transcendence within its perfect symmetry.

Her art insists that beauty is not an escape but a form of repair—a way to piece together fragments of history, identity, and loss. In a time of fractured belonging, Agha’s luminous structures offer a sanctuary, however brief, where light restores what darkness divides.

A New Chapter in the Museum’s Story

That Geometry of Light marks the first solo exhibition by a Pakistani-American artist at the Seattle Art Museum is significant. It represents a widening of the institution’s lens—a recognition that global contemporary art is not a singular narrative but a constellation of voices. Agha’s work, rooted in Islamic design yet profoundly human, bridges aesthetic traditions and cultural boundaries.

As visitors drift through her installations, they become part of a larger geometry—one of empathy, transformation, and shared illumination.

At the Seattle Asian Art Museum, Anila Quayyum Agha does not simply show art; she reshapes the act of seeing. In her radiant geometries, light becomes language, and pattern becomes prayer.