Rashad Selim Iraqi artist in London

Baghdad Pavement 2006

“I have a sense of devastation within me. The works I have deal with devastation. ” Rashad Selim

“Art has to do with debris, breaking up, assymetry, loss of grammar. “

The layers of this collage include both old manuscripts which he has torn up and debris. Rashad is echoing the break up of both history and the present in his work.

He speaks of the corruption of language as in the word al Qaida which now means international terrorism, but actually means “fundamental base” in Arabic. It was appropriated by the CIA after 9/11.

“We don’t want to lose that last bit of humanity in a state of destitution.”

He speaks of the four dimensional war, that includes the destruction of the past, present and future. Depleted uranium is destroying the genetic pool of the future in Iraq.
“There is an absoluteness in this occupation that we have never seen before.”

Fragments from the Ministry of Justice, 2007
The large installation was constructed in London as a reference to the devestation in Baghdad.

Fragments from the Seven Eyes

Much of his work addresses symbols of unity such as the intersection of the star of David and Islamic pattern, the importance of symbolic numbers such as the six pointed star, seven eyes, and the circle, symbols that come from the Bible, Buddhism, and many other sources. Here also old manuscripts have been incorporated. Rashad is addressing the possibilities of unity, fertility, goodness and well beingn, as a counter to the divisive language of international politics.

Rashad is the nephew of Jewad Selim who created the Moument of Freedom in 1958. “It is a visual narrative of the 1958 Iraqi revolution told through symbols meant to protray a verse of Arabic poetetry. It is both modern and embedded in Assyrian and Babylonian wall-reliefs.”
( Strokes of Genius, 41)

Hanaa Malallah

“I am soaked in catastrophe like a sponge.”

So states Hanaa Malallah a major artist based in Baghdad who is currently in exile in London.

Hanaa Malallah is a prominent contemporary artist who has been teaching at the College of Fine Arts in Baghdad University until last fall ( October 2006), when she reluctantly left the city.

She said recently in London

“My work is about catastrophe. I am soaked in catastrophe like a sponge. I am stamped by Iraq’s wars.
During the Iran Iraq war I was 20. There has been war after war.

My pen is a knife. ”

This painting is called Baghdad City Map, 2007

The canvas has been burned and painted with black as a record of the destruction of the city. The one green star is a reference to the stars of the Iraq flag, the black stars refer to the US flag.This work is part of an ongoing series about Baghdad the city. Here is another one.

Hanaa survived the Iran Iraq War, the First Gulf War and most of the most recent war. She is a deeply committed artist who has left here city only to get the word out
“I didn’t want to leave my country. I want to do a project about the burning city so the world knows what I have seen. When I was in Iraq, every time I was in the street I had to know that I might die at any moment. I passed many dead people everyday, I took a minibus to work that had to follow long detours because the streets are blocked. Troops are everywhere. When I go shopping there are soldiers with guns pointed. I lived without electricity, water, little food, one hour of electricity if you are lucky. Hell is more comfortable than Iraq.
Baghdad was a beautiful city like London.”
She had major works on display in the Modern Museum in Baghdad which have now disappeared as have all of the works in the museum although the scholar Nada Shabout is working to locate them.
Each page of this large format book refers to Baghdad’s history and destruction. The City of Baghdad was laid out in a circle in by al Mansour in the mide 8th century AD at the founding of the Abbasid Dynasty. The Abbasids sponsored a flowering of Islamic culture for several centuries.

Ineffective Game I
Anyone can play by moving the red squares around. Obviously it is a reference to the futility of the current situation in Baghdad, and the pointless games played by all participants. It is also a reference to the invention of games in ancient Mesopotamia such as the Royal Game of Ur.

Hanaa Malallah bases the pattern on the surface on the Sumerian patterns on pottery. She has studied the geometric principles of Islamic painting
and here disrupts that perfect order
The cone like projections are based on the ornamentation of the Temple of Warka in Iraq

Her generation of Iraqi artists emerged during the Iran Iraq war. They were unable to travel abroad, so they studied the history of Mesopotamia and incorporated references to archeological history in their contemporary paintings at the newly established Iraq Archeological Museum only steps away from the Institute of Fine Arts. For Hanaa Mal Allah the destruction of the archeological museum was a major part of the catastrophe of war, it was a place where she used to spend days studying the art. It is part of her heart and soul.

