70,000 Grains of Rice is an ongoing project that transmutes the Islamic practice of 'dhikr' into the process of making, instead of counting on a prayer bead, I count with the casting of individual grains of rice into fine silver. Dhikr is a practice akin to meditation that is central to Islamic spirituality, involving the repetition of the names of God or other sacred phrases and verse. 

This project began after my grandmother passed, and my family performed the ritual of counting 70,000 glorifications of God as a way to ensure her safe passage in the afterlife. Pictured below you will see a tally that my mother kept of her own 70,000 glorifications, as expression of her piety and autonomy, as this is also a ritual that one can do for themselves. I chose to use rice to count my 70,000 prayers as a symbol of my ancestors labour in the rice fields and the metaphor of rice. Rice is a staple food that is revered in many cultures and faiths, representing nourishment, sustenance, and prosperity. In many traditions, it is also used as a symbol of spiritual purity and enlightenment.

I am at the beginnings of exploring making chainmail in the patterns my families crochet works. Drawing parallels between the labour, dedication and consistency required in the practices of rice farming, chainmail making, our cultural textile practices and spiritual practice. The magnitude of this project, almost sisyphean in nature, is both genealogical and fractal, a whole made of many small parts, inherited at some stage when I am no longer able to produce in such a way.

This project was shown in its first iteration as West Space in 2022, along with the work ‘to be burned, buried, or released into moving water', for my collaborative exhibition with Quishile Charan, Angna Mein.

As it stands, the count of cast grains is at 942 — each time a work is made that incorporates cast rice it is added to the count.