Ali
Gillani

My practice is rooted in a fundamental question: how does religion — as a symbolic system accumulated over centuries — shape human behavior, and who controls that shaping?

I work at the intersection of historical iconography and contemporary moral philosophy. Religion, across cultures and eras, has served as both a compass and a cage — directing human conduct, encoding ethical frameworks, and simultaneously functioning as an instrument of power. In the current political and social climate, this duality is impossible to ignore. What was once a source of inner guidance has, for many, become a tool of influence, manipulation, and control — deployed by those with authority to define what is good, what is threatening, and what must be destroyed.

My paintings draw from the visual lexicon of the Shahnameh, Baburnama, and Hamzanama — manuscripts in which demons, dragons, and mythic combat were never merely decorative. These figures carried precise moral weight within their historical moment. A demon was not simply a monster; it was a philosophical argument about the nature of the self. A dragon was not simply a beast; it was an externalization of what a given civilization feared or suppressed within itself.

I borrow these figures as metaphors — not to recreate the past, but to apply their original semantic weight to present conditions. The same questions that haunted those manuscripts — Where does the capacity for evil originate in the human being? What internal forces must be confronted before one can act justly? — remain urgently unanswered.

My work, ultimately, is a meditation on behavioral philosophy: what makes humans act the way they do, and how the narratives we inherit — religious, political, mythological — continue to author us long after we believe we have authored ourselves.