shemza.digital #17 - Clock Tower, Sardar Market, Jodhpur, 2025

Materials: Fluorescent Perspex, ultraviolet lights, black powder coated steel frames, wire and fixings

Dimensions: Site specific

Commissioned for Jodhpur Arts Week 1.0 by the Public Arts Trust of India with support from British Council India and curated by Sakhshi Mahajan.

Aphra Shemza’s site-specific installation merges the abstract art of her grandfather, Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928–1985) with her own contemporary digital practice. The work reinterprets the wall and gate motifs from Anwar Jalal Shemza’s City Walls series. Inspired by Islamic architecture and the traditional jaali or perforated stone lattices characteristic of Indo-Islamic architecture, Shemza fuses inherited forms with local geometry sourced from Sardar Market and Ghanta Ghar itself.

Historically, jaalis served both aesthetic and climatic purposes, casting intricate shadows while regulating light and airflow. This is an interplay Shemza reimagines through light, colour and visual rhythm. Using fluorescent Perspex activated by ultraviolet light, she recreates the ephemeral, patterned luminosity of the jaali, evoking the quiet geometry and atmospheric richness of traditional architecture. 

The work becomes a meeting point between ancestral influence and local forms, honouring making as a vehicle for memory, identity and transformation.

Images courtesy Public Arts Trust of India.