-Niyaat-

Ink on goat skin

copper,wood 36”x24”x2”

This piece began with repetition. Not as technique, but as presence — a kind of devotion through doing. In shaping Niyaat, I found myself absorbed in the rhythm of making, and slowly the act itself became the meaning. The physical labour, the careful arrangement, the endless small decisions — they weren’t just methods. They were meditations.

The word Niyaat — intention — lives quietly in the Islamic tradition as the unseen compass of all action. It’s what separates the hollow from the sacred. You could say this piece was built from niyaat, and about niyaat. Every gesture here is tied to that inward motive, that silent “why” behind what we do.

But Niyaat is not still. It’s not just a thought. It manifests. That’s where the symbols step in.

The wing and the animal skin — they speak across worlds. One reaches upward, toward the immaterial, the eternal, the aspirational. The other is raw, corporeal, marked by the memory of life and death. Placed together, they don’t cancel each other. They create tension. Dialogue. A mirror to our condition — spirit and flesh, instinct and prayer, weight and lift.

For me, this juxtaposition felt necessary. It’s how I live — navigating a life that is deeply bound to the earth, and yet always listening for something higher. This work holds both aspects without resolving them. It doesn’t try to. Because the human experience is not about resolution. It’s about presence, and intention, inside the unresolved.

In the end, Niyaat is not a piece to be “understood” in a traditional sense. It’s meant to be approached — slowly, perhaps even reverently — as you might approach your own hidden motives. Your own silent reasons for being and doing.

If it stirs something in you, I invite you to sit with it. Not for answers, but for alignment. Sometimes, that is more than enough.

— Timur