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March
2002,
Jumana Husseini, Artist's
Works 'Depict A Romance With The Beauty Of Written Characters'
AMMAN
- Art critics believe that, in the tradition of the calligraphic
art in the Arab world, art lover and artist share a mutually
artistic challenge. The artist must be creative within certain
norms while the art lover must show his/her ability deciphering
the script; the art lover is disappointed if the calligraphy
is too easy to decipher or if the artist excessively stretches
the rules of the art.
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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