Meter & Light: Night has its counterpart in Meter & Light: Day, which enacts in music and in miniature such occurrences and activities as the passage of light, modes of cleansing, utterances in remembrance of the Divine, daily prayer. Together, these installations reimagine azaan (the call to prayer), devotions, and cycles of sleep and awakening. Using the multi-channel powers of audiovisual installation, Alam also tries to mirror the qualities of repetitive chant, dance, and spiritual excess common to Sufism. His work embraces the constraints common to certain threads of Islamic art and music—eschewing representation of the face, using only human voice and body percussion—while leveraging tools like granular synthesis, macro lenses enabling intimate close-ups, and sound signal processing to transform familiar forms into expansive, defamiliarized scenes of devotion.

As an artist who works across video, sound, performance, and installation, Alam draws on contemporary forms to illuminate and reanimate understandings of ritual and religion. A first-generation American belonging to the Indian-Pakistani diaspora, he is particularly interested in how the rituals of everyday Muslim life give definition to the idea and feeling of home, wherever believers may find themselves in the world. His work suggests a reflexivity between the idea of certain “fixed” Islamic texts or practices, and the corresponding plurality of their flexible manifestations across local communities. 

About the Artist

Zain Alam (b. 1990)  is an artist and composer of Indian-Pakistani origin, raised outside of Atlanta and based in New York City. Sound is  the central organizing principle in his practice, threading through a body of work across video, performance, and installation. His practice emerges from a lifelong question: in what ways can sound convey the ineffable? Alam explores in particular the distance between what is expressible in one language but lies just beyond the pale of translation in another, with faith in the power of rhythm, timbre, and tone to transcend meaning alone.

Alam’s performances have been staged at the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation (NY, 2023), the Center for Arts, Research and Alliances (NY, 2022), and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (2017). His installations have been exhibited at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NY, 2024), Nawat Fes and the American Cultural Association (Morocco, 2024), and the Laundromat Project (NY, 2023). His writing has been published in the Miami Rail and New Yorker. Alam maintains an ongoing recording project, Humeysha, which he began in 2015. He has since provided scores for various performances  as well as for podcasting, fashion, and film. Alam completed his M.A. in Islamic Studies at Harvard University.