When language comes under pressure
April 11, 2023 - A new student-curated exhibition in Doe Library's Brown Gallery showcases artists from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia and their artworks that reflect the complexity of what it means to inherit language - ? ? ? : How Artists Reimagined Language in the Age of Decolonization, in Doe Library's Brown Gallery. The exhibition, curated by students in Professor Anneka Lenssen's art history course, Exhibiting Calligraphic Modernism, will run through August 2023. (UC Berkeley Library photo by Jami Smith) It was a Sunday morning in fall 2022, and seven students from UC Berkeley Professor Anneka Lenssen's art history course, Exhibiting Calligraphic Modernism , were driving to Sacramento to meet with Iraqi artist Saleh al-Jumaie. "I always feel that if there's a relevant resource anywhere nearby campus, we should take advantage of it," said Lenssen, whose research focuses on modern art in the Middle East and North Africa. Al-Jumaie, who relocated to Northern California in the early 1980s, has long explored the uses and cultural meanings of Arabic and other writing systems in his creative practice. An artwork by Iraqi artist Saleh al-Jumaie hangs on a wall in his home in Sacramento. Three of the students who were involved in the interview - Haynes, Reyansh Sathishkumar and Jasmine Nadal-Chung - turned it into a six-minute documentary called Printing Silence , now part of a UC Berkeley Library exhibition curated by Lenssen's class, Letters ? ? - How Artists Reimagined Language in the Age of Decolonization.
