Darat al Funun currently on

However, the perspective of the exhibition is broad and goes beyond private views. The pictures and the objects should be seen in a global connection. Even limited environmental disasters can indirectly affect the whole planet. Likewise civilization will be suffering when nature is destroyed. Maha and Ibrahim claim that there is only one civilization as there is only one planet. That is a point of view that one should think of when some polemicists talk about "a clash of civilizations".

Nature is changing all the time and human actions, good or evil, can change the living conditions. When Maha and Ibrahim sent an inquiry about what had happened to their once so flourishing garden in Baghdad, they got a letter telling them that the trees had withered away and the fruits shrunken. Such things make lasting impressions and maybe art can be a way of handling the feelings just as it can help to investigate the past. Neither Maha nor Ibrahim remains attached to their personal memories but they go on to a point that can be called Beyond 100 degrees centigrade. In his essay Art and Environment or The Game of Burning Stones Ibrahim Rashid who is not only a creative artist but also an art critic relates Maha Mustafa's childhood memory of the flaming stones.

When Maha was ten she and her parents visited Karkouk in North Iraq. Together with other children she was dancing and playing at a place where the soil was rich in oil. When the children were throwing stones at the ground the stones flamed up. The "magic fire" can, according to Ibrahim, be interpreted as an aesthetic invention by nature. "Is this art?", we wonder and answer, "Yes, it is", after quoting Picasso, "I didn't invent cubism, I just discovered itŠ" Of course you can't repress the fact that nowadays there are mass destruction weapons enabled to exterminate the world over and over again. Nature nihilists argue in favor of abandoning vain efforts to preserve an environment which still can't represent its originality. According to such approach the talk about original nature seems inconsistent. Of course this nihilism has been met by a counter-offensive in defense of environmental protection. ...Besides there are chaos-ecologists who claim that the well-balanced landscape is pure fiction while other thinkers dismiss the basic principles of nature conservation as historical and social constructions.

Nevertheless it can be said that the opinion of environment protection keeps up with the opponents. But the conditions are more complicated than before. An art interacting with such debates in this way is far from being a matter of course. Regarding art and the view of the artists you may say that the Renaissance laid the foundations of the art view that reached its peak with modernism. But the reproduction technique of today has gradually changed and even undermined the authority of art. ŠTheir artistic careers have changed fast in the course of time, but new ways of expression characterized by the Post Modernism of the Western World combined with their own experiences make it hard to place them into any existing category.

Maha and Ibrahim who first met at the Academy of Art in Baghdad have since then worked together in some kind of continuous dialogue, even if their ways of expression differ obviously. While Maha concentrates on sculpture, Ibrahim is above all a painter. However, when they exhibit together they present pictures and objects in such a way that a fascinating varied whole is formed. Nature and culture collide and something quite new arises. Previously Maha has worked with natural objects but now she also often uses artificial materials. In some of the works "without title", seaweed, roots and other natural objects are enclosed in plastics. In that way Nature is enclosed by "skins" produced by civilization. It can remind us of the fact that nature is transformed by human beings, but also that it lives deep in the human mind.

Ibrahim's way of painting has changed a great deal since his first years in Europe in the direction of a more expressive abstraction combined with a more intensified interest in fragmentation. He likes to work with square canvases which he can combine into bigger pictures.

The importance of the parts for the whole impression is something that both artists are very much conscious of. When they are preparing for an exhibition it is a comprehensive project that starts, where the works undergo a second birth when forming a greater mosaic whole in the gallery. In her installation "Field", Maha works with 8 000 bulbs which gives an illusion of an internal fire. The small bulbs are covered by a thick layer of semi-transparent material.

The effect is striking and gives an impression of smoldering scenery. It's some kind of realized dream, a conjuring trick, but also an illustration of human ideas of nature. But more than that. As a matter of fact there is a whole series of associations that start moving in harmony with the paintings by Ibrahim Rashid which have been placed above the illuminated field. As a negative of her work Maha has created a black form which seems to absorb all light. It's like a vortex, a black hole where all substance could disappear, be transformed or transported.

As Gaston Bachelard the French philosopher, wrote about fire in his pioneering work, fire is the most dialectic of all sources of pictures. "It alone is both a subject and an object." It is the heat that is the proof of the richness of the substance. From that follows the human fascination of the flame, the blaze, the light. But at the same time fire concentrates a number of contrasts. "To be conscious of burning that is to cool down, to experience intensity, that is to diminish it: you must have intensity without knowing it. That is the acting person's bitter law."

