Scope and Contents

Rachid Koraichi is mentioned in this review of the exhibition, Global Conceptualism. He is described as "an Algerian living in Tunisia, who stands here also as a window into the Middle East and Muslim culture...Koraichi's calligraphic work uses Arabic script that combines political questions and private psychological explorations. Of course , for the Westerm eye it becomes a formal device that we cannot read." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

In her review of the exhibition at the Miami Art Museum, Turner writes, "African artists have proved especially adept at using language in beautiful but provocative ways...Willem Hendrik Adriaan Boshoff of South Africa, who condenses handwritten and typewritten text into minuscule characters, such as his 1979 work written while in prison as a conscientious objector to apartheid. Some of his tiny letters are legible, while others are defiantly obscure. In ways both good and bad, they become a metaphor for the range of art in "Global Conceptualism." The work described, the manuscript for "Kykafrikaans," was lent to the exhibition by the Sackner Archive. -- 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...