Paiwand 2, An-nisa 2
This work is going to be as much about absence as it is about presence.. particularly in relation to Paiwand. I see new policy on Afghan minors affecting this group already. On Friday we expected up to 12 people for the NPG session. Eventually the key workers turned up with only one member of the group. The reason was that two of them had received ‘bad news’ about their status and could not face going out. They assured us that they had loved the session last week, and that they had tried very hard to persuade them to come, but it had just not been possible. We were of course sympathetic, the gravity of their circumstances really is becoming clear and what might face them, in a country that is supposedly ‘safe’ (?!) to return to, blows a visit to a gallery out of the water. Louise sent me a copy of a UNHCR report on Afghan minors seeking to come to the UK, called ‘Trees only move in the wind ‘. It makes for sobering and compulsive reading, download it here
The session at the NPG, which we reduced to a gallery session led by Peta, was still very much worth the time . …a real treat having a detailed and animated introduction to some of the portraits and the fielding some animated responses , especially to Quinn’s ‘Self’ , Pandit Gopal, Maggie Hambling and the turkish rugs and mystery objects of the Tudors, including the polarised moral codes, both Henry VIII and Elizabeth 1…
On the Saturday, I took a copy of the publication which I got from an unforgettable show at the British Museum a few years ago called Word into Art. I was interested to show the girls not only some of the incredible and thought provoking work but to raise some ideas that we might work with from them. We played around with drawing our names (which is how it feels if Arabic is not your first language) in the Arabic script, to create what I call ‘name scripts’ both horizontally and then vertically by linking the names together, then using mirroring (see image). We were playing within the tradition of ‘Hurufiyya’, art which ‘deals with the Arabic language, letter or text , as a visual element of composing’.
I came apon a lot of works using the idea of the magical tradition, which centres apon numerical values attached to letters, the use of repetition as a form of visual incantation.
Humera, who runs An-nisa, talked about how when printing came into use, there was a big controversy around it in Islam, as it was felt that the sacred nature of writing the word of god, the Koran, had been disrupted. So, writing was/ can be a devotional act. Coupled with the idea that in Islam , one must have the right name , which accords with one’s true being, then writing one’s name within a certain context can become an intentional act of devotion, of presencing oneself in a primal way. In Word into Art, in reference to the artist Shakir Hassan Al Said, it is written that he was ‘influenced by Sufi Husayn ibn Mansur el Hallaaj’ who believed that the ‘arabic script , in it’s different forms and schools, reflects and is a reflection of the history of the Arab individual and social reality, which remained stored in the intellectual consciousness of culture and society’ and….(contains) of mythological consciousness and Mesopotamian societies and all others that followed. Thus, language and its written form are the means of revealing the hidden’ (Shabout 1999:244, Porter: Word into Art)
There’s something potentially powerful about the traces of ourselves we leave behind when we write our names in such an intentional way, together. I liked the bold way the girls experimented with their names (Arabic is not their first written language but they learn it an Sunday school for Koranic purposes) . Also, it felt very natural when we linked them together and they were confident in doing this. I want to explore this more. I am going to try this with Paiwand tomorrow and see where it leads.
