Dia Al Azzawi\n\n(Exhibition Graphics)

QMA Dia Al-Azzawi Paintings Art Gallery Qatar abstract iraq sculpture Al-riwaq Art Gallery

All images courtesy of the designer, Doha-Qatar, 2016

I was hired by QMA AKA Qatar Museum Association to work on the graphic design elements for the Exhibition:

I am the cry, who will give voice to me? By the Well renowned Artist Dia Al-Azzawi.

My work included working on:

-Wall Texts

-Art Labels (Short, Extended, Grouped, Diagram, Handout & Vitrine)

I had to Apply the QMA Brand guideline and Label System

I had to design in both Arabic and English

The exhibition took place in two locations:

-Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art

-Al Riwaq Gallery

I am the cry, who will give voice to me?*

DIA AL-AZZAWI: A RETROSPECTIVE

(from 1963 until tomorrow)

16 October 2016 - 16 April 2017

This exhibition, one of a two-part retrospective of Dia al-Azzawi, begins with a survey of the artist’s early engagement with historical and popular sources, in order to trace the consequences of his encounters with Arab poets, among them Mahmoud Darwish, Fadhil al-Azzawi, Saadi Youssef and Muzaffar al-Nawab. The exhibition goes on to chart the shifts that occur in his practice, in relation to the techniques of printmaking, and finally the consolidation of the relation between image and text into the daftar, a personal interpretation of the artist book form developed throughout the twentieth century.

Born in Baghdad in 1939, Dia al-Azzawi came of age at a time when new art forms were developing alongside the rediscovery of the ancient and medieval arts of Iraq. By the time he graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1964, a medieval history of manuscript illustration had been invoked as a basis for modern art. That history was interpreted as painting of life, and during the 1950s artists pursued modern art as a renewal of that history by depicting modern life.

Al-Azzawi’s generation of artists was driven by a different concern, to develop unique means of expression. However, the question of modern art’s relation to an older history of art in Iraq continued to hang over their practice, and al-Azzawi would go further in addressing it. Having studied archaeology at the University of Baghdad, he was open to the formal possibilities which that history offered modern art. For decades he continued to explore in his practice these possibilities by drawing on the material and literary culture of antiquity as well as on objects of popular culture. But in 1968, after meeting the poet Muzaffar al-Nawab, his interests began to focus on poetry. A relation between image and text emerged in his work that he developed over the next twenty years, in conversation with the technologies of printmaking and illustrated manuscripts. Al-Azzawi’s artistic practice tied the modern artwork to a lost history of visual art in the Arab world.

Curated by Catherine David

*Title of an original poem by Fadhil al-Azzawi