word into art: artists of the modern middle east

This weekend is the last chance to see the wonderful Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East at the British Museum. Thankfully, Birzeit University of Palestine and the BM have teamed up to produce a detailed virtual exhibition, which is the next best thing for those who can't make it to London in time. Also, I highly recommend the accompanying volume, which I bought on the spot--the paperback version isn't expensive at all, and the translation of the visual exhibition into book form is done skillfully.

First, of the various shows of contemporary Middle Eastern art I've seen in the past view years (locations ranging from Oxford Modern Art to the İstanbul Biennial to the Met) this was the best--it's small but rich and ravishing: thoughtfully curated, conceptually interesting, and consistently stunning. It was also deeply affecting--it's been a long time since I was moved to the brink of tears by something in a museum. Part of the impact was no doubt due to the context--the exhibition has been running since May, but we went to see it in mid-July (in fact, a few hours after attending a demonstration for peace in Lebanon). So some of the works--several of which deal directly or indirectly with the Lebanese civil war--were granted an unexpected and terrible potency by events. At one point thariel touched my shoulder and pointed to a high wall where a line from the work of Lebanese poet Nelly Salameh Amri had been stenciled: Today is a blessed day/ A day off for the snipers.

As its title suggest, the exhibition is primarily concerned with the transmutation of the written word into a visual art form, and thus many of the works draw heavily on the traditions of Arabic and Persian calligraphy, rendering words into new kinds of art--mostly paper-based forms like calligraphy, sketches, collages, paintings, and book arts, but also sculpture, for exmaple Parviz Tanavoli's Heech in a Cage, and computer-generated art, like Israeli artist Michal Rovner's Notebook 2.

Walking through, I was thinking about the reason "word into art" is such an interesting rubric through which to consider these works--in a calligraphic tradition, the simple act of copying (whether a sacred text, a Sultan's firman, a line of poetry) is itself an act of creation, the bringing into existence of an entirely new artwork. So a mere "copy" of a poem is not dismissed as unoriginal work, or worse, plagiarism: rather, it is an innovative work of art in its own right. This is every bit as true of, say, the Book of Kells as it is of the works in this exhibition, but the calligraphic tradition of the Western romanized scripts has become almost extinct as a contemporary high art form, whereas in Arabic or Japanese it remains vital. The interplay between the Islamic tradition and other calligraphic forms was drawn out by works that incorporated or hinted at the latter--Haji Noor Deen Mi Guanjiang's Ya rahim, in Chinese script, and three panels of Qur'anic verses in mirrored script by Japanese calligrapher Fou'ad Kouichi Honda, who works in the Ottoman/Turkish calligraphic tradition.

And poetry, was, of course, at the heart of many of the works displayed--from Hafiz, Rumi, and Ibn 'Arabi to Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said). The curation was, again, brilliant in this respect, with much effort put into making the poetry accessible to an English-speaking audience through translations, contextual explantions, and a free booklet of translated poems from the works in the exhibition. Birzeit's online version includes a lot of this material.

I've decided the best way to write about Word into Art is to post a series of entries with images of specific works, lined up under this header post. The works on display were grouped into four sections, which I'll follow in the posts below: Sacred Script; Literature and Art; Deconstructing the Word; and History, Politics, and Identity.