AWJ Retrospective Fine Art Exhibit by Nja Mahdaoui

The Sheikh Abdullah Al Salem Cultural Centre is pleased to present the retrospective exhibition Awj, by Nja Mahdaoui, a major figure of art and Arabic calligraphy. 

This retrospective exhibition is an invitation to discover languages and shapes that resulted from the encounters and questions that crossed the artist’s life from 1966 to 2018. The artist traces the roots of where it all began while taking us on his journey. In fact, the exhibition juxtaposes distinctive temporalities.

His friends were poets, writers, and musicians. Since the 60’s, they have been challenging the orientalising gaze, tawdry folk and the mimesis of western modern art. They wanted to create a new form of art that carries a complex identity.

Although the artist was never interested in becoming part of a group of any kind, he has participated in many significant collective exhibitions. A key exhibition was the one in 1967 in Galerie Yahia in Tunis, where he showed Aura Popularis, a very powerful work that already gave hints to the calligraphic abstraction that will come afterwards.

The title AWJ refers to an Iraqi 'maquam', with a highly spiritual quality. Unlike other 'maquamat' which have fixed structures, Awj has an open form, meaning that the performer determines the form according to his or her own taste, drawing from a pool of different melodies. 

The title already sets the tone and rhythm of the exhibition. In fact, the viewers will determine their own meaning, depending on their perception of the letters. 

For Nja, who is profoundly influenced by post-structuralism, the meaning is projection, and therefore not at stake. Because the sign is defined by what is not, there is an infinite possibility of meanings. Therefore, it will always remain unrecoverable and indeterminate. In the artist’s work, every decoding is another encoding: it is a deconstructed architecture of letters which forms entirely-new vocabulary. 

The succession of letters does not form words but is a choreography of shapes and gestures. No wonder that he has been known as the “choreographer of letters”. In fact, as the exhibition unravels, the viewer discovers the extraordinary plasticity of the Arabic letter though not as something to be read. The artist plays with the vacant space between wanting to know and not being able to comprehend. 

The work of Nja Mahdaoui does not only emancipate calligraphy from its sacred function but also performs choreography of letters and gestures, which intertwines questioning our identity with abstract poetry.