Tradition or a Postcolonial Choice? 

LONDON -- The staging of the two shows is coincidental, but Issa and Porter have collaborated over the years, as when Porter contributed to Signs of Our Times.

Issa and Porter’s exhibitions, along with Dia Al Azzawi’s retrospective of his artists’ books, or dafatir, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, have opened a debate over artists’ use of lettering as a postcolonial move. Al Azzawi, for example, who is also included in Porter’s show, has suggested that dafatir connects him to the Arab tradition of manuscripts and performed poetry — unlike imported media such as painting or sculpture from the West.

Similarly, for Issa, artists’ use of text speaks of an authenticity to Middle Eastern traditions.

“I wanted references to my culture rather than imitating or having derivative works of the West,” says the Iranian-Lebanese curator of her interest in the form. “I see students from Sharjah who come to London — and they teach them how to put garbage in a plastic bin to be conceptual, while what they did before was much more interesting. To me, I prefer when they refer to their own culture than to be a bad derivative work of the West.”

Both Issa and the curator of Al Azzawi’s show, Francesca Leoni, underline this continuity by juxtaposing contemporary text work with pre-modern Islamic artefacts. Issa, for example, sets a blue-glazed Seljuk ewer from SOAS’s permanent collection next to a ceramic work by Manal Al Dowayan, in which she casts scrolls in porcelain (ironically titled Just Paper, from 2019), and various artists’ books with richly illustrated manuscripts.

But the emphasis on Arabic and Persian writing has, over the years, come across like typecasting: a recognizably “Arabic” subject that artists from the Arab region feel pigeonholes them in their identity.

While neither of these shows address these concerns, the variety of work — and the works themselves — complicate any easy readings, whether of artists’ books as an authentically “Middle Eastern” form, or as one of stereotyping.

When it comes to modern art, the interchange between West and Middle East has been ongoing for decades, without any sharp or binary divide between the two regions. Indeed, the Lebanese artist Shafic Abboud, who was the first modern artist in the Middle East to make an artists’ book, became acquainted with the form when he was living in Paris, where the tradition of livres d’artistes flourished in the early 20th century.

Likewise, Moroccan artist Farid Belkahia, who explicitly turned his back on the French traditions of the School of Fine Arts of Casablanca in the 1960s, used source material from that country for his own explorations. In his Atours autour (1980, on view at the British Museum), he used a French text, written by the Czech poet Natacha Pavel, which he had translated into Moroccan Arabic for his handwritten version of the text.

While the source material speaks of layers of cultural exchange, Belkahia cites his version of the book in the color palette of Moroccan folk art, in tawny browns and dark reds.

“These books are many things,” says Porter. “Artists will find different ways to tell their stories.” End

 

Courtesy: The National