1001 Lights is an interactive sculpture where stories unfold through light, reflection, space, and time. Inspired by the poetic universe of One Thousand and One Nights and shaped by Arabic calligraphy, the work approaches language as a spatial form of narration—fluid, layered, and in constant transformation.

Seven superposed metal cubes rise into a monolith, each of their 28 faces bearing a custom-designed dual Arabic letterform conceived as an ambigram. Each character takes shape through the interplay between a solid, reflective figure and its hollowed mirrored counterpart. Light passes through these voids, projecting reversed letters onto nearby walls and ceilings, where they reappear, resolved through shadow and glow. As the cubes rotate freely along their vertical axis, letters shift and realign, light paths migrate, and language unfolds across surrounding surfaces, oscillating between what is seen and what is cast, between material presence and luminous absence.

As reflections multiply and projections overlap, the sculpture composes an ever-renewing poem of light and shadow—where no configuration is final, and each ending gives way to another beginning.

Collaboration with designer Fady H. Salamé.

1001 lights 2020. Steel, mirrored stainless steel. 220 x 30 x 30 cm