Moreover there are a lot of complexes related to the metaphysics of fire, the fire of passions generating neuroses but also a source of poetry. It is somewhere in the space of emotions that the flaming field puts the onlooker. Life is full of paradoxes which leave their marks on our ways of perceiving nature and the material world, just think of the old alchemical conception that you had to destroy the metals to be able to produce them. Ibrahim Rashid's Landscape without Boundary is a series of paintings welled out of an intensive conception of the world, but they are pictures not to be seen just as emotional expressions. Sure, the script of the brush is there like the seismographic imprint of a state of mind but the pictures visualize something beyond that, something exceeding the individual. When the twelve square canvases are put together to form a large picture, there is a white vacant field left in the middle. You may reflect on that vacancy. What is it? What you see depends on how you read pictures and your convictions. Where somebody sees God, someone else sees nothing, and a third person doesn't find that contradictory.

These days Ibrahim uses the color of white more often than he used to. He uses it to paint overlaying layers. At the same time as he brings light he hides some thing. A shining paradox. I remember when I met Maha and Ibrahim for the first time. Then they were living in Malmö. Their studio was filled with colors and forms. The new studio where Maha and Ibrahim today show their latest works is large, light and airy certainly a must if your works are large-sized, as theirs often are nowadays. No process is so hard to understand as that of inspiration. For some time the idea of the inspired artist was generally turned down as a romantic myth and at a certain time perhaps it was necessary to illustrate other sides of artistry. Just inspiration is never enough if you want to create art. Knowledge and technical competence are needed. However, merely craftsmanship will not do to make art that will touch other people and arouse their interest. Maha's and Ibrahim's knowledge of materials is solid and their formal skills are great. Moreover they have the tireless ambition to achieve renewal of their means of expression. There is a distinct link between Maha Mustafa's sculpture "Three Sails in the Sun" in Bjärred Square (1994) and the objects she has just finished in the studio. There is another appearance now but the concentration of the finished style is easily recognizable and so is the simplicity which makes the mysterious seem natural and obvious. Also in Ibrahim Rashid's painting you find an aesthetically reliable attitude. Coats of paint are added while the world is expressed in an incessant new range of nuances, in most cases nature's own colors. Ibrahim doesn't depict, he transforms, shaping interesting innovative structures. As Werner Aspenström puts it in his poem Eyewitness: "You can't step twice into the same flood of light". You always discover something new every time you look at Ibrahim's pictures. Often light-conditions make the experiences differ. He likes to experiment with unconventional materials e.g. car-enamel paint as a complementary color to earth and vegetative colors form. The alchemists sought for real gold and according to the myth, the stone that would make the transformation perfect could be found in the gutter. There is an old proverb saying, "All is not gold that glitters" and maybe that is what the artist will show us. What does the progress of man really mean to nature? This is art that makes us conscious of environmental problems, putting relevant questions rather than solving problems. While looking at Maha's lotus flowers you find natural objects in a scientific context. Here nature is enclosed by civilization. They are strange beautiful plants but they seem to have become set in a fixed mould and by laser light fibre optics they get energy and Life can rise again in a polluted environment.

I have written a little about the historical perspective but it is important to point out that Maha Mustafa and Ibrahim Rashid concentrate on the future in their art. What they are trying to attain is expressions that are more concerned with the future than with the past. They know that it is illusive or even destructive entirely to become absorbed in history. By consistently exploring new possibilities the limits are moved. There is an almost utopian feeling in this. It is a question of understanding the whole thing and finding the right way, Ultimately Maha Mustafa's and Ibrahim Rashid's art is a project of liberty and independence where the field of vision is widening and the dialogue is deepening. There is a firm conviction in their creative art, a conviction that art can be a means of understanding themselves as well as the world. They can give a vision of destruction but they can also show us that there is hope as long as people still have the ability to dream, think and create.

Excerpt from an article written in the book "Beyond 100° C" Published in Sweden 2002

Clemens Altgĺrd
(born 1959). Poet, and writer, literature and art critic in Sydsvenska Dagbladet. He is also working with the Swedish magazine 00-tal.2