Literature

Hujra — A Portal Between Frequency and Form

Miramar Al Nayyar's paintings emerge from a process of deep attunement, where the body becomes a vessel for frequencies received from stone, translated through movement, and materialized as color and form. Working with acrylic mixed with calcium carbonate to create porous, chalk-like surfaces, she employs airbrushing techniques that disperse pigment into air before it settles—mimicking the way light becomes visible in atmosphere, or how desert sand slowly accumulates across stone.

Each work begins in stillness. Al Nayyar attunes to the frequency of rocks gathered from Jordan's deserts, Wadi Rum, Petra, Al Baidha, sensing through her hands what she describes as the rock's "temperature" manifested as color. This tactile cognition bypasses language, arriving as proto-script, as gesture, as the trace of movement before meaning divides. Light enters each composition from the top right corner, awakening the surface like sun rising over form.

The paintings are layered in a process that mirrors embryonic development—complete from the start, revealed gradually through what Al Nayyar calls "a journey of excavation." Script threads through some works as pre-verbal marks, "words giving life to flesh, like blood flowing through veins," evoking ancient carvings etched into stone. These layers accumulate through repetition, dhikr in the Sufi sense, each gesture a return to origin, each stroke completing the cycle it begins.

Drawing from visions encountered in states of heightened perception—serpents rising from lotus flowers, chambers radiating inner suns, the works channel what Jung termed the collective unconscious. They function as devices that shift perception, inviting the viewer into the same dissolution of recognition that Al Nayyar experiences before stone formations in the Nabataean valleys: forms that seem to morph not through their own movement, but through transformation unfolding within the observer.

The paintings are chambers, hujra in Arabic, sharing its root with hajar, stone—where inner experience births into material presence. They offer passages into slower time, expanded space, and altered registers of consciousness, guiding viewers along the movement the artist's hand follows: from frequency to dance, from dance to tone, from tone to visible form.