Collecting Now
Venetia Porter
6 August 2003

This talk will focus on three artists whose work we hold in the British Museum : Khusrow Hasan Zade, who lives and works in Iran; Laila Shawa, Palestinian from Gaza who lives most of the time in London, and Ali Omar Ermes originally from Libya but who also lives here. I have chosen these artists from our collection of over 60 artists from the Middle-East and North Africa in order to try and offer a snapshot into the huge and complex field of contemporary Middle-Eastern art, and to look at what informs the work of these particular artists, what stories they are telling us and whether the contemporary art from this region can be linked at all to the pre- modern art of this region: what is termed ‘Islamic art’ (a term that in my view is not appropriate to describe the contemporary art of the Middle east).

Each of these artists is extremely affected by war, terrorism, injustice and they show their preoccupations in a variety of ways as I hope to show you. We will start with Khusrow Hasan Zade. Born in 1963, he served for many years in the Iraq –Iraq war enlisting as a volunteer while a teenager. This terrible war which began in 1979 and ended in 1988 killed and injured on both sides one million and a half people – the majority on the Iranian side and so many like Khosrow only teenagers. It was a war in which the might and sophisticated weaponry of the Iraqis was pitted against waves of Iranian young men armed with plastic keys to paradise. Much of Hasan Zade’s work is directly linked to his horrific experiences and his work appears to be becoming increasingly somber.
War veterans and children of the martyrs –as they are described- of the war have special status in Iranian society. At the end of the war Hasan Zade was able to pursue his studies focusing on poetry and painting, fulfilling a childhood ambition. After a spell at the Faculty of Painting at Tehran’s Mojtama’as –e Honar University (1981-91) and studies in Persian literature, he continued on his own, guided by one or two well known Iranian painters but primarily earning his living by selling fruit until he began to exhibit and sell his work in the 1990s. Many of his early works are painted on paper fruit bags. His paintings have been described by Rose who has curated an important exhibition of his work in London in 1999 at the Diorama Gallery and included him in the Barbican exhibition of contemporary Iranian art in 2001, as personal visual diaries. These two works (slides 1 and 2)

painted on paper bags are portraits of himself and his mother –often they are painted at key moments of his life. The self portrait painted at the moment of his marriage is entitled I’m in love. It has poetry written across the walls, shirt and trousers and even the picture at the back. The seated position of the artist, and the mixtures of patterns has something of the Classical Persian miniature about it – whether this is conscious nor not I don’t know.
Khosrow’s dark side can be seen in these two works (slides 3 & 4) .

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‘Do I have to sign ? ‘Sayings of a dead man’, oil on canvas, which was exhibited in the Barbican exhbition. In many of his works he writes his own poetry over the paintings. Part of the inscription here is as follows: ‘I would have been happier if I had given joy to my heart before I died, I turned off the light long before I died..’ A5 below the arrow is one of a number of codes he uses. This is for nostalgia. The other work is a coffin from the series War painted in 1997-8 with ink and acylic paint on paper.

Laila Shawa’s work also strongly reflects political realities. She was born in Gaza, Palestine in 1940. She studied art in Cairo and in Italy and then with the well known Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoscha. Painter, lecturer and illustrator of childrens’ books she has exhibited her work widely. The first works I will show you are about the Israeli – Palestinian conflict – the disastrous, murderous and unsolved conflict which is the running sore of the Middle-East. Laila Shawa believes that ‘the role of contemporary artists is to record the signs of their times’. For some years since the beginning of the first Intifada (1987) ‘ she writes, ‘I have been searching for the method and medium with which to record the raw dialogue appearing on the walls of Gaza, a dialogue which has been going on among Palestinians themsleves, and between Palestinians and their Israeli occupiers’. What she wanted to capture was the urgency of this dialogue and its ephemeral nature with this grafitti which consisted of messages of hope and resistance constantly being painted over. She printed her photographs using silk screening and off set lithography on raw canvas and paper. These were overlaid with coloured filters. These two works which we have in the collection are from the series ‘Walls of Gaza’ which was exhibited at the October gallery in 1994. The first is ‘Letter to a mother’ (slide 5) , the colour purple symbolising the colour used by the Israeli soldiers to cover the grafitti. The second is the large and striking canvas ‘A Gun for Palestine’ (slide 6).

In 1995 she created an installation in two parts ‘Children of War Children of Peace’ (slides 7 & 8) which was commissioned for the exhibition ‘The Right to Hope’ which opened in Johannesburg in 1996.

