The Wind Egg
From 15 September 2018–6 January 2019 BAK Fellow Haseeb Ahmed has had a solo show IN SITU: Haseeb Ahmed – The Wind Egg as part of the In Situ series at M HKA, Antwerp.
For millennia ancient Egyptian, Aran, Indian, European, and Chinese cultures have conceptualized the wind egg, suggesting that the wind can fertilize animals and people. Ahmed worked with this idea with state-of-the-art wind tunnel technology at Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, Belgium. He blends art and aeronautics, myth, and technology, personifying the wind and reflecting the human capacity to project empathetic sensibilities onto inhuman things. A project that moves from antiquity to astrobiology, the exhibition functions as a test-site for imagining the possibilities for humans to reproduce without men and with the wind.
Ahmed’s exhibition was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the Zurich University of the Arts, Zurich; Saint Lucas Antwerp College of Art and Design, Antwerp; and the University of Antwerp, Antwerp.