Hanaa wrote in Strokes of Genius Contemporary Iraqi Art, ed by Maysaloun Faraj Saqi Books 2001
“Those artists who choose to remain in Iraq despite all the obstacles are building new aesthetic and epistemological values in painting which are drawn entirely from the Iraqi reality with all its current influences and shifting sands.” (64)

For more images of Hanaa Malallah’s work see www.ayagallery.co.uk The Aya Gallery, London, which recently hosted a two person show with Hanaa Mal Allah and Rashad Selim . More on the art of Rashad Selim in another posting.
For a film on these artists see

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/CD2E6527-E7A7-4CA5-A72F-FABB0A922828.htm

Not only possible but also necessary, optimism in the age of global war

The lengthy title of the 10th Istanbul Biennial suggests Hou Hanru’s desire to address the role of art in the midst of the pressing social concerns of the contemporary moment. To a surprising extent he was successful.
There were several reasons for his success.

First, he looked at the modern and contemporary history of Turkey, rather than being seduced by stunning ancient sites such as a Byzantine cistern or the monumental Hagia Sophia, sites which have so often been used as venues in the Istanbul Biennial. Those sites entirely dominate any contemporary art. There was little or no connection between the art and the site.

Second, Hanru selected venues that have a strong resonance with current issues of gentrification, globalization, urban migration, war, social movements, as well as current concerns in Turkey about relationships between the traditions of the secular Republic founded in 1923 and new economic and social realities. Rather than coming as a tourist to Turkey, he read about the modern history of Turkey, the founding of the Republic, and current texts that examine the Republican legacy such as the work by Resat Kasaba and Sibel Bosdogan, Rethinking Modernism and National Identity in Turkey, University of Washington Press, 1997. ( Apologies, there appears to be no way of including Turkish accents in this blog).

Third, he almost entirely eliminated empty art that said nothing. He placed social concerns in a primary position.
Many critics will bemoan the absence of traditional beauty, poetry or aesthetics, but in fact, intense poetry in a new voice emerges in the collective concerns of artists working in various media that communicate clearly through maps, videos, installations, and even diagrams, about the issue they are addressing. These artists are optimists in the sense that they believe that by exposing issues,rather than simply ignoring them, they can make the world a better place. Hanru was not interested in easy superficial viewing, nor in art that would attract buyers. He wanted people to suffer, to think, to experience the city in the different places that were required to go, off the beaten tourist track.

The title “Not only possible, but also necessary, optimism in the age of global war” suggests that art must play a primary role in addressing current concerns. The word “optimism” is the oddity, sitting in the position where you would expect the word “art” , a word which does not appear in the title. In banners throughout the city, the title was changed in Turkish to “Sanat hic bu kadar, iyimser olmamisti. ” There has never been so much optimistic art” ” So what do we make of that? The slogan makes it sound like all the art is optimistic, when in fact, the opposite is true. Optimism comes from the fact that artists are addressing problems, not simple platitudes of modernism.

It would seem that by avoiding the word “art” Hou Hanru is purposefully saying that art as such, the tradition of aesthetics, is not what is necessary, but rather, a production that presents the current world even as it offers some way forward. Optimism paired with consciousness is necessary. Optimism can come, he perhaps proposes, not from art itself ( that is a tired idea from modernism), but from our collective experience of the artists’ ability to address social concerns, their freedom to expose the horrors of war, the divisions of the left, the impact of globalization, as well as their ability to offer alternatives.

More to follow on the art.

Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art

On a positive note, Seattle has an extraordinary exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at the Asian Art Musuem until December 2
Originally curated by Wu Hung at the University of Chicago for the China Institute Gallery it was supplemented in Seattle, due to the efforts of the assistant curator of Chinese art, Josh Yiu. Yiu was able to add to the original exhibition with Xu Bing’s famous and still stunning Book from the Sky, borrowed directly from the artist.

