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Chapter 5. Kamal Boullata
the semantic meaning of the calligraphy, which in English translates to “I am the truth”; Truth is one of the 99 names of God in the Islamic tradition. This is a quotation by the Sufi mystic, al-Hallaj. The other piece is entitled Fi-l Bid’ Kan-al-Kalima, translating to “In the Beginning was The Word,” the oft-quoted opening line of the Gospel of St. John. Both rendered in Arabic and square geometry, the pieces present quotations from distinctly separate religious traditions. Referring to the seemingly contradictory semantic and aesthetic “modes” that formulated his artistic development, Boullata discusses the culturally embedded experience of text due to his Arab/Arabic heritage and the experience of icon art as a Christian, saying: The neutral language of geometry common to medieval Arab art as well as to contemporary schools of geometric abstraction was to serve as a bridge linking the two sides of my cultural formation. The visual sensibility cultivated by looking at geometry from two cultural perspectives involved the reconsideration of characteristics from two modes of expression, which over the centuries unfolded in opposite directions but which were destined to cross over each other by the twentieth century. The first mode excelled in developing abstraction in visual expression partly as a consequence of the Semitic veneration of the word. The second mode mastered a language of figurative representation that gave a tangible body to narratives and whose illusionist quest ultimately lead to abstraction in art. My attempt at crossing between the two modes belonging to two distant cultural traditions inevitably produced works in which aesthetic boundaries gradually dissolved between verbal and visual expression. The process began in the late 1970s with the exploration of the plastic potentialities found in the supreme art in Arab and Islamic culture, namely that of Arabic calligraphy.19 Identifying Arabic with the “verbal” and icons with the “visual,” Boullata seeks to, by putting these particulars in conversation, break down ‘aesthetic boundaries’ in favor of universal communication. Boullata recognizes Arabic calligraphy as ripe for this endeavor. As we have seen throughout the tradition of Arabic calligraphy, from early Qur’anic manuscripts to Mahdaoui’s word/image calligramms to Zakariya’s precise calligraphy, acknowledges the tension between word and image either by emphasizing it or attempting to further blur it. One unique way that Boullata emphasizes the tension between word and image in these silkscreen works is by creating what he calls a “mandala.”20 In the Buddhist and Hindu 19 20
Boullata, Palestinian Art, 315. Boullata, Palestinian Art, 254.