YZ Kami is admittedly a portraitist at heart. His haunting, softly focused figures lure the viewer into the soul behind the picture’s plane, each muted layer laboriously crafted to allow the looming images to act as an illustration of the sitter’s mood, tone and almost mystical aura. Yet his non-figurative works, drastically stark at first glance, also belie layers of meaning in their seemingly simple blue or sandy repetitive text. This is Kami’s exploration of the soul by another means: the image at once absorbs, reflects and loses meaning to become a tile, a link, and an instrument of reflective endless prayer.

Iran is sandwiched between Eastern Europe and the Persian Gulf, straddling the controversial if fine line between the farthest reaches of the West and the heart of the Middle East. While political borders are of little interest to the artist – who is part of the generation who emigrated following the 1979 Islamic revolution – the interaction between peoples across the borders have much more relevance to this series, which stemmed from a fascination with the cultural similarities across the distinct Gulf states and their far-flung neighbours, especially in the volatile issue of religion.

An amalgam of text as building block, Kami’s Mandalas evoke spinning prayer wheels and architectural orifices subconsciously identifiable as distinctly Islamic yet ambiguously Eastern in origin. The text itself is taken from assorted Arabic chants, Hebrew prayers, Scripture and poems from revered thirteenth-century Iranian poet Rumi, whose work is considered sacred to the Persian people. While Kami himself grew up in a Shiite family – Iran is uniquely a Shiite majority state, while Sunni Muslims make up approximately eighty-five per cent of Muslim peoples worldwide – his upbringing was not particularly religious, and he operates as more of a spiritualist than a subscriber to a specific religion. As such he conceals no personal agenda in the work. The spiralling text serves mostly as a multicultural record of the unifying elements to be found in the most divisive element in the region: religious belief.

As the cultural focus in the Gulf shifts towards the development of a more prolific and encouraging artistic environment, now is the time for artists to respond to the seemingly more fluid borders between accepted art and practice across the region. Kami’s Endless Prayer series combines cultural and religious ideas to transcend the underlying differentiation among Arab, Persian, Shiite, Sunni, and even Jew. The text and its meaning merge into a shared belief: in the existence of a presence higher than humanity and in the power of faith itself. The Mandala form is often found on ceilings or in archway friezes as a symbol of the spiralling ascension to a higher plane, either in terms of physical closeness or spiritual enlightenment.

God is One but people see Him in different forms and express their belief in different languages, although the concept is the same: there is One source but different outlets. Deep down, despite wars and conflicts, [the essence of] humanity is not divided as we see today.