| Palestinian
artist Jumana Husseini, like many contemporary Arab artists,
has initiated a new set of rules in regard to this exchange
between art lover and artist. Her works, currently on display
at Darat Al Funun, depict a romance with the beauty of written
characters and script.
"At
times, we are just as deeply moved by script as we are by
natural beauty. I believe that this is due to the social formulation
of the script," said the artist who studied painting, ceramics
and sculpture in Beirut. Husseini has an interesting way of
making her paintings. During her travels in the Middle East,
she wood fill her notebooks with notions on different written
forms of the native language she encountered. Then she would
take the texts and write them on a large monochrome oil surface,
and paint over them. She would repeat these steps with different
forms of writing for months, until an almost metallic surface
would result, concealing thousands of years of Middle Eastern
history in the form of written languages of the native people.
"An X-ray would most certainly penetrate and reveal several
of the layers, each having a different story to tell," said
Swedish art critic Ulf Thomas Moberg.
Husseini, who also obtained a BA in political science in Paris,
incorporates the use of sand in her abstract work. She feels
there is force and strength in abstraction. In some of the
painting, she inserted sand from the ancient city of Petra
and ceramic pieces from Amman into the monochrome surface.
Although her work has evolved from realistic to geometric
and abstract styles, Husseini has noted that she always paints
the same theme - the Arab world and her childhood in Palestine.
This recurring subject is somewhat surprising even to her
since, "outwardly, I'm more Westernized than almost anyone
I know," said the artist who participated in a number of group
exhibits, like the Venice Biennial, the Tokyo Modern Art Museum,
and the Museum of Women in the Arts of Washington in 1994.
"I am still painting in JerusalemÉ I used to paint the houses,
the people, the scenes of Jerusalem; now I paint what is under
JerusalemÉ to me it's like the archaeologist who's brushing
layers of sand each day [to see what he] can find from the
days past, from our ancestors. So this really gives me hopeÉ
I go back to the earth to see what we had in the past, to
give me energy and feeling for living," said the artist who
was born in Jerusalem in 1932.
Among the works, there are several huge abstract paintings
filled with scripts and marks. In some captivating pieces,
fragments of script are bolder than the rest, catching the
attention of the viewer. "These scripts are letters. Letters
to my mother who is buried in Jerusalem. Scripts also give
me a connection between life and death, between the living
and the dead," Husseini, a resident of Paris told The Jordan
Times. "As we jump from one script to another from one letter
to another we feel that we are driven into a world of written
information and, later, after we leave, we regret not having
read the script." The exhibition, organised by Darat Al Funun
and the French Cultural Center, runs until April 25/2002
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