word into art 4: identity, history, and politics

This section strayed the furthest from the theme of words rendered into art, with some works eschewing the word (deconstructed or otherwise) in favor of text-free images and forms. It was also one of the richest and most thought-provoking parts of the exhibition.

Shadi Ghadirian's Untitled is one of a series of photographs mimicking Qajar-era (1790s-1925) portraits in Iran. She staged them with models wearing antique costumes and posing in the stances used in the portraits, but with anachronistic touches--the model is reading a copy of Hamshahri, an "avant-garde" Tehran newspaper founded in the mid-1990s.


Chant Avedissian, Umm Kulthum's Greatest Hits. This painting, which is about eight feet tall, rocks my world (as they say). As do the rest of Armenian-Egyptian artist Avedissian's stencils, which portray iconic personalities of the 1940s and 1950s in Egypt--especially Nasser and Umm Kulthum--mixed in with text, images, and repeated motifs from sources such as (in this piece) Ottoman royal textiles--note the blue tiger-stripe and çintamani in the background. Thariel loved this painting, and so I stole back a week later while in London for an interview and bought him Avedissian's book Cairo Stencils (yet another Saqi production) which proved so much fun to leaf through that I had to order it for myself too.

Finally, one of the works I found most striking--which for some inexplicable reason is not represented in either the book or the online exhbition--was Dictionary Work by Palestinian artist Khalil Rabah. (I've stolen the photo from this flickr set). It's a copy of a paperback desktop edition of the American Oxford dictionary, opened to the P section. The face of the book is studded with bristling nails hammered into the text, but for one entry:

"Philistine, n. 1. Member of a people opposing the Israelites in ancient Palestine. 2. Person who is hostile or indifferent to culture ... ignoramus, barbarian, boor."