The exhibition is an opportunity to see a full range of well known Chinese artists
in some cases with little known works.

Cai Guo-Qiang for example is represented by a piece about Japanese pirates in the Middle Ages which he never realized for political reasons. Professor Gu Xiong, now residing in Vancouver, shows his notebooks from his years of re education during the Cultural Revolution in which he made detailed sketches of his life and that of the peasants from whom he learned how to do backbreaking work for three years.
There is an amazing piece by Song Dong, A room full of Calligraphy Model Books, 1995, 158 books all shredded and lifted up by an electric fan. They seem to be dancing on their spines as they reach helplessly out of their bindings.Unreadable and unusable, they nevertheless speak about the poetry of the book and calligraphy in China.

But the Book from the Sky is still the tour de force of all works from China about the book. Everyone knows the story, that the artist invented 4000 characters that cannot be sounded or read. It is piece that sings with beauty and complexity of meaning. Beautifully installed in a self contained gallery, It hangs over our heads like a sweeping sail of a new type of ship. It fills the gallery floor with a sea of books, it covers the wall with panels of text that are like windows to a world we cannot penetrate. The photograph here is a detail from an installation in Albany.

The unreadable books created in the late 1980s are subversive on so many levels, for an artist who grew up during the Cultural Revolution.

For all of these artists, the book was destroyed in its traditional meaning, literally, as they were asked to burn libraries as young red guards and commit other acts of descrecation against what was labelled as “capitalist” culture and decadent aesthetics. They themselves were forced to read only the Little Red Book. Yet calligraphy survived. Mao was a calligrapher and a poet himself. So in spite of the destruction, the book is a sacred tradition in China still, and that reverence can also be felt in the exhibition. Finally, the transformation of the book physically, and the departure from the ideology of the Little Red Book, as capitalism has taken hold in China, also permeates the work in their scale, media, themes, and presentation.

Willie Cole in Seattle

The exhibition of the work of Willie Cole at the Frye Art Museum is a stunning installation by a major American artist. Cole’s relationship to the masters of twentieth century sculpture and painting is obvious in every work. This postage stamp photograph of With a Heart of Gold, shoes, stone, wood screws, metal, staples and 85 x 16 (Alexander and Bonin Gallery) doesn’t do him justice. His genius is overlapping many different meaning sfrom aesthetics to history to modernism, to found objects, to transformations, to spiritual, to everyday life, to Civil Rights, to racism, and as part of that mix, there are some intentional riffs and echoes of African sculpture.

Unfortunately at the Frye Art Museum they paired Cole in a conversation with a curator of African Art and tried to pigeon hole him in that one box. They basically primitivized him, rather than honoring him for the extraodinary artist he is. They further belabored the African theme with films on African art during his exhibition
His conversation was at the same time as a Friday night open house and held in a gallery, so it was impossible to hear. But when a food critic, who had top billing at 8PM came on, everyone was asked to be quiet. Let’s see how many other ways can Seattle demonstrate its oblivious racism?

James W. Washington, Jr. Creativity as a path to freedom

This sculpture by James W. Washington, Jr, The Chaotic Half, was made in 1945, long before the so-called era of Civil Rights in the 1960s. I say so called because African- Americans had been fighting for their Civil Rights ever since they arrived on Slave ships.

Washington made this sculpture one year after he moved from the South to the to the Northwest (through Civil Service Employment). He wanted to speak in his art to the injustice that he had experienced in the South. He found a lot of racism in Seattle as well, but he felt freer to express his real feelings in his art. He only did three art works directly calling attention to racism, all in the 1940s.

On the right a hand puts a ballot in a box. Behind a diagonal line which serves as a partition is a KKK hood, a noose, a cross and an “all seeing eye”. The eye is the eye of surveillance, suggesting the constant vigilance that Washington had to practice growing up when, as he declared “he lived in fear most of the time.”

