Embraced in light and darkness, Abdelkader Benchamma's as above, so below is an allegorical wall drawing that evokes the grandeur of geological and symbolic timescales. The mural is envisioned as a cave harbouring elemental forces, an allusive landscape of primordial memories, and a vortex that thrusts forward the currents of time. This enveloping drawing brings together a dynamic set of natural phenomena—tectonic chasms, tempestuous whirlpools, and gravitational forces—to create an enigmatic and evanescent landscape. As if emerging from an ethereal realm, lines swell, collide, and dissipate, expressing movement bound in an eternal cycle. The work’s title is borrowed from a phrase found in the Emerald Tablet, a hermetic text of ancient Arabic or Greek origins that revealed the bonds between the celestial and terrestrial spheres.

Since time immemorial, humanity has used caves as sacred sites of cosmological rituals, burial grounds, and for murals that display our earliest forms of artistic expression. They are living archives with layers of memories inscribed by human activity accumulated over time. If the absence of light is the defining feature of caves, which are home to complex forms of life, darkness can be imagined anew as a life-giving force. Benchamma’s work in the Fleck Clerestory exists in a spiritual dimension, where darkness becomes a conduit for enlightenment, creating an inner sanctuary, a chamber of latent memories, taking us back to the genesis of the cosmos.

In many ways, as above, so below is a metaphor for imagined, symbolic, or interior worlds. It exists in the nebulous borderlands of the infinite and interstitial, the visible and invisible, the known and unknown. There is no beginning, middle, or end to this expansive composition; definitive interpretations will not hold. As light streams in through the windows above, illuminating the darkness of the mural and instilling it with an air of solemnity, the gradations of Benchamma’s line-work evoke a poetic state of flux.