Poet & Artist Collaborations

Because the alphabetic characters that comprise written language are already abstract, they offer modernist artists a vehicle for reimagining pictorial symbols and means of composition. What is more, because many artists working during the age of decolonization became interested in reviving popular arts, they saw in Arabic calligraphy a mode of artistry that pursued experimental form without becoming academic or overly bourgeois in status. Refusing the idea that “fine art” ought to take the form of a framed and finite painterly image, they took inspiration from communicative literary forms such as oral poetry and ritual recitation. Artists established collaborations with poets— whether joint projects with friends, retrospective illustrations of classical poetry, or evocations in sculpted form made in parallel with prose—so as to insert their art into a multidimensional space of shared cultural memory.

Sometimes it is the constructive logic of the poem as a form, based upon internal rhythms and rhymes, that inspires artists. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair and Iranian artist Reza Mafi each produced experimental sculptural works involving nested elements. Choucair, a renowned experimentalist working in three dimensions, used no recognizable letters at all to create her “poem,” relying instead on an aesthetic of stackable undulating forms as an evocation of internal stanzas.

Above: Saloua Raouda Choucair, Poem, 1972-74, brass. Reproduced in Saloua Raouda Choucair, exh. Cat. (London: Tate Modern, 2013). UC Berkeley Library collection.

Mafi, a calligrapher himself, adapted the expressive qualities of nastaʿliq—a hanging script developed in Iran during the 15th century—to create minimalistic three-dimensional compositions.

Below: Reza Mafi, The Poems of Hafez, 1969, oil on polystyrene on board. Reproduced in Iran Modern, eds. Fereshteh Daftari and Layla S. Diba (New York: Asia Society, 2013). UC Berkeley Library collection.

Iraq-born artist Rafa al-Nasiri initiated this long-distance collaboration with Lebanon-born artist and poet Etel Adnan (also featured in the exhibit) following the 2003 NATO-backed American invasion of Iraq. Seeking a way to express the agony of witnessing the suffering from the relative comfort of his home in Amman, Jordan, al-Nasiri describes taking refuge in poetry and creating artist books on themes of loss. This book, titled A Library Set on Fire, was a remote collaboration with Adnan. Al-Nasiri pairs Adnan’s poem of that name—which responds to the 2003 burning of the Iraqi National Library amid the catastrophe of the invasion—with his own silkscreen prints featuring texts by the Abbasid-era poet al-Mutanabbi.

Above: Pages from the artist book A Library Set on Fire, poetry by Etel Adnan with silkscreen prints by Rafa al-Nasiri, 2008. Reproduced in Rāfiʿ al-Nāṣirī: Ḥayātuhu wa-Fannuhu (Rafa al-Nasiri: His Life & Art) (Beirut: al-Mu’assasah al-ʿArabīyah lil-Dirāsāt wa-al-Nashr). UC Berkeley Library collection

On display here are two sides of a leaf from a special edition published by artist Sadequain that pairs his own calligraphies of couplets from the Diwan-e-Ghalib, a collection of ghazal poems by the mid-19th century Mughal-era poet Ghalib, with his illustrations. The design of the folios, which placed poetry on one side of an unbound folded page and the images on another, establishes a spatial separation between text and image that requires a reader to select and open each leaf, viewing the calligraphed verses before turning the page to see the images.

Above: Sadequain, Ghalib (Karachi: Elite Publishers Limited, 1969), internal folio, here showing front and back. UC Berkeley Library collection.

In this richly illustrated, bilingual volume, free verse by Algerian poet Rachid Boudjedra evoking the immensity of the Sahara desert is interwoven with full-page drawings by Algerian artist Rachid Koraichi. Active since the 1970s, and in exile from Algeria for much of his career, Koraichi is known for his work with mystical symbols. Here, he experiments with mirror writing and talismanic pictograms so as to evoke the kinds of popular protective rituals in which migrants might engage over a long journey.

Above: Rachid Boudjedra, author, Rachid Koraichi, illustrator, Cinq fragments du désert (Mujtazaʼāt al-khams lil-ṣaḥrāʼ) (Five Fragments of the Desert) (Algiers: Barzakh, 2007). UC Berkeley Library collection.

Nja Mahdaoui, the great Tunisian calligraphic modern artist, is the illustrator for this artistic edition of French translations of poems by the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. Long interested in the complex visual structure of language, including the arbitrary nature of graphemes as signs, Mahdaoui has stated that he tries to prevent viewers from “relying on the reassuring meaning” of legible words in favor of more intuitive experience. Here, he delivers a strikingly elegant, abstract composition of calligraphed lines that spell nothing in any language.

Above: Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Les poèmes de Djaykoûr, translated from Arabic by Salah Stétié and Kadhim Jihad, with original graphemes by Nja Mahdaoui (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 2000). UC Berkeley Library collection.