Dia al-Azzawi: Connecting the letter across communities

The international career of Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi (b. 1939) takes place at a nexus of print communities and experimental graphic arts. A pioneer of calligraphic modernist styles and one of their strongest proponents (as well as their occasional critic), al-Azzawi promoted Arabic calligraphy’s place in the global art world. He organized exhibits of poster art and advocated for the creation of the Al-Wasiti festival in Iraq in the 1970s as well as events featuring graphic arts. Al-Azzawi’s later exile from Baghdad placed him in London, where he reoriented his relationship to the Arabic letter. His connection to Iraq became that of an insider on the outside, and he dedicated himself to promoting emerging creative practices by a range of Arab artists and collaborators.

Throughout the decades, one constant in al-Azzawi's work is his commitment to graphic arts and graphic design - a sensibility that he honed, in part, in the active printmaking and commercial printing scene in the Baghdad of the 1970s. For al-Azzawi, media such as silkscreen and other approaches to poster arts, occupied a crucial space triangulating fine art, popular arts, and political action in the service of better futures.

The below holiday card by al-Azzawi, created some time in the 1970s, makes use of abstracted Arabic letters that are shaped to also resemble ancient Mesopotamian symbols. Although appearing legible at first glance, the script beneath the crescent shape is indecipherable. This card was likely meant to be folded and written on; many artists produced annual greeting cards as a means to promote their distinctive images and build networks.

Above: Dia al-Azzawi, silkscreen Eid card, c. 1970s. UC Berkeley Library collection.

Silkscreen is an exacting medium requiring careful planning for registration between layers of color.

The below handbook outlines the tedious process of screenprinting, substantiating the complicated nature of Iraqi graphic arts. Because each color requires its own printing, even the relatively small, vibrant Eid cards made by al-Azzawi and Rafa al-Nasiri (featured elsewhere in the exhibition) require great skill. The complex and time-consuming nature of printing often served to foster a collaborative community among artists.

Below: Caspar Williamson, Little Book of Screenprinting (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2011). UC Berkeley Library collection.

Another meticulous artist, Palestinian artist and critic Kamal Boullata, turned to silkscreen as a primary medium in the 1980s. He too grappled with the Arabic letter as a central artistic element, albeit in a more geometric op art idiom than either al-Azzawi or al-Nasiri. The below diagram, made circa 1981, reveals his precise approach to the laborious process - complete with meticulous notations about color applications. Hoping to produce a crystalline mirror image of an Arabic phrase about transparency, Boullata pushed silkscreen printing to its limits. Although he initially planned to print this work at P Street Paperworks in Washington, D.C., he later resorted to a commercial printer and used metallic inks to achieve a reflective effect.

Long interested in applying design to political causes, al-Azzawi has stated that “a good poster is one of the nearest visual things to being both intuitively poetic and logically articulate.”

Even after leaving Iraq, al-Azzawi made it a point to continue deriving inspiration from multiple iterations of the written Arabic letter and its application in popular cultural practice. To create these three pieces, dating to the 1980s, al-Azzawi made elements of Arab ornament, folklore, and calligraphy into dimensional compositions. The resulting mixed media sculptures employ letters as vivid design elements more than legible writing.

Above: spread from Dia al-Azzawi: A Retrospective, from 1963 until Tomorrow (Doha, Qatar: Arab Museum of Modern Art, 2017). UC Berkeley Library collection. Reproduces three works by Dia al-Azzawi: Unsur ʿArabi (Arab Motif), 1984, mixed media on wood; Rumuz Shaʿbiyya (Folkloric Symbols), 1986, acrylic onboard; Shakl Sharqi (Oriental Form), 1986, mixed media on board.