Ala Ebtekar: Thirty-Six Views of the Moon

Thirty-Six Views of the Moon is a meditative collection of nighttime exposures. Ebtekar uses book pages from texts referencing the moon and night sky spanning the last ten centuries, leaving the sheets outside in the moonlight from dusk until dawn. The artist works with a photographic glass plate negative of the moon from the Lick Observatory archives in Northern California, treating each book page with Potassium ferricyanide and Ammonium ferric citrate (cyanotype) to make the surface of the page light-sensitive. Then, Ebtekar exposes the pages overnight in the UV-light emitted by the moon. The work takes its cue from Omar Khayyam’s poem, eventually producing a vignette of windows to the moon, inviting us to shift the direction of our gaze. This project challenges viewers to imagine the the moon looking at us, seeing ourselves as the objects of the moon’s billion-year gaze.

There are four unique editions to the work, each produced under the moonlight of a season (i.e. winter, spring, etc.), and each with its own unique bibliography. Thirty-Six Views of the Moon is the only work made with moonlight from all four seasons over the span of one year.

For over two decades, Ala Ebtekar (b. 1978, Berkeley, CA) has situated his practice as a relentless leveling and collapsing of time and space. His work frequently orchestrates various orbits and cadences of time, bringing forth sculptural and photographic possibilities of the universe and time observing humanity. The artist’s extensive research and thoughtful methods borrow and physically rework thousand-year-old traditions of image/object-making up to the latest technological advances. Ebtekar’s recent investigations have created liminal experiences to longer notions of scientific duration beyond human timelines, in particular cosmic travel & the phenomenology of light. Considering light itself as both concept, medium, and even the possibilities of light as healing he uses a range of radiation in his practice, such as works birthed by daytime uv-light emitted from the sun, or night exposures that were produced by moonlight and starlight. With this method, his recent photographic works take a whole night to expose, continuing durational projects and works which he views as in collaboration with the sun and stars. Moreover, Ebtekar equally over decades has employed the tactile traditions and properties of bookmaking, page and illumination in bound manuscripts, and classical training in Iranian coffeehouse painting. His alchemy of combining these legacies weave into his commitment and own work in tandem with enduring centuries of reclaimed text & image archives, poetry, and translation.

Ebtekar holds an MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work has been exhibited widely internationally and throughout the United States in such institutions as the ZKM – Museum for Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, Germany, the British Museum, the Xinjiang Biennale, the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah, UAE, Asia Society in NYC, Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, San Diego Museum of Art, The Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, and the Brooklyn Museum, NY. His works are in public and private collections including the British Museum, London, UK, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; Devi Art Foundation, Delhi, India; Orange County Museum of Art, CA, USA; Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt, Germany; de Young Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco, USA; Crocker Art Museum, CA, USA; Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, WA, USA; Berkeley Art Museum, CA, USA; UCSF Medical Center, CA, USA, among others. Ebtekar has been awarded residencies at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, 18th Street Art Center in Los Angeles, Sazmanab in Tehran, Iran, and the San Francisco Center for the Book.