Rafa Nasiri • Artist Books

Rafa Nasiri • Artist Books

Edited by Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and may Muza Muzaffar
A comprehensive monograph dedicated to one of the most influential Arab artists of our time. Contemporary book art makes possible a myriad of encounters across vast spaces of time and geography as well as between the book and the reader. Intimate in nature, the latter forge new ways of seeing and reading the word and the world far from outside interference. Book art thus opens a space for privacy in a world that is marked by a lack of individual agency and liberty face to state control and surveillance. Rafa Nasiri’s book art stands out as a masterful example, as it draws on diverse traditions of book culture, from ancient Mesopotamia to the Arabic-Islamic world, China, and Europe and is, at the same time, part and parcel of contemporary artistic practices worldwide. Inspired by Arabic poetry, especially after the Iraq war of 2003, Nasiri has produced a number of limited editions on classical Arabic literature, from the Abbasid poet al-Mutanabbi to the Andalusian poet Ibn Zaydun and al-Hariri’s famous Maqamat as transmitted by the thirteenth-century Baghdadi calligrapher cum miniature painter al-Wasiti, as well as on modern Arabic literature, written by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and others.

Skira - Nasiri Studio, Hardback, english, 112 pages