Please join us on Friday, March 6, for an evening with interdisciplinary artist Zain Alam, followed by a reception. This March program is a special one and we’re excited to gather and celebrate together.

Born in Flushing, Queens, and raised near Atlanta, Zain Alam is an artist and composer of Hindustani origin whose current body of work is probing a question: can sound, outside of language, convey the ineffable? In his creative experimentation, Alam has been mining the gap between what can be clearly stated in one language that is somehow beyond translation to another.

To open the 2026 season of MacDowell Downtown, Alam will lead the audience through two of his three-channel audiovisual works. Meter & Light: Day (2024, 20 minutes) has been presented in art galleries and cultural forums from NYC to Fez, Morocco, engaging with Muslim communities on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2025, Meter & Light: Night was commissioned by and premiered at The Shed in Manhattan. In these immersive works, Alam manages to compress the daily rhythms of devotional practice into visual and musical form. Grounded by graduate work in Islamic studies at Harvard, Alam embraces religious constraints against figural or idol-based representations of the divine. For his installations, advanced digital processors are used to transform human vocalization and bodily percussion into expansive, devotional audio that complements three channels of cinematically wonderous imagery.

While in Peterborough for his first MacDowell Fellowship, Alam is expanding the Meter & Light series, creatively fusing research with film, music, and the ineffable.

Don’t miss this opportunity to experience a creative convergence of sound, image, and devotional practice in Zain Alam’s reimagining of sacred time. The reception to follow will be prepared by Chef Erik and the MacDowell Kitchen.