LONDON -- Whether scribbled in minute scale, expansively painted, crafted out of bent bronze or telling a story in folded artists’ books, text has long remained a major — albeit receding — element of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art.
Curiously, this feature is having a moment, as it is under the spotlight of two exhibitions, running simultaneously in London at SOAS’s Brunei Gallery, and the British Museum. The shows, each curated by pioneers in the field, span three generations of artists from the Islamic world.
At Brunei Gallery, The Future of Traditions, Writing Pictures: Contemporary Art from the Middle East traces a chronology of the subject — co-curated by SOAS’s own Bob Annibale and Rose Issa, the latter having explored the subject since her work at London’s Kufa Gallery in the 1980s. Meanwhile, at the British Museum, Venetia Porter’s Artists Making Books: Poetry to Politics comprises the artists’ books Porter collected for the museum, which she left after more than 30 years last December.
“Lettering was the aesthetic of the Iranians and the Arabs in the late 1950s and ‘60s that changed the direction and the trajectory of the art scene,” says Issa, who co-authored a book on calligraphy titled Signs of Our Times: From Calligraphy to Calligraffiti in 2016.
“After I published Signs of Our Times, I thought everybody would jump to do an exhibition, to remind themselves what an important aesthetic lettering was for the region, for Iranians, Arabs and many other cultures. It’s not just calligraphy. In this show out of 38 artists, only four of them are calligraphers. The rest of them are people who love the morphology of the letter, the shape of it, the aesthetic of it.”
A vast show spread across the Brunei Gallery’s three floors, the exhibition begins with early experiments with Arabic and Persian lettering in the 1950s, by artists such as Nja Mahdaoui from Tunisia, Muhammad Ehsai from Iran, and Maliheh Afnan, from Palestine and Iran. From their explorations on canvas, one can watch the subject unfurl, turned into graphic lettering by Mouneer al-Shaarani, artists’ books by Etel Adnan and even stone sculptures by the Kurdish artist Walid Siti.
Yet, while the importance of early Iranian experiments is well-documented, that of the hurufiyya movement in Iraq feels somewhat absent, which is an omission in such a historical survey.
Like much of Issa’s curating, this is a show that revels in beauty, with history and politics not far behind. Fathi Hassan creates colorful, almost folkloric renditions of Arabic letters — which seem to jump and dance in relation to each other, untethered by lines or the need to combine to create meaning. For the Upper Egyptian artist, the dismembered letters reflect on the loss of Arabic under colonialism.
Elsewhere, in comparison to the predominance of the two-dimensional canvas, sculptural forms are particularly striking, such as Said Baalbaki’s twisted “La”, or “no”, made out of bronze and fashioned to look like a leather belt crossed over itself — a double-edged image of constriction.
Reflecting the intimacy of language, other works are inspired by personal events. A series of 45 small bronzes by Susan Hefuna reads “Patience is Beautiful” — a reference, says Issa, to the fact Hefuna, now an internationally renowned artist, only began to achieve success at the age of 45.
Courtesy: The National