Scope and Contents

This review of Xu Bing's exhibition "Word Play" considers written language as performance. Bing's well known work "Books from the Sky" is installed at the Sackler Gallery in Washington and consists of "an architectural environment made entirely of books, wall panels and enormous paper scrolls that hang from the ceiling like a canopy. Every surface is covered with words, printed from thousands of wood block plates hand-carved by the artist. The language resembles Chinese but actually consists of nonsense characters he invented." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

This book by Jonathan M. Bloom traces the history and impact of paper in the Islamic world. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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...