Sobia Ahmad

Constellations (As One They Quake), Installation view, 2026, Schaefer Gallery, Gustavus Adolphus College, Saint Peter, Minnesota

All installation photography by Will Clark​​

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The Department of Art & Art History at Gustavus Adolphus College is pleased to present Constellations (As One They Quake) by Sobia Ahmad. The exhibition brings together celluloid-based film and photographic works emerging from Sobia Ahmad’s ongoing engagement with Pando, an ancient aspen forest in south-central Utah. Though it appears to be 47,000 individual trees, Pando is a single organism connected by one immense root system spanning more than 100 acres. Estimated to be 16,000–80,000 years old, it offers a living model of entanglement and multiplicity within unity. For Ahmad, Pando becomes a site where ecological, mystical, and material forms of knowledge converge.

The exhibition draws on years of alternative photochemical research in the kitchen and darkroom, alongside concepts of Oneness and spiritual seeking in Islamic Sufi mysticism. Cycles, revolutions, and circumambulations recur throughout the work: the orbit of the moon, moths encircling a light, and a 360-degree image of Pando, The Breath within the Breath. This continuous photograph was made on a single roll of 35mm film as Ahmad stood at Pando’s center, holding the camera to her chest and turning her body in a circle with her breath. Its title, drawn from the fifteenth-century South Asian poet Kabir, evokes the circular dance of the Sufi dervishes and embodied prayer. 

A new site-responsive work, Constellations, maps a web of translucent images across the gallery’s exterior windows. At its core are scanned phytograms, cameraless images made by imprinting aspen leaves from Pando onto expired film in sunlight. The leaves’ chemistry, combined with a homemade developer, produces ghostly web-like impressions in fiery orange and crimson. Presented alongside images of moths, spiderwebs, and Sufi Qawwali singers’ hand gestures during devotional recitations, the work evokes ecological entanglements, fragility of a spiritual journey, and the yearning for unity with the Divine. 

Ahmad hand-processes 35mm and 16mm film with a homemade coffee-based developer containing washing soda, salt, lemon juice, and vitamin C. Developed in her kitchen sink, the films accumulate chemical irregularities, residues, and inscriptions. These approaches materialize most vividly in the 16mm film One Big Eye that weaves scientific and folkloric ways of relating to the Pando forest. Ahmad also prints gelatin silver photographs as negatives, reversing light and dark to unsettle conventional ideas of clarity, control, and photographic truth. In As One They Quake, bright daylight transforms into pulsing darkness through developer artifacts, while To become dust that sings its melody to the night draws a cosmic field from the residue of coffee-based chemistry. 

Across Constellations (As One They Quake), chance and material transformation become ways of attending to what cannot be fully seen or known. Ahmad approaches photography as a devotional practice that asks her to slow down, listen, and remain receptive to the relationships unfolding between human and more-than-human worlds. In the traces left by light, dust, breath, plants, chemicals and time, the works gesture toward a form of Oneness that is at once ecological, spiritual, and material. 

 

Gustavus Magazine Interview

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