This is the second edition which we acquired with the generous help of sponsors. Preoccupied with the subject of the brutalisation of children in war situations wherever that might be, the subject of this work is a boy from the Sheikh Radwan Refugee camp in Gaza. In Shawa’s own words ‘ After the Oslo agreement (1993) it was thought that the state of peace will alter the situation of thousands of Palestinian refugees particularly children. Unfortunately there has been no change in these children’s lives and the trauma of war and dispossession has carried on. The only apparent difference in the streets of Gaza was the change in colours of the grafitti which became brighter. However the misery, the trauma and the violence remained’. (Children of War is on the left, Children of peace is on the right).

Her two most recent works which are not in the British Museum collection but were recently exhibited at the October Gallery. Twin towers, a response to September 11th , is a 3 dimensional work – the top of the towers is covered with the American flag, the towers themselves are inscribed with the words Allahu Akbar ‘God is great’. In Shahada as with ‘Twin Towers’ she has inscribed the words of the ‘Islamic Profession of Faith’ ‘there is no God but God,’ in Arabic calligraphy – in a style known as ‘square kufic’ which was used to write decorative inscriptions in Iran and elswehere from about the 14th century. She writes ‘My use of calligraphy’ she writes ‘was an attempt to project the concept of ‘Revelation’ in the divine sense of the word- an idea which may be equated with that of ‘Energy’…the testimony ‘There is no God but God’ must reverberate around the universe.

Shawa’s use of a traditional Islamic calligraphic style, leads us to the work of the last artist I will talk about now Ali Omar Ermes.
Ermes comes from Libya where he was born in 1945. He studied Design at the Plymouth school of Architecture and Design and later at Central St Martins. He returned to work in Libya but came back to England with his family in 1981 where he has been ever since. Ermes is a painter first and foremost who uses the Arabic script as the subject of his compositions. This does not make him a calligrapher, a distinction which is very important. For the traditional calligrapher in the Islamic world writing in pen and ink was constrained by strict rules governing how they wrote the Qur’an principally and then other texts, rules which were developed in the 9th-10th centuries and still adhered to today. While Ermes, with his love of showing dramatic single letter forms painted with huge brushes, prefers to be without those formal constraints he often loosely bases his script style on the Maghribi script of his native North Africa developed in the 10th century and still used to this day. Yet while he does not follow the formal classical tradition, his use of the script is very significant. Arabic is the language that the Qur’an was revealed in and the Arabic script was used to write it down. There is therefore a symbiotic connection between writing and the word of God. Ermes is himself a devout Muslim, when he is not painting he is engaged in charitable works and sits on the Muslim Council of Britain. The use of the Arabic script, with its strongly religious connotations, is therefore extremely meaningful for him. He is also a poet and poetry plays a crucial role in his work as we shall see. (One very interesting connection between his very contemporary approach and the tradition is the way he signs his paintings min ‘amal or ‘hadha min amal’, the work of … as artists of the region have signed their work for hundreds of years. )

The first two works (slides 9 & 10) are in the British Museum collection. Harf al-Kaf (9) the letter Kaf which he kindly donated to us and the shadda (10) , the symbol used to double letters.

These beautiful and simple forms are given an additional layer of meaning by the tiny poetic inscriptions above and below them. For the poetry inscribed on these works is deliberately chosen. He paints the single letter first and then finds texts from the body of Arabic literature that express the mood or idea he wishes to express. Most often these have a bearing on the events of today, on the behaviour of those in power, on social inequality and injustice. For example the text around the base of the letter Kaf is by an early Arab caliph, the Abbasid al-Mansur which comments on the injustice of the society in his day and laments its unconcern for the plight of the poor. The shadda too includes poetry promoting an equal society.

The poetry surrounding the letter ‘S’ (slide 11) – this work is called ‘sin al-malahim’ – ‘the letter sin of the battles’ are verses by the pre-Islamic poet Antar.

Once a slave, best loved in his time and till now not only as poet but hero, he speaks of the need for honourable behaviour in war no humilation of captives, looting and so on. An early version in fact of the Geneva convention !

Sometimes Ermes takes his texts a stage further with specific poetic commentary which he himself has written on the war in Bosnia for example or as the painting on the right, the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain in 1492 painted in 1992, the 500th anniversary of this event. This is the main subject of the text written as the background of the Alif al-Ahat (slide 12) which on the right side is in English.