Growing up in Mississippi, Washington experienced the preachings of organized religion as part of the oppression that affected his spirit as much as the KKK threatened him physically.

He celebrated creativity as a means of freedom in all of his art work. When we think of the cuts in support for art programs in the schools and in our nation as a whole, we know that the freedom he spoke of, the creativity that he celebrated, is a revolutionary idea. He believed each person could find their own talent and make it work for them.

It is a radical idea even today. If culture can be liberated from materialism, ambition, elitism, academia, and its other prisons, it can speak of escape from oppression.

That is what Washington did in all his art work even after he turned to more symbolic work and away from explicit images of oppression.
And he succeeded. By the end of his life he was a celebrated artist.

"Stuff Happens" David Hare

Last night I saw the new David Hare play about the Bush administration march to the Iraq war. It was terrific.
Even though we knew the whole story, we were still sitting on the edge of our seats with the tension and stupidity, arrogance, malice, and ignorance of the whole thing. Colin Powell was the central tragic hero of the story, who tried to stand for what he believed in but was trapped into using his integrity to support lies.
SEE THIS PLAY.
The only weakness in the story was the conclusion when the Iraqi came out speaking about the tragedy of destruction and death that has been visited on their country and ends by saying Iraqis should have taken control of our own country ( as though it were the Iraqis’ fault that the US invaded them and as far back as 1953 have been meddling in their politics by overthrowing a democratically elected leader who was affiliated with Nasser’s socialism. We put in Saddam Hussein, trained him, sold him weapons, encouraged war with Iran, boycotted him, then we took him out as well as the entire country. ON the other hand, the Iraqis have a resistance which is fighting hard in order to get rid of us, in the midst of all the convolutions of terrorism that we have spawned in Iraq, and the Iraqis have not signed the oil bill that the US wants that gives away their assets ( so called “progress towards democracy.” in Bush speak.

The play has little emphasis on the economic motives, it is all about raw power .
Only at the end do we learn that Cheney’s stock options in Halliburton have gone up to 6 million in value since the war.

watch this video on Impeaching Cheney

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEzPVP6EVRk.
Then get out and make it happen! Everyone do what works for you, but do something.

Shahram Karimi and Shirin Ebadi

In the 2003 Istanbul Biennial the artist Shahram Karimi showed a work with the title “Traces” which he referred to as presenting the creative people of Iran who participated in the “collective struggle toward modernity.” Painted on rice sacks, he made realistic portraits of 248 intellectuals many of whom are dead or in exile. Beside the mural he showed a video that wandered through a deserted city, suggesting as Shirin Neshat has stated “a melancholic sense of intended annihilation and erasure of history” ( Poetic Justice 126).
I conclude about the work in my forthcoming book on Art and Politics Now,

“This work achieved a perfect dialectic between high and low culture, the political and the poetic. The mural is in a material and style of the street, and speaks to everyone directly, the video with all of its vacancies and absences is the material of Biennial culture, but it uses that vacancy as a metaphor of the absences of history. “

Here is the mural part of the work. I don’t have a photograph of the video, but I am also posting the list of writers, novelists, poets, composers, musicians, political leaders, theater directors, rug weavers, social workers, singers etc. Itis a powerful statement and record of both accomplishments and losses in contemporary Iran.

One of the people listed ( not in this detail) is the Iranian lawyer and Human Rights activist, Shrin Ebadi. She won the Nobel Prize in 2003. She is still in Iran working for legal rights for women and children, freedom of the press, the rights of political activists and other important causes. She announced in May that she would defend the scholar Haleh Esfandiari who was recently arrested in Iran. Ironically Ebadi had to sue the United States for the right to publish her memoir Iran Awakening in this country.

Venice Biennale: A Note on Turkey and Lebanon

For the first time Turkey and Lebanon are officially represented at the Venice Biennale. Those of us who cannot afford to go there can visit the sites online. Turkey is represented by a quirky artist Huseyin Alptekin . Alptekin has been doing offbeat interventions in Europe and Turkey for quite awhile.

