This is one of a suite of 21 prints done by Koraichi based upon fragments of a poem by the Palestinian activist poet, Mahmoud Darwish. Koraichi wrote the poems and drew signs, symbols and ideograms onto zinc plates that were then printed with black ink except for small sectors of the prints with red ink. Several of the prints were exhibited in "Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950 s - 1980s, a show that the Sackners saw at Miami Art Museum in 2000. A critical essay by Abdul Kebir Khatibi in the book with the same title (also held by the Sackner Archive) describes this project. He states that the poetry undergoes two transformations: a second writing of writing by Koraichi that is joined by the monogram (pictogram) with its Chinese and/or Japanese look. The calligraphy, which is inspired by the Kufti style regains the geometry of imaginary the articulation of its tracery, the association and dissociation of its designs, the rhythm and power of its lines. Calligraphy constructs one word in another, it photographs the word's supplementary visual attributes. Khatabi adds, "We now find ourselves in possession of a lens capable of deciphering the visible according to three registers: - A poem suspended in the act of calligraphy; - A calligraphy which in itself reflected by the painter who is in turn portraying Darwish's poems according to the art of the engraver; - A third, inter-poetic register, circling between poems, the calligraphy, and the prints: the essential matter of this work of art." Khatabi notes that in Koraichi's painting that the viewer is faced with several possible species of line: the real world, the pictogram, the shape of the heavens, the bestiary, magic geometry, the talisman. It is a chess game of signs, of gestural movements. The lancinating quality of the letter provokes figurative representation, but neither illustrates the other. These prints have reference to classic Arab and Islamic culture, but Koraichi has added traces of popular culture, of research into forgotten languages, of the archeology of writing from the pictograph to the formation of the alphabet, the stylized letter. Khatibi notes that in this print (#6), Koraichi appears to be working on the basis of a traditional cartography of the sky but does not represent its mode with absolute fidelity. He depicts 13 medallions in upper left corner and two in upper right corner of the print. "... the analogy beween the map and the heavens continues to function: look at these medallions, this star-writing, as if the metaphor of the sky and the earth were the birth of the new world. More precisely, the opposition -- between the upper section, riddled with scripts, suspended on turbulent forces, and the lower portion, structured with a calm geometry, purified by a game in the form of a talisman is the effect of an artificial vertigo. Each contrast, each assymetry, destabilizes the eye's focus, they oblige it to circle, to rotate. There is no longer any strict opposition between the legible and the illegible: of its own volition, that which is legible effaces itself in an instant, in a flash, sign by sign." ...In the art of Arabic callography, it is not just a matter of the design of the letters, but of the line as gesture, as it is translated by all the energies of the art of painting." In the Fall of 2002, Koraichi will have an exhibition at the Johnson Museum, Cornell University and will contribute works to P.S. 1, NYC. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.