Constructing a Work of Art
Just as religious characteristics were ascribed to language, this was also done to architecture. In this project above, I created a puzzle. The image it contains is of a room inside Fatehpur Sikri, the palace created by Akbar during his reign as a Mughal Emporer. The architectural elements inside this room were then photoshopped to bear different colors. The picture was then turned into a puzzle, so that each time one views the image it would have to be actively constructed and put together. This puzzle of Fatehpur Sikri functions as a metaphor for the way in which the religious connotations for certain architectural structures are actively constructed and maintained to keep their validity.
The inspiration for this puzzle came from the description of Michael Meister of the “Two-and-a-half Day Mosque.” In his article, Meister stated, “so closely related to Hindu ceilings, and so much a creation of the Hindu tradition that none but Hindu workmen could have made it, still seems to this author, from certain of its details, a work commissioned for the Muslim overlords” (Meister, 1972). This conception of having “ceilings” or doorways or arches containing inherent religious values led to the coloration of each of the elements in the Fatehpur Sikri puzzle having a different color to symbolize the connotations of identity that others ascribed to them. At the same time, the way in which Meister describes the construction of the mosque with intentional “Hindu” elements even though the broad ideology of Hinduism as it is conceived now likely did not exist then, mimics the way in which modern elements in Photoshop can be projected back through history to the image of Fatehpur Sikri.