LONDON -- A few blocks away, at the British Museum, Porter’s show dives deeper into one of the forms touched on by Issa: the artist’s book, a medium that arose in the 20th century and became hugely influential in the Middle East. These take various forms, from hand-drawn unique works to books produced in limited editions, those made in lithographs or etched and even sculptural renditions.
Porter divides her show of more than 40 books into five key themes: the mixing of traditions, poetry, conflict, histories and Arabian Nights. The last carefully examines not only how artists were inspired by that famous book, but on how the stars and the night sky have been used to guide migrants both literally and figuratively.
Iranian artist Ala Ebtekar, for example, has made a deep-blue book pierced with stars by exposing pages featuring Isaac Asimov’s short story Nightfall — treated with light-reactive chemicals — to the night sky, which acts both as a memory of the past and as a means to capture the present.
The portability and fragility of the books, which could be folded up and packed away, provide a reminder of the ubiquity of conflict, migration and exile throughout the region in the 20th century.
The Iraqi artist Mahmoud Obaidi created small suitcases in which he placed his scrapbooks, in the poignantly titled Compact Home 7 (2015). Muhammad Omar Khalil, from Sudan, responds in a series of minute etchings to Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, a novel that chronicles the loss and displacement of trying to exist in two worlds at once. In his tight, careful script and illustrations, Khalil summons Salih’s portrayal of the heroic self-control of men estranged from their surroundings.
The show is a delight, despite the fact artists’ books can be notoriously difficult to exhibit in a public setting. Designed for perusal, they often feel cut off behind the vitrines’ panes of glass, with text too small for the audience to read, and the intimacy of the artists’ hand-done illustrations and writing seen only at a distance.
However, the British Museum has chosen to reproduce many of the poems, which allows the books’ unique equality between the visual and written to come to the fore. The show includes the full text, for example, of Mahmoud Darwish’s The Damascene Collar of the Dove, through which the Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj responds to his country’s war — a work and poem worth the trip to the museum alone.
“For me, the magical thing is the interaction between the text and the image,” says Porter, who admits a personal fascination with the medium. “Every artist talks about how their work is not just an illustration of the poem. The artists are working with poets, coming up together with ideas on how to make these books.”
Courtesy: The National