Light as a Mediator of Meaning: Reexamining the Role of Light in Contemporary Light Installations Within the Framework of Islamic Traditions, With a Focus on “Journey of Light” and Iranian Examples

Mokhtari Dehkordi, Razieh

doi:10.22034/rph.2025.2069042.1171

Light as a Mediator of Meaning: Reexamining the Role of Light in Contemporary Light Installations Within the Framework of Islamic Traditions, With a Focus on “Journey of Light” and Iranian Examples

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Razieh Mokhtari Dehkordi

Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Communication, Faculty of Arts , Shahrekord University, Shahrekord, Iran

10.22034/rph.2025.2069042.1171

Abstract

This study provides a thorough reexamination of the role of light as an active mediator of meaning in contemporary light installations that are influenced by, responding to, or consciously referencing Islamic philosophical and artistic traditions. Light holds a special and multifaceted position in Islamic intellectual and aesthetic history. In Qur’anic interpretation, the Light Verse—”Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth”—is viewed not just as poetic embellishment but as a foundational point for reflection on presence, guidance, and understanding. Illuminationism (Wisdom of the Rising Light), established by Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi, elaborates a metaphysics of emanation, where varying degrees of light symbolize different levels of existence and knowledge. In Islamic architecture and visual culture—ranging from muqarnas and perforated screens to calligraphic and geometric patterns—light has served as both a practical technique and a symbolic medium. Contemporary light installations draw from this rich legacy but reinterpret it using new materials, programmable technologies, and performance-oriented spatial strategies. Despite a growing interest in these works, scholarship often divides into technical/formal studies and separate historical or symbolic analyses. This study addresses that gap by emphasizing the intersection of illuminationist symbolism, phenomenological perception, and formal luminous strategies. The research explores two main questions. First, in what ways does light effectively mediate the construction of meaning in selected contemporary installations? Second, what roles do the formal properties of light—such as intensity, direction, color, temporality, movement, and interaction with reflective or translucent materials—play in shaping the audience’s lived and embodied experience of these works? To address these questions, the study combines two complementary theoretical frameworks. Suhrawardi’s illuminationist ontology provides a lens for interpreting variations in luminosity as symbolic representations of ontological and epistemic hierarchies. Meanwhile, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to embodied perception offers insights into how the structure of luminous environments influences bodily attention, proprioception, and intersubjective orientation. The study employs a qualitative and analytical-critical approach. Using purposive sampling, it focuses on three significant installations for detailed analysis: 1- Matias De Falcis’s Journey of Light (2024): this installation is highlighted as a key international example that uses programmed temporal sequences of light to create an illuminating arc. 2- Afruz Amighi’s Angels in Combat (2010): selected for its rich Iranian cultural references, this work utilizes shadow, suspension, and semi-opaque membranes to explore themes of migration and contested sanctity. 3- Maryam Taghavi’s Being Nothing (2023): this installation is noted for its use of prisms, calligraphic allusions, and reflective surfaces that engage with concepts of presence and non-being. The study’s data sources include exhibition documentation, artist statements, critical texts, and high-resolution visual records. Visual materials were analyzed for various luminous aspects, including intensity gradients, chromatic shifts, directional vectors, movement dynamics, and material interactions. The interpretations were framed within a combined illuminationist and phenomenological approach. The findings indicate that light serves as a dynamic and multifaceted mediator of meaning through the coordinated deployment of formal properties that operate across temporal, spatial, and bodily dimensions. In Journey of Light, De Falcis constructs a three-stage experiential sequence. First, an initial field of darkness establishes potentiality and withdrawal. Second, a progressive accretion of discrete luminous particles fosters concentrated attention and a sense of becoming. Finally, a saturated luminous field affords a sense of plenitude and unitive presence. Calibrated intensities and chromatic transitions—notably a movement from cool, attenuated hues toward warmer, more enveloping tones—produce an affective and cognitive trajectory analogous to illuminationist schemas in which increasing luminosity indexes greater degrees of being and understanding. Spatial directionality—often top-down or axial—places the viewer within a mediated vertical axis of reception, reinforcing narratives of ascent and inward reflection. Afruz Amighi’s Angels in Combat reveals a different modality by which light frames social and historical narratives. In this work, backlighting, concentrated point sources, and semi-transparent screens cast viewers’ silhouettes and produce layered shadow-planes that become integral to the piece’s iconography. Shadows function as prosthetic carriers of memory. They instantiate absence and presence