Ink and Washi on Canvas

Ilyas Kassam

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Ilyas Kassam is a UK based, Indian Ismaili Visual Artist and Poet. Drawing from Ismaili, Kufic, and Japanese calligraphic traditions, his works centres around the notion of infinity and the role language plays within the mystical experience. He is known for his large textual paintings on rice paper and canvas, that have an explosive yet meditative quality.  He was an exhibitor at the 2018 International Jubilee Ismaili Islamic Arts Festival. In 2020 His exhibition ‘The Way’ was held at Port Art and Design Tsuyama, Japan, as part of a joint show with the infamous icon, Misuzu Kaneko. In 2023 his solo exhibition ‘Every Spell Is Wet When Held Too Tightly’ was held at The Arx gallery in London. He has shown alongside the likes of Lim Chang Min, Ilhwa Kim and Bisco Smith. His written works have appeared in countless anthologies including publications by The Aleph Review, New River Press and Simon and Schuster. His painted works have gained recent acclaim due to his novel reimagining of ancient techniques. Kassam is a self-taught artist whose education emerged out of an immersive 5 year period of meditation and self-discovery. In 2009 he visited the Kangra valley, India, where he spent months meditating in the cave of Baba Sant Ram. This experience gave birth to a prolific period of creative and philosophical inquiry. Ever since, his work has been rooted in the esoteric, and has paid reverence to mystical traditions across the world. He has since studied under shamans, learning the language of plants at Schumacher College, and journeyed to the Guangxi mountains of China, to learn calligraphy with the Langshi Shifu. His process is autonomic, performative, and works through the natural movements of the body. With roots in Ismaili esoteric thought, he draws inspiration from expressionistic practices including the Bokujinkai and Gutai movements that emerged out of Japan in the 1950s. His practice seeks to create spaces and materials that embody a temple like theurgy, reflecting the inner architecture of his process; where everything is unknown, emergent and runically spontaneous. In recent years, Ilyas’s attention has focused on the role language plays in relating to the intangible aspects of the world; How can we use language to transcend its own literalism? By interweaving poetry, asemic text and visual imagery together, Ilyas seeks to recalibrate our language, so that it may be returned to its natural poetic state. These tiny, often illegible, poems found within his paintings point to a very precise linguistic meaning that is derived not through its definition but through its essence.