Tower of Now

Mixed media including wood, steel, fibreglass, resin, sand

1520 x 340 x 340 cm

Commission for Bradford 2025 City of Culture

Location: Hall Ings, Bradford 

Date: 2025

Tower of Now (2025) is a major new artwork created by artist Saad Qureshi for Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture.

Saad Qureshi was born in Pakistan, then moved with his family to Bradford at the age of eight. Living across cultures, he examines and celebrates his diversity of experience and belief systems – something he shares with thousands of British citizens, whose identities have been formed by the extraordinary variety of cultural experiences that life in the UK presents today.

Memory and place are central themes in the work of Saad Qureshi, who is fascinated by the process by which we identify or recall a location by its built environment. In particular, Qureshi is interested in how motifs such as columns and domes are common across the world yet find varied expression from region to region – locating a building in place and also, sometimes, in time. Migration and tourism compound this variety, influencing and subtly transforming their environments.

Tower of Now takes its architectural inspiration both from Bradford and from around the globe, including Gothic, Flemish, Roman and Chinese architecture, as well as from religious traditions spanning Judeo-Christian, Hindu, Islamic and Buddhist influences. It combines a world of visual cues and associations into an artwork that invites interpretation, while also evoking a sense of place beyond itself. Tower of Now presents a lexicon of places that you may recognise – but also in which you may lose yourself.

Photography by Jonty Wilde