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Presented By: History of Art

Tappan Talks

Allison Martino & Elizabeth Rauh

Allison Martino and Elizabeth Rauh, U-M History of Art doctoral candidates, gives short talks followed by Q & A.

Allison Martino, "Cloth, Chairs, and Key Chains:
The Re-Invention of Gye Nyame as a National Symbol of Ghana"

Adinkra is best known as a mourning cloth among the Akan of Ghana. Yet the role of adinkra in practices of remembrance extends far beyond funerals. Since at least the early 19th century, the Akan have printed adinkra cloth with distinct graphic designs evoking multiple meanings related to proverbs, historical narratives, and moral beliefs. Joining visual and verbal arts, adinkra is a dynamic form of communication that oscillates between expressing personal, cultural, and national identities. Ghanaians have innovated the form and meaning of adinkra over time to mark changing relationships to the past and envisions of future aspirations.

This presentation examines how Ghanaians have re-invented adinkra from a precolonial Akan cultural practice to represent national culture. Specifically, it analyzes the shifting meanings and contexts of gye Nyame, one of the most popular adinkra symbols. Often translated as “Except God,” gye Nyame is ubiquitous in Ghana today – ranging from plastic chairs and key chains to churches, currency notes, and tourist souvenirs. In tracing one motif across time and space, this talk reveals how Ghanaians have transformed gye Nyame and revitalized adinkra to resonate deeply in contemporary life.

Elizabeth Rauh, "The Colored Horizons of Karbala: Rafa Nasiri and Contemporary Printmaking in Late 1960s Iraq"

This presentation looks to Rafa Nasiri’s (1940-2013) printmaking practice and its early experimentation with printed Arabic script as the locus from which he stimulated and historicized the contemporary graphic arts movement in Iraq. Although conversant in pan-Arab and international socialist realist strategies from his training in printmaking at the Institute of Fine Arts in Beijing (1958-1963), Nasiri’s work in the 1960s offers experiments with global abstract expressionism and local religious prints. The need for educational programs and publications on the arts of Arab printing led Nasiri to travel around Iraq gathering popular printed textiles. Nasiri collected block printed (hafir al-tarsh) black and white calligraphic banners, which are carried in the streets during ‘Ashura and the holy month of Muharram, when mass pilgrimage processions overtake Shi‘i Muslim shrines in the cities of Karbala and Najaf. He then cut these popular prints and their pious poetic verses into separate cartouches and adhered them directly onto his abstract works.

Drawing upon communal rituals and public ceremonies moored Nasiri’s contemporary graphic art practice within Iraq’s historic printing technologies and social and religious practices. The collage-print series offered visual venerations of the Battle of Karbala (680 AD) as colorfully abstracted desert landscapes. Nestled within their references to that catastrophic landscape, the Shi‘i readymade prints associated Nasiri’s works with the ancient battle and its religious performances of dissent against injustice and oppression. By imprinting his compositions with prefabricated calligraphic texts, Nasiri elicited collective memories of Karbala and created a representational strategy counter to the new Baathist regime’s use of populist imagery. These works thus show how Rafa Nasiri marshaled Iraq’s historic printing technologies and social traditions to depict popular expressions of the metaphoric horizons of Karbala.

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