In Albania, for example, he hired Kiaja Kiuru from Finland to create a lace covering to cover one of the 500 bunkers left behind by a paranoid dictator.
Here is a photograph of one of her lace covering as shown in a gallery in Istanbul. Kaija Kiuru, originally from Lapland, created “Chamber” in 2002. Using dozens of antique circular tablecloths that the artist collected in secondhand shops, she constructed a temporary domestic shelter from the fruits of thousands of hours of work. Kiuru is concerned with the nature of home and women’s lives and the fact that 80 percent of the world refugees are woman and children. The simultaneous fragility and semi transparency of the tent created a stunning resting place.
I discussed Alptekin’s work with Kiuru in
Sculpture , May 2004. Here’s a quote:

“Alptekin invited Kaija Kiuru to create a lace cover for a bunker. The lace domesticated these useless shelters. The Bunker Research Group (BRG) connects reality and paranoia, derelict socialist structures and contemporary art, change and stasis.”

As for Lebanon, it is one of the hottest places in the world from the perspective of wars, politics, and artists who are actually in the midst of it, figuring out ways to both simply survive and to engage with what is surrounding them as an ongoing reality. The result is a multmedia experimental group of artists who collectively address the insanity of war, suicide bombings, and public pathologies.
Here is Rabih Mroue, a performance artist:
“Searching for a Missing Employee”, as performed in 2004 at the Lift Theater Festival. He uses video, news clippings archives, narratives, and a diagram of the information to try to “find” this person who has disappeared (as thousands did in Lebanon during the Civil War 1975 – 91) with only traces left of their existence)

The result is that we realize once again that history is a fabrication based on narratives and procedures that make no sense at all. If that isn’t pertinent to our present moment, what is?
Mroue is not showing in Venice, but this gives a little context.
Walid Sadek ,who is showing in Venice, works in texts.
Last year in “Out of Beirut” at Oxford Modern Art he showed labels for landscape paintings by Moustafa Faroukh, a well known Lebanese artist, leaving a space for where the art work would have been and adding a poem of his own which invoked the missing landscape ( both the missing painting, and the landscape that no longer exists because of war).

Word into Art Artists of the Modern Middle East

Dia al Azzawi Blessed Tigris inscribed with poem by Muhammad Mahd

I greet you from afar, O greet me back,

O blessed Tigris, river of gardens green.

I greet your banks, seeking to quench my thirst.

Like doves between water and clay aflutter seen.

O blessed Tigris, oft have I have been forced to leave

To drink from springs which didn’t my thirst relieve.

O blessed Tigris, what inflames your heart

Inflames me and what grieves you makes me grieve.

O wanderer, play with a gentle touch

Caress the lute softly and sing again

That you may sooth a volcano seething with rage

And pacify a heart burning with pain.

( translated by Hussein Hadawi).

Entrance to Word into Art, Artists of the Modern Middle East with Iranian artist Parviz Tanavoli Heech in a Cage, 2006, bronze in foreground right

Published online arteeast.org July 2006

WORD INTO ART: ARTISTS OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM (MAY 18 – SEPTEMBER 2, 2006) is a major contribution to our perceptions of contemporary art in the Middle East. I attribute its engaging nature to a combination of aesthetic seduction, clear organization, and compelling subject matter. “Word into Art” is based on the premise of the vibrancy of the traditional art of Arabic calligraphy in the context of a sacred script, as well as the transformations of the script by individual artists as they intersect with international contemporary art trends, politics, and their own regional traditions.

