IT IS THE AMBITION of many Muslims to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Part of this involves visiting a sacred black stone, the Ka’abah, which is cuboidal in shape. One part of the annual pilgrimage, the Haj, involves pilgrims circling the Ka’abah seven times clockwise – a ceremony known as the ‘Tawaf’.

The artist and physician Ahmed Mater, who was born in Saudi Arabia in 1979, has created artworks based on the pattern created by the pilgrims circling the Ka’abah, as seen from above. Some of these are aerial photographs, but others are based on magnetism. Those who have studied physics even at an elementary level will be familiar with the demonstration of the shapes of magnetic fields that can be achieved by scattering iron filings near a magnet on a sheet of paper. The magnet arranges the filings in a pattern that corresponds to the shape of its magnetic force field.

What Ahmed Mater did was to create a cubic magnet in the shape of the Ka’abah. Then he scattered iron filings around it on a sheet of paper. The filings then arranged themselves according to the magnetic field of the cuboid magnet. Next, the artist gave the magnetic miniature Ka’abah a twist. This caused the filings to rearrange themselves into swirls, which when viewed from above, resemble the pilgrims encircling the sacred stone in Mecca.

This simple artwork demonstrates not only the fascination of magnetism, but also the spiritual magnetism of the Ka’abah, which draws Muslims to Mecca. In discussing this work of art, Tim Mackintosh-Smith makes an interesting point:

“But Ahmed Mater’s magnets and that larger, Meccan lodestone of pilgrimage can also draw us to things beyond the scale of human existence, and in two directions at once – out to the macrocosmic, and in to the subatomic. In the swirl of Ahmed’s magnetized particles and the orbitings of the Mecca pilgrims are intimations of the whirl of planets, the gyre of galaxies.” (www.ahmedmater.com/essays/magnetism-tim-mackintosh-smith).

The artworks based on magnetism and the Tawaf, are just a small selection of the intriguing, beautiful works by Ahmed Mater, which are currently being exhibited at Christies in King Street (London) until the 22^nd of August 2024.