How Do You Paint in Arabic? Exploring the Artistic Oeuvre of Etel Adnan
An Interview with Tagreed Darghouth
“We have to share the language that we own with others, and there must be something that the viewer should be highly interested in, because it’s a conversation at the end of the day”.
Expressionism and Engagement. Tagreed Darghouth, Ayman Baalbaki, and the Legacy of Marwan Kassab Bachi
The important Syrian artist Marwan Kassab Bachi (1934 - 2016) moved to Germany in 1957 and spent most of his life in Berlin, studying and then teaching at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste. Unlike many other Arab artists who studied abroad, his work involves a dialogue with the German Expressionist strand of modernism, rather than Cubism derived from Paris, or American forms of Hard-Edge Abstraction.
Memory, Traces & the Passage of Time
Sinuous tire trails cover the foreground of Ali Cherri’s (b. Beirut, 1976) Dust and Other Anxieties (2013). The image, from Abraham Karabajakian’s collection, presents a section of a road. Cherri’s perspective splits the image into three, with marked differences in color and texture. Closest to the viewer is a dark, tire-marked surface. Moving up the image, we notice a flatter, lighter stretch of ground. At the far back, the hazy sky descends onto sandy land; half-hidden by clouds of dust, the fuzzy outline of a monumental statue interrupts the otherwise featureless view.
Density and/or Lightness of Urban Life
Today, over half the world lives in and around a city. By 2045, it will be closer to 70% . As more and more people turn metropolitan, new patterns of urbanity are set to emerge. Creative, dense, contested—cities are alive. They are also hard to decipher, difficult to recuperate within an objective map or explain, minutely, from any singular spot. In this light, the urban artist occupies a special position. She is placed to engage the architectures of our habitations, drawing from the overwhelm of reality and postulating, through aesthetics, the implications of how we live now.
Objects of the Threshold - a liminal reflection
The construct liminal stems from the Latin nouns liminis (or limen) meaning threshold and transire (trans emphasizing the beyond) - to cross over to the other side. Liminality was first used by anthropologists Arnold Van Gennep and later Victor Turner during the 20th century to describe the different stages and the social roles of the rites of passage during rituals (such as marriage or coming-of-age ceremonies). Van Gennep and Turner’s contribution concerning liminality lies in their emphasis on the importance of embracing an in-between, ambiguous, or disorientated state. They argued that these transitional moments are vital for us to move forward as they influence our identity. Contemporary cultural theory, such as Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial perspective in the seminal work The Location of Culture (originally published in 1994), was later greatly influenced by these viewpoints. He defines the liminal as a transitory, mediate “third space of enunciation” that is characterized by uncertainty, hybridity, and potential for cultural change. Cultural liminality is experienced for example when an individual is caught between two cultures after being unsettled or displaced, such as an immigrant experiencing diaspora in a new culture after forcefully having to leave home.
The Desert Picturesque
When considering historical landscape paintings, depicting deserts, palm trees, camels, and large tents in the distance, one might understandably recall images associated with Orientalism. This artistic approach developed from European fascination with cultures and landscapes beyond their own - specifically, those situated to the east of Europe (arguably including northern parts of Africa) - often oversimplified into an imagined collective place known as the Orient. However, Abdulqader Al Rassam’s painting scene from Badia/Baghdad prompts the onlooker to interpret a Middle Eastern landscape that adheres to European landscape painting principles but is neither painted for the European viewer nor portrays the “Orient” as something alien.
Hurufiyya and the Inspiration of Arabic Letters
The term Hurufiyya comes from huruf, the Arabic for ‘letters’, and refers to a form of painting that combines modernist abstraction with Arabic letters or calligraphy. It was coined by the Lebanese poet and critic Charbel Dagher in his book Huroofiya al-Arabiya: Fan Wa Hawiya (1991), translated into English as Arabic Hurufiyya: Art and Identity (2016).[1]
Dubai Calligraphy Biennale
Calligraphy—from the Greek for beautiful writing —is a form that elevates written language into an aesthetic experience. The medium, however, is more than simply pleasing to the eye. Calligraphy is a people’s expression of harmony, being “a statement about the sum total of [their] cultural and historical heritage.” In this spirit, the Dubai Calligraphy Biennale is a platform that gathers various calligraphic lineages. The event contextualizes penmanship as a carrier of history. The multilingual exhibits are an “opportunity for cultural exchange and understanding.”