simultaneously and foreground themes of displacement, sacred struggle, and migration. The oscillation of shadows across layered surfaces, as well as the interplay of occlusion and partial revelation, creates a social tableau. In this tableau, the viewer’s body becomes an actor, and meaning is produced relationally between the object, the light, and the embodied spectator. Maryam Taghavi’s Being Nothing foregrounds prismatic refraction, reflective planes, and calligraphic reference to the nukhteh (the dot) to stage dialectics of presence and non-being. Focused beams draw attention to a central sculptural volume, while peripheral reflections and refracted fragments multiply vantage points and produce intervals of estrangement. Directional shifts and refractive dispersion generate sequences of revelation and concealment that resonate with theological and existential motifs of genesis, annihilation, and return. In Taghavi’s work, light’s refractive and reflective behaviors—coupled with culturally specific graphic allusions—translate metaphysical questions into perceptual operations that solicit bodily repositioning and reflective attention. Synthesizing across cases, four operative mechanisms by which light mediates meaning are identified. First, gradation: calibrated intensity and chromatic sequencing enact temporal narratives that can be mapped onto ontological hierarchies and epistemic transitions. Second, embodiment: spatialized and directional light configures bodily engagement, recruiting proprioception, kinesthetic adjustment, and attentional posture as components of interpretation. Third, relationality: reflective, refractive, and translucent materials generate dialogic interfaces where meaning emerges in the interplay between viewer, surface, and luminous field. Fourth, performativity: programmed temporalities, particle motion, and dynamic modulation of light produce sequences of events in which meaning accrues through embodied duration rather than static representation. The study further contends that contemporary technologies—LED matrices, projection mapping, fiber optics, and interactive control systems—substantially expand expressive potential without displacing inherited symbolic frameworks. Technological affordances enable finer gradations, rapid chromatic modulations, and choreographed temporalities that classical architectural devices could only approximate. Yet artists selectively integrate programmable techniques with Islamic semiotic registers—calligraphy, geometry, and traditional shadow play—so that technological media serve as amplifiers of cultural and metaphysical resonances rather than as neutral instruments of spectacle. Acknowledged limitations include the absence of sustained in situ ethnographic observation and physiological measures of audience response. These limitations constrain definitive claims about affective and somatic reception. This study mitigates these limitations by triangulating documentary sources and providing a rigorous theoretical framework. It recommends that future research employ mixed methods, such as phenomenological interviews, cross-cultural reception studies, and physiological monitoring (e.g., heart rate variability and galvanic skin response), to correlate luminous manipulations with embodied and affective states. Theoretically and practically, this research contributes an integrated model of luminous mediation that links doctrinal metaphors of illumination with embodied perceptual mechanisms and technological practice. Curatorial implications include the advisability of designing exhibition conditions that respect sightlines, dwell times, and bodily movement so that luminous gradations can realize intended narratives while preserving open-ended interpretive possibilities. Ethically, curators and artists should attend to the cultural valences of religious metaphors and provide contextual frameworks that enable critical engagement without reductive explanation. In conclusion, the study demonstrates that light in contemporary installations inspired by Islamic traditions functions as an active mediator of meaning. By orchestrating gradation, bodily engagement, material relationality, and temporal performativity, these installations translate metaphysical concepts into situated, lived experiences—thereby opening productive paths for artistic innovation, interpretive scholarship, and culturally attentive curatorial practice. Moreover, the research underscores the potential of light-based practices to foster intercultural dialogue and pedagogical initiatives that foreground embodied ways of knowing. Practically, it recommends collaborative design processes between artists, scholars of Islamic thought, and exhibition professionals to ensure culturally informed implementations. Methodologically, the study advocates for integrating qualitative narrative methods with quantitative physiological measures to produce robust, transferable evidence about how luminous interventions affect cognition, emotion, and social understanding. Finally, by situating contemporary technical affordances within a long history of Islamic light symbolism, the study argues for an expanded critical vocabulary—one that can account for technological mediation without divorcing works from their doctrinal and communal resonances—thereby enabling ethically sensitive, theoretically informed, and experientially rich approaches to future practice and scholarship.

Keywords

Installation Art

Contemporary Islamic Art

Light Installation

Illuminationism

Phenomenology of Perception

Subjects

Philosophy of Islamic Art

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