Rose Issa – författare

This publication presents a selection of her most startling work so far, created in response to the dramatic social and political upheaval that she experienced after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the murder of her parents in Tehran. Though the inspiration behind Forouhar's subject matter may be tragic, her work has a great emotional range: the results are sometimes macabre, occasionally darkly humorous and often purely joyful. Published to coincide with artist's first solo show in the UK at Leighton House Museum, London, in October 2010, this is the first English-language monograph of her work. The Artist's work is in the permanent collections of The Queensland Art Museum, Queensland; Belvedere, Vienna; Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe; Musem of Modern Art, Frankfurt; and the Deutsche Bank Art Collection. Rose Issa provides a forword and there are essays by the curator and film-maker Lutz Becker and the author and art critic Russell Harris.

Malileh Afnan's work appears 'as a relic of an older civilization or an archaeological excavation into the collective psyche. The delicacy of Persian miniatures and manuscripts, which she remembers from childhood, is mirrored in her love for intimate scale and the refined beauty of muted colour'. Calligraphy plays an important role: images appear that suggest the written word. Works on paper and tablets of painted plaster are reminiscent of ancient, almost obliterated texts, and like palimpsests, retain only some vestige of literal meaning and an impression of human contact. Afnan has absorbed both Middle Eastern and Western influences. She has looked towards such artists as Pollock, Rothko, Dubuffet and Klee, and shares an affinity with the American artist Mark Tobey, who helped arrange the first European exhibition of her work in 1971.

Shadi Ghadirian is one of Iran’s leading contemporary photographers. Born in Tehran in 1974, she rose to prominence in the late 1990s and has since become a defining voice of her generation.Shaped by the restrictions of post-revolutionary Iran, Ghadirian’s work probes the boundaries of freedom and expression, reflecting a collective yearning for liberty and colour. This new monograph traces her evolution – from the stillness of Untitled Qajar to the digitally manipulated Ctrl+Alt+Del – as she navigates the tensions between public and private, tradition and modernity, documentary and fiction.With wit and subversive charm, Ghadirian parodies domesticity and authority alike, cementing her reputation as one of the most original photographers of her time.

Arabicity reflects on four decades of the aesthetic, conceptual, and socio-political concerns of contemporary Arab artists. Beautifully produced, it features over 200 artworks by more than 35 Arab artists including Bahia Shehab, Ayman Baalbaki, Hassan Hajjaj, and Raeda Saadeh, who explore their cultural heritage, and themes such as memory, destruction, and conflict, with great warmth, humour and visual poetry. Whether through video art, painting, photography or installation, these artists challenge the confines of their identity, resist stereotyping, and reshape the parameters of their cultural traditions. In their diverse media and subject matter, their works reflect the pulse of the region. In chaos they discover what endures.

Three generations of artists from Iran and the Arab world show the diversity of contemporary calligraphic art.

Garden of Africa is an artist's response to the need for humans to be given proper dignity after death. Many corpses, washed up by sea currents on the beaches of Zarzis, Tunisia, had for years been denied a proper burial and had instead gone to the public dump. It was the artist, sculptor, urbanist and architect Rachid Koraichi's determination to create a palace, a final resting place for these people, a site that would itself be a work of art - and would grow into a memorial where families and

Shadi Ghadirian is one of Iran’s leading contemporary photographers. Born in Tehran in 1974, she rose to prominence in the late 1990s and has since become a defining voice of her generation.Shaped by the restrictions of post-revolutionary Iran, Ghadirian’s work probes the boundaries of freedom and expression, reflecting a collective yearning for liberty and colour. This new monograph traces her evolution – from the stillness of Untitled Qajar to the digitally manipulated Ctrl+Alt+Del – as she navigates the tensions between public and private, tradition and modernity, documentary and fiction.With wit and subversive charm, Ghadirian parodies domesticity and authority alike, cementing her reputation as one of the most original photographers of her time.

Signs of Our Times: From Calligraphy to Calligraffiti covers six decades of an art trend led by artists from the Arab world and Iran. Starting in the early 1950s, this alternative and original approach to modernism began with artists who took inspiration from their own cultural sources and combined them with international aesthetics and concepts. This publication considers the work of 50 key artists, ranging from important pioneers of the calligraphic movement to those who use the written word in their work today. The book begins with a contribution from Venetia Porter, curator of Islamic and contemporary Middle Eastern art at the British Museum, who provides a historical contextualization of the movement and its relationship to lettrism in Europe. In a second essay, the writer and curator Rose Issa presents an overview of 60 years of the art movement in Arab countries and Iran, from the independences of the late 1940s and 1950s to the present day. A timeline by Juliet Cestar, an expert on contemporary Middle Eastern art, then sets out major cultural and historical events in the Middle East over the course of the last 60 years.The main part of the book is divided into three sections, each devoted to a different generation of artists: the first generation of pioneers, who created a new aesthetic language following the independence of their countries; the second generation of artists, who mostly live in exile and who reference their own cultures and languages in their work; and the third generation, comprising contemporary artists who have absorbed international aesthetics, concepts and languages and who occasionally use Arabic and Persian script, or the morphology of letters, in their work. The entry for each artist includes a concise biography and a statement from the artist about their work. The artworks, in a variety of media, are also interspersed with poems and relevant literature, putting into personal and historical contexts the innovative use of words in art.