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On Taswir or the Inherently Incomplete

Conference organized by the Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al-Nahyan Chair for Arabic and Islamic Studies and the Department of Fine Arts and Art History (FAAH) at the American University of Beirut

Beirut, 11 May 2024, AUB College Hall B1

Conference abstract: On Taṣwīr or the Inherently Incomplete

Recent scholarship in anthropology and art history has recalled attention to the historical term taṣwīr by contextualizing and theorizing it within moments of overlap between Arab Modernist artistic practice and nation building projects in the 20th Century.

In 1951, the Iraqi artist Jewad Selim (1919-1961) published an essay in which he gives the name taṣwīr or fan al taṣwīr to modern art practice and defines it as a form of speech addressed to the public. This act of definition can be seen as a reconceptualization of a term with a long history and a shifting conceptual grammar, and in part instrumentally attached to the cultural project of an Arab yaqza or awakening and the freedom to fashion new images that artists must now shoulder and deploy. But it is also an attempt to manage or structure an uncertainty constitutive not only of that historical moment but also of practices of the image that while initiated by the artist depend upon a viewer for their prospective realization.

In her book titled Fantasmic Objects, anthropologist Kirsten Scheid unfolds taṣwīr over three decades of art making and reception in Lebanon under French mandate and leading up to its first decade as an independent nation state. For Scheid taṣwīr is a temporally laden technology of molding, forming, shaping, and fashioning images by a sociality discursively interdicted from the high values of European art and yet engaged in an aspirational fashioning, or what she calls an imaginal striving – taṣwīr – in a realm of interaction between a nation’s coming into being and becoming meaningful. Boldly articulated, Scheid writes that to engage in taṣwīr is to stop not being aware of ongoing possibilities.

The modern itinerary of taṣwīr and its analytic conceptualization by Scheid brings to the fore a concept that introduces contingency in artmaking, not by suspending the intentionality of the artist, but by contextualizing its production within historical moments defined by uncertainty. A ṣura or the fashioned thing is located within a network of making, reception, backward leaning historical scripts and forward leaning ideological striving. The modernist work of art or ṣura, the artist or muṣawwir, the spectator, colonial imprisonment and competing nationalist revolutionary projects, constitute the complex differential power field of taṣwīr. How fitting for ṣura to be defined by Scheid as inherently incomplete. The conference On Taṣwīr or the Inherently Incomplete invites scholars and artists to ponder over the ongoing possibilities of this concept in its practicable current permutations and potential future extensions as well as revisit its many shifting pasts.

Nadia von Maltzahn paper abstract: Taṣwīr through Paint-Feeling in Fadi Barrage’s Work

The diaries of Lebanese artist Fadi Barrage (1939-1988) give insights into the process of his art making and his use of the motif of “Fleisseh”, which stood in for a deeply felt emotion that was translated into largely abstract painting. It was born out of a memory of Barrage’s boyhood in the real Fleisseh, the name of his boarding house in Brummana High School. For him, it was connected to happiness, pure emotions, love, and some kind of gardens of paradise. Fleisseh as a motif was also a refuge, a recurrent subject of Barrage. As a gay man living in largely homophobic societies, he constantly felt the need to find a safe hiding-place. In his diaries, several references are made that what he really wanted to paint were male nudes. Barrage felt restrained in his choice of subject, however. One solution for diversification he thought of was to see men through a cycle of their days. Or he “masked” his motifs in a “Fleisseh” work, expressing himself through feeling. Fadi Barrage was very clear about his paintings representing a “paint-feeling”, in which the concept of revealing and concealing also played a role. As he writes in April 1980, “later, fascinating seeing, guessing, doubting, supposing, half-seeing what is continually hidden and revealed, provided it never becomes a sort of striving for a form of anatomical accuracy, to maintain it at the level of feeling, even at the cost of not communicating anything directly, the passion to see is enough”. He emphasizes how his paintings were never directly of Fleisseh, but “in fact of anything else, set up in that context for contemplation” (8 May 1979). He thus prompts taṣwīr in Scheid’s sense of imaginal striving (2022), and invites the viewer to complete the image. 


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nadia von Maltzahn (May 9, 2024). On Taswir or the Inherently Incomplete. LAWHA Lebanon's Art World at Home and Abroad. Retrieved May 20, 2025 from https://lawha.hypotheses.org/1718


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