Word into Art consists primarily of contemporary works on paper and ceramics, as well as a few paintings, most of it collected by the British Museum since the 1980s. The show attracted a huge grant from Dubai Holding, enabling the museum to have an entire summer of Middle Eastern Programming, as well as an opening symposium that included artists and art historians from Palestine, Iran, Iraq, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. (1) Because of this funding the museum also commissioned major art works as part of the exhibition, including Blessed Tigris by Iraqi artist Dia al Azzawi, a towering sculpture in the entry of the Great Court of the Museum. The tower is inscribed with a painfully lyrical poem by Iraqi poet and journalist Muhammad Mahdi al Jawahiri who died in 1997. (2)

Although the British Museum has always defined colonialism in art, with its massive collections of sculptures and other art forms removed from countries all over the world, in this case its historical collections provide a deep resonance for the contemporary art works. Venetia Porter, British Museum Curator of Islamic art and the Contemporary Middle East, also demonstrates a deep respect for the Arabic language. She has chosen to include brochures and displays that lay out the Arabic alphabet and some of its different scripts in order to engage the public on more than a superficial level. She also acknowledges the problem of designating the work as “Middle Eastern” (3)

Word into Art reveals an international contemporary culture of which outsiders to Arab culture usually have only the barest glimpse. Reinstallation of Islamic Collections is ongoing at many museums, but pairing historical works with contemporary art is much more productive. It informs us that these countries, of which we hear so much these days in the news, are not simply historic sites or “contemporary war zones full of terrorists” but sites of a sophisticated contemporary culture.

In contrast to the typical Biennial exhibition, which has by now achieved a slick formulaic (one could say colonizing) presentation of aestheticized videos and large scale works with excess uses of materials that say little, this exhibition declares itself to speak, and speak clearly, on many different levels, about contemporary culture. Two of those international Biennial artists appear here, Shirin Neshat and Rachid Koraichi, but now we can understand their perspectives more completely.

The British Museum exhibition is divided into four parts: Sacred Script, Literature and Art, Deconstructing the Word, and Identity, History and Politics. The exhibition opens with a juxtaposition of an elaborate Ottoman Tuğra (official signature) in classical Diwani script and a contemporary emblematic work, by a prominent Iranian sculptor, Parviz Tanavoli. Working in large scale bronze, Tanavoli cast the single Arabic word “heech” written in nasta’liq script and placed it in a cage. The word means “nothing” in Persian. (4) Tanavoli is a central figure in recent Iranian art history, specifically as part of a movement called Saqqakhaneh. (5) The museum commissioned three other “heech” sculptures from Tanavoli in red, yellow, and green, which appear in the Great Hall. Also in this entry gallery are photographs of all of the artists in the exhibition, thus underscoring that they are contemporary men and women. The first room prepares us for an exhibition that honors tradition, transformation of tradition, and the contemporary world.

“Sacred Script” focuses on the fact that Arabic script originated in the writing of the Qur’an, the word of God to Mohammed, in the 7th century. Consequently, it has always had a sacred aspect that sets it apart. In the first gallery, the artists are from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Japan, China and Turkey. One theme, the curator explained, was to demonstrate that Arabic calligraphy linked with the spread of Islam exists all over the world. (6)

The most visible calligrapher was Hassan Masoudy, an Iraqi living in France, who created the main insignia of the exhibition. The posters feature the phrase from an early Sufi master “I follow the religion of Love, whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith,” in red Kufic script, then the creatively enlarged word “love” in a sweeping gestural movement. (7) Thus in the first section of the exhibition, we are already aware that Arabic has sacred roots and functions—that it is a living, international art expression, and that it is constantly being transformed by contemporary artists, as well as practiced in many different styles of script that cross geographical and historical boundaries.

In other words, the monolithic Arab and monolithic Islam, as promoted by politicians and the Western media, metamorphoses into a subtle, spiritual, worldwide, changing contemporary culture before we leave the first gallery.

While all of the works in the first section are designated as sacred because they directly quote the Qur’an, the second section of the exhibition “Literature and Art” emphasizes another dimension of Arabic, its powerful, long lasting poetic and literary traditions (its endurance partly based on oral recitation and memorization in school). The references include pre Islamic poets, mystics, Sufi masters, and recent poets from countries who use Arabic or Persian, including the famous Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. His beautiful “Birds Die in Galilee” is the poem in a book of monoprints by Algerian artist Abdullah Benanteur: “Flocks of birds fell like paper/into the wells/and when I lifted the blue wings/ I saw a growing grave/ I am the man on whose skin/chains have carved a country.” (8)

