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, 1950s - 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. This print is not listed or depicted in the book, A Nation in Exile; it depicts 20 prints. 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.