Signs of Our Times: From Calligraphy to Calligraffiti covers six decades
of an art trend led by artists from the Arab world and Iran. Starting in
the early 1950s, this alternative and original approach to modernism
began with artists who took inspiration from their own cultural sources
and combined them with international aesthetics and concepts.
This publication considers the work of 50 key artists, ranging from
important pioneers of the calligraphic movement to those who use the
written word in their work today. The book begins with a contribution
from Venetia Porter, curator of Islamic and contemporary Middle Eastern
art at the British Museum, who provides a historical contextualization
of the movement and its relationship to lettrism in Europe. In a second
essay, the writer and curator Rose Issa presents an overview of 60 years
of the art movement in Arab countries and Iran, from the independences
of the late 1940s and 1950s to the present day. A timeline by Juliet
Cestar, an expert on contemporary Middle Eastern art, then sets out
major cultural and historical events in the Middle East over the course
of the last 60 years.
The main part of the book is divided into three sections, each devoted
to a different generation of artists: the first generation of pioneers,
who created a new aesthetic language following the independence of their
countries; the second generation of artists, who mostly live in exile
and who reference their own cultures and languages in their work; and
the third generation, comprising contemporary artists who have absorbed
international aesthetics, concepts and languages and who occasionally
use Arabic and Persian script, or the morphology of letters, in their
work. The entry for each artist includes a concise biography and a
statement from the artist about their work. The artworks, in a variety
of media, are also interspersed with poems and relevant literature,
putting into personal and historical contexts the innovative use of
words in art.
