Scope and Contents This review of an exhibition at MoMA in New York states that "Rachid Koraichi , raised in a Sufi family in Algeria and now living in Paris, invents 'calligraphic' texts with Arabic characters, Chinese-style ideograms and talismanic signs, and embroiders them in gold on silk banners to creat banners for a new, universal language." Cotter also writes that "Shirin Neshat, born in Iran, turns the written word - as distinct from calligraphy, with its very particular skills - into a quasi-revolutionary instsrument in a seies of 1996 studio photographs of young women wha are dressed in traditional black veils but carry guns and have passages from erotic poetry and paeans to religious martyrdom written in Persian on their faces and hands. The artist seems to be symbolically placing political power in the hands of the kinds of veiled women who are automatically assumed by many Westerners to be oppressed victims of Islamic religious law, but who don't necessarily see themselves that way at...

Scope and Contents

This exhibition ostensibly dealt with works by 17 Islamic artists but fell short owing to inclusion of mostly Western art images done by Islamic artists living in the West. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.