word into art 2: literature and art

Poetry infused the whole exhibition, but in this section it reigned supreme. Adonis and Darwish appear again and again, as do great medieval poets and mystics, and even some jahiliyya poetry (from the oral traditions of pre-Islamic Arabia). Once more, most works in this section are prints, paintings, silkscreen, and calligraphy, but there were also a number of striking handmade little books--behind glass, of course, which makes it hard to appreciate them fully.

British-Iranian artist Jila Peacock's contribution to the exhibition comes from her collection Ten Poems from Hafez, in which she renders the text in nasta'liq using zoomorphic forms--a popular trend of nineteenth-century Persian and Ottoman calligraphy (I've seen Turkish examples with boats, bottles, and flower forms, too.) Hand-printed editions of Peacock's book are available for sale, by the way, and are stunning--though to expensive for me to have indulged at the time. Appropriately, the piece from the collection displayed in this exhibit is the peacock:


The work chosen to represent the exhibition on posters and the book cover--one of several by Iraqi-French artist Hassan Massoudy on display--is also one of my favorites. A simple line of red kufic script displays a line from a poem by the twelfth-century Sufi mystic Ibn 'Arabi: "I follow the religion of Love: whatever way love's camels take, that is my religion and my faith." But the word Love is rendered in massive, exuberant blue brushstrokes that overwhelm and encircle the text, a tactic of visual emphasis that Massoudy has used in a series of similar works. Incidentally, S. informs me that the same line was on the Middle East Centre's Christmas card a year or two ago.
[And a bonus: I don't usually read the NYT Vows section, but this story of an American Jewish human rights lawyer (pregnant already with their first child) marrying a Moroccan Muslim human rights activist sounds like one of the more joyous weddings I've ever heard of. The connection? They read the Ibn 'Arabi to each other, in English and Arabic, as part of their vows.]