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Chapter 3. Nja Mahdaoui
swer. Certainly the viewer cannot read his calligraphy as Arabic. The viewer, however, is still engaged. While narrative is disrupted, interpretation is not. There is an intertextuality to Mahdaoui’s work. Understood with reference to Qur’anic manuscripts and other calligraphic practices, his calligrams evoke the power of the Word as evoked by the Qur’an. While channeling the power of word, Mahdaoui questions our human ability to master language. Mahdaoui’s execution of calligraphy on the technical level of pen and ink is precise, meticulous and detailed; however, he relinquishes nearly all authority over semantic meaning. His word/image calligraphy is semantically meaningless, making the bounds of interpretation not infinite but certainly much wider. Mahdaoui’s calligraphy, in his calligrams, as exemplified by Calligramm on Papyrus, as well as his word/image calligraphy in his illustrations, the mosque screens, and on the drum, evoke the mystery of word, very much connected to the memory of Revelation. Through the mystery of word, Mahdaoui addresses another tension, that of the personal and the universal. His desire is to create calligraphy that allows for personal interpretation and experience, and that can resonate with a universal human audience. The tension between personal and universal audiences is not a new one, and indeed was a tension that we saw the Qur’an is very conscious of. However, the iteration of the tension in the globalizing world of Mahdaoui’s era is a particular problem that Mahdaoui seeks to address using the medium of calligraphy. It could be said that Mahdaoui uses “tradition” insofar as he uses visual and material reference points to evoke the memory and association of calligraphic genres such as the calligram and hilye. Mahdaoui pushes text to its limit, where it has all the appearances of text with no semantic content. However, because of the visual reference points, he engages the viewer and reminds the viewer that “reading” is a process involving more than just text. Although technically illegible, Mahdaoui’s works are intelligible because of the tension between word and image; the image and the visual and material presentation of text radically inform how we “read” and understand “word.” Mahdaoui uses these ideas to argue that calligraphic visual culture could be a way of bypassing the exclusivity of language and communicating globally.