SMRN monthly meeting of March 30, 2022: Drunken Words*

April 1, 2022

On March 30, 2022, SMRN had another warm meeting with a group of members including Azadeh Emadi, Jessika Kenney, Nina Czegledy, Masayuki Iwase, Nezih Erdogan, Lynn Marie Kirby, Laura Marks, Somayeh Khakshoor, Carol Bier, M Javad Khajavi, and Mena El Shazly.

During the first part of the meeting, Javad Khajavi presented his work on the Animated Calligraphy and Animated Typography Database (ACTD). ACTD is a (non-profit) growing and leading resource that showcases various examples of temporal text-based art created using the Arabic system of writing (which is the script used in writing many languages including Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, Malay, etc.). The growing database is part of the website (http://www.animatedtypography.com), which accompanies the book Arabic Script in Motion: A Theory of Temporal Text-based Art. In his presentation, Javad, who has also made delicate and strong animations using animated typography, briefly talked about the book and the different theoretical perspectives on temporal text-based art that are presented in the book. He then demonstrated the website and how the ACT Database works. He explained about different functionalities of the database, including the searching and filtering tools. For more information about Javad Khajavi's research and projects visit his website via this link.

In the second part, Mena El Shazly gave a thorough presentation of the research she had started around 2010 and was first triggered as an act against the provocative term jāhiliyyah (ignorance)--a term that is sometimes used to refer to the pre-Islamic Arabic culture. While doing the research, Mena became interested in the poetry of wine, one of the main genres of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. She collected hundreds of wine names and their references in Arabic poetry and found that poetic forms of wine, as a recurring motif in pre-Islamic and post-Islamic Arabic Poetry, often emphasize themes of time/timelessness, life/death, intoxication/wakefulness. In 2013 she created her first iteration of this research, “A Hail of Abuse”, in collaboration with women weavers in southern Egypt. 

During the presentation, Mena referred to some stories from classical Arabic literature which showed her fascination with the beautiful concept of words of a poem being drunk with their own poetry or “a work being drunk on its own work”. She also mentioned how upon revisiting her ripe research after this many years the implied but intense references to wine in the poetry of wine inspired her to work with shadows or what we might call present absences of substances in her current works. For more information about Mena's research and projects please visit her website.
 

Both presentations were followed by inspiring discussions in the form of questions, answers, and exchange of feedback. 

*This report has been prepared with the help of M. Javad Khajavi and Mena El Shazly.