Photo: Karim Jabbari.
Karim Jabbari uses long-exposure photography to capture words written with handheld lights.
There’s an amazing kind of calligraphy that involves writing with light. For Karim Jabbari, it started as a way to connect with his heritage.
Alissa Greenberg reports at the Nova Newsletter (PBS), “Karim Jabbari still remembers how painful it was to walk down the street with his family as a child and see his neighbors turn away. ‘No one was willing to talk to us in public,’ he says. Jabbari’s father was a political prisoner, an activist and ‘public enemy’ of the dictatorship that then ruled Tunisia. …
“Ten-year-old Jabbari, lonely and missing his father, looked for other ways to fill his time. What he found was his father’s trove of 400-year-old religious texts, inherited from an ancestor who had been a renowned scholar of Islam. The books were written in an old form of North African calligraphy known as Maghrebi script. ‘It’s an art form that speaks to your soul, even if you don’t understand the message. … I saw my father, his smile.’
“Before long, he was obsessed, copying what he saw in the books over and over until the arcs and lines settled into his muscles. That obsession only grew once he left his hometown of Kasserine to go to boarding school, and his new skill attracted friends—the one thing he’d never had.
“Today, Jabbari, now 42, is a full-time artist based in Canada and the U.S., using murals, graffiti, and specialized technology to bring traditional Arabic calligraphy to an international audience. He worries that a craft that prizes meditative concentration and lengthy training will be lost in an era so focused on agility and speed. …
“Calligraphy—and calligraphers—have resisted new technologies for centuries. For starters, Arabic and its sibling, Persian, used non-Latin alphabets that made them difficult to adapt for use in printing technology developed in the West, says Behrooz Parhami, an engineer who has studied how Arabic and Persian scripts have evolved alongside technology. Physical typefaces built for Persian and Arabic’s connected letters are more fragile, prone to chipping and cracking. And if they aren’t perfectly made, white spaces appear between letters that shouldn’t be there.
“The scripts also included letters with elements stacked on top of neighboring letters, which was impossible to recreate using the separate blocks of moveable type. And they varied in height and width much more than Latin characters, meaning that the common printing practice of adjusting typefaces to make letters about the same size would render words illegible. …
“It therefore makes sense that in Persia and the Arab world, words simply remained handwritten for centuries longer than in Europe, Parhami says. … Still, Parhami attributes this delay not just to the technical challenges but also to the hallowed role of the written word in these societies. In the Arab world, calligraphy provided an intimate connection to God through handwritten copying of the Quran and other religious texts. …
” ‘You can be a beautiful, amazing, well-known, traditional calligraphy artist, but your art isn’t speaking to the younger generations,’ [Jabbari] says. Refusing to try new things or embrace new technology leaves young people out, he argues, and puts the entire tradition at risk. ‘ “Your art is dying with you,” I said to them. I have nothing but respect for you, but I’m taking calligraphy to the streets.’
“Although Jabbari also paints murals that incorporate written elements, ‘taking calligraphy to the streets’ usually means light painting: a combination of long-exposure photography and perfectly calibrated movements of a handheld light that captures the loops and swirls of Maghrebi Arabic in thin air. In 2011, after Jabbari’s uncle was shot and killed along with 28 other young men during the beginning of the Arab Spring, he returned to Kasserine to do just such a performance piece. ‘I wanted to write his name in light painting, the same place where he died,’ he says. After he finished honoring his uncle, he gave other families in the area the opportunity to do the same, allowing them to write their loved ones’ names in space—a fleeting memorial fixed on film.
“Light calligraphy is a challenging medium. ‘You need to know the limits of the camera, what space it’s covering,’ he says. ‘You have all of that space to explore, so you end up using your body as reference: making a line at chest level, or one at hip level.’ …
“Jabbari has collaborated with dancers and musicians. … He recently hired two software developers to create a program that projects his movements in short near-real-time loops onto skyscrapers, a kind of ephemeral graffiti. …
“Calligraphy has taught him that ‘we are the sum of all the knowledge our ancestors transmitted to one another,’ he says. That’s how the art of calligraphy has been passed down—from master to student, who then becomes the next master—and also what calligraphy was for: recording history and wisdom to be shared with the next generation.
“Jabbari hopes his work will inspire the traditionalists to try out something new and the modernists to remember the value of tradition, reminding them what writing can be: a form of escape, an adventure in memory.”
More at PBS, here. Gorgeous photos.
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