A Is For Albatross

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A is for Albatross  is a solo exhibition by Haseeb Ahmed - an American artist who graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MIT Program in Art Culture and Technology.

By putting forward the idea of making the wind visible, the exhibition A is for Albatross expresses a principle: what is important is not the object itself but what is fleetingly created by the interaction with its environment. Collaborating with the engineers from the Von Karman Institute For Fluid Dynamics (VKI), a NATO facility on the outskirts of Brussels, the artist devises ways to see the unseen within the art gallery. Each of the elements in the exhibition carries the narrative from which they result while coming together to form an installation.

The title of the exhibition comes from a test conducted in the Plasmatron, a chamber used to simulate space shuttle reentries into our planet's atmosphere. Placed inside was a letter A fashioned from the same synthetic cork husks of which space ships are made from. If all possibilities to transmit between one place and another ceased to exist, could language literally return to the Earth? The result of the test was yes.