Threshold by Sultan Bin Fahad
Curated by Zaynab Odunsi
Between forms lies a moment of transformation; the slow, invisible work that reshapes matter, body and belief.
In this sequence of works, Sultan Bin Fahad gathers fragments of sacred spaces, gestures and elements to make
visible the mechanisms by which the self, moves toward and away from the divine. Read together, the pieces
stage thresholds: places where public ritual becomes private reckoning, where object and body translate
devotion into touch, sound and light, and where memory is both archive and active agent of becoming.
These works attend to liminality; the condition of being between two spaces, states or phases. They are not to be
read as monuments of faith but instruments of passage: partitions that listen and solicit confession, stones that
remember hands and shadows, screens that compress massed devotion into intimate encounters, bowls that
return writing to water and water to flesh. Each component performs a different modality of crossing where
confrontation, reflection, possession, purification asks the viewer to inhabit a movement rather than simply
observe it. The show favours encounter over exposition and insists that spiritual life is a process rather than a
fixed state.
The threshold is also a collective proposition. Individual acts of prayer, search and touch accumulate into shared
intensity; private purification becomes public trace. The works collect residues of pilgrimage and ritual, worn
edges, traded objects, recorded gestures, and recompose them into a field where history and presence converge.
In this field, material witnesses (metal, stone, water, light) enact memory as force: they hold the past in tension
with the possibility of change.
Finally, Bin Fahad's works frame transformation as a practical, embodied labor. It asks: how do we cross from
one interior to another? How is faith rehearsed, misremembered, reclaimed? By inviting quiet attention,
enforced proximity and sensorial disorientation, the work makes the mechanics of spiritual movement legible.
The result of the work is a space that can hold many meanings, feelings and experiences all at once, a repository
of questions, a conduit for ritual, and a present-tense invitation to move.
