A curated archive of
works by M. Fath

PARALLEL
PRAYERS

Last updated Nov. 2025

¹ Published in a 1905 Russian publication titled "V.M Doroshevich East and War" by journalist Vlas Mikhailovich Doroshevich.Indian students faced intense pressure in the early colonial period, when Western-style university education (introduced by the British) was seen as one of the few paths to civil service positions and social advancement.

² Waiting for God is a collection of Weil's letters and essays written during her final years, documenting her radical spiritual philosophy while refusing institutional religion. Weil argues that genuine prayer is not petition but pure attention: a complete openness to reality that requires us to "decreate" ourselves, to undo our ego's constant manufacturing of meaning and become transparent vessels for divine love. She insists we must consent to necessity, to the world's weight and affliction, without consolation or escape into fantasy; only through this absolute acceptance of reality (including suffering) can grace enter.The "waiting" in her title isn't passive but an active discipline of attention without grasping, learning to love without possessing, to believe without joining, to create without claiming authorship... What she calls becoming "impersonal" enough that God's love can pass through us toward the world, making us instruments rather than owners of truth.

ESSAY

Light, Otherwise

University of Madras student ties his hair to nail to prevent sleeping at night while preparing for exams, 1905. ¹

Simone Weil understood prayer as attention without object, a discipline of receptivity that unmakes the one who attends. In the Renault factory, with hands bloodied by metal sheets, she discovered that repetitive labor could become contemplation; not transcendence, but a descent into matter's opacity where light enters through fracture (that's right - God's in the factory, not the cathedral!).This is the path we trace: the artist's work as what Weil called "consent to necessity". Not the romantic myth of inspiration, but something more severe and tender: Paul Celan writing after Auschwitz, each poem a "message in a bottle" thrown toward an addressee who may not exist. Agnes Martin drawing the same line ten thousand times until personality dissolves into vibration. Ann Demeulemeester working through the same black thread drawn through fabric thousands of times, rendering the shadow not as absence but as light's most honest form ("white shadows", she calls them). Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in Dictee, fragmenting language itself to speak to displacement, each broken sentence in reverence to that which cannot be made whole. Patti Smith dissolving into rhythm as incantatory repetitions ("go Rimbaud - go Rimbaud go - Rimbaud") become decreative practice, until something else speaks through. Tarkovsky flooding a house to film memory's architecture, waiting hours for the light to move across water… This is prayer as pure expenditure, creation that refuses the economy of recognition.

“The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.”

— Simone Weil, Waiting on God ²

When Weil writes that beauty is "a trap set by God to make the soul consent to receive him," she reveals creativity's violence: how it demands we be wounded by reality before we can witness it. The artist becomes a nail whose head alone stops the violin string from vibrating. Minimum presence, maximum disruption. Light, Otherwise proposes that genuine creative practice operates through what Weil termed "supernatural use of suffering": not suffering's glorification but its transformation through attention into aperture. Every creative act performs this paradox: to make something that unmakes the maker, to produce presence through practiced absence. We are not speaking of quietism or withdrawal - Weil died of tuberculosis aggravated by refusing food in solidarity with occupied France, her attention was militantly material. So too with creation: it must engage matter's full resistance, must know the weight of pigment, the stubbornness of language, the way film emulsion holds and releases light, and ultimately recognize its place in the world, alongside mankind's grandeur and catastrophe.To speak only of what leaves you speechless - this is the parallel prayer, each attempt running alongside others without convergence. Not communication but communion. The light enters otherwise, not through sovereignty but through the cracks it leaves when it fails.

PERFORMANCE

Two solitudes protect and border and greet each other (or, Waltz)

2022 - Ongoing
Performance
24"Partner in video: Marijana Dragić
Sound engineer, music producer: Kosta Ranđelović
Camera: Ivana Mandić

Waltz is an informal one-on-one performance/research project exploring distance and enforced intimacy between people, presenting a strict intervention into routine. Participants follow randomly generated instructions and are thereby divorced from will, finding refuge in their partner and their shared experience. The fruits of this inevitable experience, traced by biometric sensors which record reactions of the body to stress and solice, then manifest in visual and sonic forms: interpretations of a shared moment dislocated from the joint.

Između jedan i četiriZapinjem za telo.
Plitak je moj stomak:
Ono dolazi i odlazi nepozvano,
Noćima me menja.Ono što ti nazivaš snom
Ja čeznem da prespavam.

Thirty solarized analogue photographs of a female nude projected onto a gallery window as a sensor tracks the movement of passersby. Each body that crosses the frame triggers a manipulation: the nude bends, distorts, fractures as her skin stops fitting right.This is a work about the body becoming foreign territory, the particular violence of being seen — how the external gaze enters and rearranges what it finds. The installation operates between midnight and dawn: the hours when perception loosens, when the distance between self, reflection and projection stretches thin. The public, walking past, may not know they are participants. They do not need to, as the work functions the way scrutiny does: without consent.The solarized image — a photographic process that inverts and destabilizes — mirrors a body caught between presence and dissolution. Analogue, the grain is visible. The body remains a body, even as it warps. The window is both screen and membrane, between two spaces. The nude exists in the threshold.

INSTALLATION

Insomnia

With Ivana Brezovac2023
Interactive installation, 30 analogue solarized photographs
Variable dimensions

These notions inform Mirror Terrain, an installation within which: images of ancestors, the significant dead, archetypal figures and even past audience. A viewer's reflection enters the three-dimensional space and moves among them. Contact erodes these figures as the they offer no resistance.The eye can be trained to see what is absent. Memory, made tangible, becomes something to navigate, to damage or protect. The work asks what preservation requires: not only remembrance, but attention beyond the present. The act of turning toward what is absent cultivates resilience as the random compositions of figures reveal scenes of families, communities and relationships in a shared, absolute flow.

COMBINED

Sacred Objects & Minor Deaths (or, Angelorum)

Presented at Ars Electronica 2022
Interactive installation
Variable dimensions

“Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.”

— Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900