The artists work with literary traditions in varied ways, ranging from illustrations of specific texts to abstract references, in styles with meticulous detail or free form expressionism. Sometimes, two artists refer to the same poet such as Adonis, the well known Syrian poet and literary critic who now works in Beirut. Adonis’ poem “Beginnings of Words” is presented in a book by the Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata with text framed in geometric shapes, while Iraqi artist Dia al- Azzawi gives us an expressionist figurative rendering of “Harlem,” an excerpt from Adonis long narrative poem A tomb for New York from 1971. What is obvious from these two examples, and indeed every work in this section is that the cultured artists, poets, and intellectuals of the Arab and Persian world revere one another, and form a culture that crosses national boundaries continuously, both in their work and in their own physical positions within that world. Shirin Neshat, inscribing the poetry of Iranian Farough Farokzad on her photographs, and Rachid Koraichi collaborating with Algerian novelist, Mohammed Dib, are part of a tradition of homage.

Koraichi is also included in the next section of the show “Deconstructing the Word”. His usual position within international Biennials, as a token Middle Eastern artist using Arabic writing, is here embedded in a context that reveals what his work is really about. Deconstructing the Word refers to the resonance of the Arabic letter forms in themselves, as aesthetic objects, nationalist signifiers (for the modern abstract artists of the mid century in Iraq for example (9)), magical incantations and protections, and talismans as sources of healing. Many of these qualities are aspects of Koraichi’s use of Arabic. He is a smuggler bringing these powerful references to European public art. (10)

Another familiar name that makes a surprise appearance in this section is Siah Armajani. His early work Letter, 1960, is based on his love of Persian poetry and calligraphy. That rich connection has metamorphosed in his American public art into texts in English (such as quotes from Moby Dick in a Seattle public art work). Ceramic art by Tunisian artist Ben Slimane, includes repeated letters that are sometimes legible, sometimes not, invoking a tradition of religious incantation. Another stunning ceramic piece by Saudi artist Faisal Samra is shaped like a peaked hat densely inscribed with Arabic letters separately written in the style of amulets meant to ward off evil.

The final section of the exhibition, “Identity, History and Politics,” includes artists who foreground political subjects, even as they continue in the tradition of framing image and words, poetry and writing, as a single entity. In a work where we might ignore the Arabic writing in the background, it is now clear that the word and image are inseparable. For example, Khosrow Hassanzadeh is an Iranian artist who makes large paintings that invoke Persian miniatures in their style. A figure (a self portrait of the artist) kneels against an ornamental background, but texts on his chest and across his head refer to his disillusionment with life. As a child he was forced to fight in the Iran/Iraq war, an eight year war encouraged by the United States (who armed Saddam Hussein), in order to destabilize the region. The poem as translated in the exhibition reads in part “And the act of demolishing becomes a basis for another destruction and each destruction follows a demolition after a construction. And when everything is destroyed, it is only the legend that seems real.” (11)

Artists left to right Laila Shawa Children of war, children of peace, 1995 silkscreen on canvas; Chant Avedissian Umm Kulthum’s greatest hits, 1990s, pigment on recycled board, Sabah Naim Cairo Faces, 2005, painted photograph on canvas and newspaper

An example of Palestinian Laila Shawa’s long term photographic project Walls of Gaza dominates the last room. Two large scale paintings repeat a silk-screened photograph of a little boy who appears to hold a stick that can be a play gun or a play hobby horse. Behind him is bright orange, yellow and pink graffiti that the artist has photographed. The text is illegible, the graffiti in Gaza is routinely spray painted over by Israeli occupiers.

Kareem Risan detail

The most searing images of the entire exhibition for me, though, were two small scaled works by Iraqi artist. Kareem Risan. In the first untitled work, he created a thirty page book in mixed media which has the appearance of a burnt, destroyed book, with orange, black colors, and a hollow center. It has no text. The artist refers here to the burning of the Baghdad library shortly after the United States’ invasion of Iraq. It has horrifying significance because of the deep connection and central position of words, poetry and books in Arab and Persian culture. Risan’s second small book called Uranium Civilization uses dark blood reds and blacks combined with spirals and pyramids to refer to the use of depleted uranium as a cause of illness and death following the first Gulf War.

