Rose Issa

Parastū Furūhar

Parastou Forouhar's work has a great emotional ranging from the macabre to the darkly humorous and the often purely joyful.

Art, Life and Death in Iran

Parastou Forouhar

Juliet Cestar

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.

From Calligraphy to Calligraffiti

Signs of Our Times

Beyond Art Production

Arabicity

Darius Shayegan

Ruyin Pakbaz

Rūʼīn Pākbāz

Published to accompany the exhibition at the Curve Gallery, Barbican Centre, London, 12 April - 3 June 2001.

Iranian Contemporary Art

Sheila Whitaker

The New Iranian Cinema

Life and Art

Lutz Becker

Michel Fani

Painter and installation artist Ayman Baalbaki is one of the most exciting young artists to emerge from the middle eart. Bold, striking and bursting with energy, his work can be interpreted in a multitude of ways: where some despair, others see hope; where some see menace, others see courage.

Beirut Again and Again

Ayman Baalbaki

Rose Issa

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