word into art 3: deconstructing the word

This section ended the dominance of paper-based forms, with mixed media, sculpture, ceramics, video art, and textiles joining the party (Turkish artist Kutluğ Ataman's video works of mirror-written calligraphic texts rotating and converging upon themselves would have fit in beautifully here). The works play about with signs, symbols, and syllables; sometimes with vague shapes that evoke Arabic script, other times with nonsense phrases.


Iranian sculptor Parviz Tanavoli's Heech in a cage is a three-dimensional rendering of the Farsi work heech (meaning "nothing"; in Turkish the same word is hiç) half-suspended in a bronze cage.

Lebanese artist Hussain Madi's Alphabet reminded somehow me of the graphic covers and contents of Scottish writer/artist Alasdair Gray's work (like Lanark, or The Book of Prefaces). This lithograph is divided into squares containing an inventive personal variation of the Arabic alphabet, in which Madi riffs on the basic form of each letter to create reflexive visual iterations. Alphabet also distantly evokes Islamic talismanic patterns (for example, the talismanic shirts worn by Ottoman royalty), which other works in this section refer to more directly.