A book by Maysaloun Faraj, History in Ruins, is made out of ceramic with the two sides tied together with straw. The text is an invocation of God and the question “why.” The surface appears burnt. The work makes reference to the destruction of not only the library, but also thousands of cuneiform tablets that were stolen at the beginning of the occupation. (12)

The exhibition as well as the book that accompanies it, which includes detailed explanations of each work, and a helpful introduction by Venetia Porter, is an invaluable intervention in the usual clichés and stereotypes that dominate Western understanding of the Arab and Persian world. The overall message is straightforward: a belief in poetry, humanity, and reverence as an alternative to materialism, capitalism, and power struggles. The international artists presented here are part of a powerful oppositional force that offers an alternative world view to our cliché media messages.

NOTES:

1. For the complete program visit www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk

2. “I greet you from afar, O greet me back/ O blessed Tigris, river of gardens green/I greet your banks, seeking to quench my thirst. /Like doves between water and clay aflutter seen. /O blessed Tigris, oft have I been forced to leave/to drink from springs which didn’t my thirst relieve./O blessed Tigris, what inflames your heart/inflames me and what grieves you makes me grieve./ O wanderer, play with a gentle touch;/Caress the lute softly and sing again. That you may soothe a volcano seething in rage/And pacify a heart burning with pain” transl by Hussein Hadawi.

3. She commented in a public gallery talk that the definition of “Middle East” was loosely expanded to include artists from countries in North Africa and, at the symposium, stated that the artists preferred national identities, in spite of all the obvious political problems associated with that. Another perspective offered to me by Shiela Blair, author of Islamic Calligraphy, Edinburgh University Press, 2006) was that “Western Asia” would be more accurate.

4. Nasta’liq means “hanging script” based on a dream about flying geese according to legend, popular in India and Iran from the fifteenth century.

5. Rose Issa, Ruyin Pakbaz and Daryusy Shayegan, Iranian Contemporary Art, ( Barbican, 2001) on the Saqqakhaneh school and its use of the reference to the martyrdom of the Prophets grandsons denied water at Karbala in the 7th century, 18,19. The cage may reference a grill to which religious talismans are attached at votive fountains. When pressed for what the work means, the artist declared it meant “nothing”, but in his repetition “nothing” became a philosophical statement.

6. In order to underscore the idea that calligraphy is a living changing tradition, the Museum brought in five artists for a Sunday afternoon program. Professor Fou’ad Kouichi Honda, came all the way from Japan, to demonstrate refined Ottoman based calligraphy which he studied for ten years in Istanbul. Behnam Keryo, an Iraqi living in France, wrote in traditional cuneiform on clay tablets . Mouneer al Shaarani from Syria wrote in traditional North African script, Lassad Metoui Tunisian (living in France) created a large scale work as a contemporary performance.

7. The poem is taken from Muhyi al Din Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad ibn al-‘Arabi

( 1165 – 1240), an influential Sufi master. These words come from a collection of 61 mystical odes. Venetia Porter with contributions by Isabelle Caussé, Word into Art, Artists of the Modern Middle East, British Museum 2006. Venetia Porter, Word into Art, p. 61.

8. Word into Art, 52. Translated by Kabbani 1986.

9. Nada Shabout, “Modern Arab Art and the metamorphosis of the Arabic letter, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Arlington, 1999.

10. This term is used by Simon Harvey “Smuggling Practices into the Image of Beirut,” Out of Beirut, Oxford Modern Art, Oxford, exh cat, 2006. This exhibition is on until July 16.

11. Venetia Porter, et. al, Word into Art, p. 103 for the entire poem.

12. Maysaloun Faraj, also owns the Aya Gallery in London and organizes exhibitions. Maysaloun Faraj, ed. Strokes of Genius, Contemporary Iraqi Art, 2001 is an invaluable reference on contemporary Iraqi art.