When “Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking” (see AAP 49) opened in early 2006 at the Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition seemingly came and went on the New York art calendar. Comprising 15 artists living in the US and Europe with origins in Islamic Africa, West and South Asia, as well as two Americans, Bill Viola and Mike Kelly, the exhibition occupied three small adjoining spaces in the museum.

“Without Boundary” was intended to critique over-determined interpretations of artists’ works based on their geographical or cultural backgrounds, a position underscored, in absentia, by the show’s self-consciously discrete title. Yet, if the lead organizer, associate curator Fereshteh Daftari, sought to free artists from the reductive label of “Islamic,” she also made a case for the pervading influence of Islamic artistic and spiritual traditions on contemporary practices, dividing work into categories such as “Text Versus Calligraphy” and “Beyond Miniature Painting.” Among works on display were the apparently compulsive canvases of Shirazeh Houshiary (see AAP 44), with their countless repetitions of illegible Arabic words or characters layered upon each other in light graphite scrawls to form expansive, visual mantras; Shirin Neshat’s black-and-white photographs of herself wearing a black chador, the whites of her eyes, her exposed hands and her forehead stamped with excerpts of modern Persian poetry; and sensuously calligraphic animations of words or letters, in Turkish and Arabic, by Kutlug Ataman (see AAP 47), their transparent forms morphing in intricate white patterns glowing against anonymous black backdrops.

In hindsight, Daftari’s focus on the tensions between text and calligraphy in particular was timely not only for encapsulating the “Islamic” side of the equation, but also for addressing a wider phenomenon of artists working with elements of calligraphic inscription, textual excerpts, photography and video, as well as the Internet and independent cinema. Indeed, the trend has continued developing in two principle directions. One comprises the highly aesthetic and formal employment of abstract, calligraphically rendered text that draws from a long tradition with roots in early manuscript painting and has little buzz of conceptual underpinning. Many of the regional artists in the British Museum’s exhibition “Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East” (see AAP 52), which opened in 2006 shortly after “Without Boundary” and ranged across 50 years of recent calligraphic developments, fall squarely within this category.

The alternative approach to this aesthetic current is an archival-like conceptualism in which composite installations, happenings or works combining text, calligraphic inscription and other narrative elements—documents, sketches, photography, video, found and fabricated objects—provide a montage-like window onto an artist’s chosen subject matter. This loose movement, inspired in part by the writings of French theorists Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, is gaining currency across the globe and includes several West Asian artists among its key exponents. Emily Jacir (see AAP 54 & Almanac 3), of Christian-Palestinian heritage, was included in 2005’s “Classified Materials: Accumulations, Archives, Artists” at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and Lebanese artists Lamia Joreige and Walid Raad featured in “Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art,” organized by curator Okwui Enwezor at New York’s International Center of Photography in early 2008.

As for the more esoteric, aesthetic and abstract direction, the work of the Iran-born Shirazeh Houshiary, who was educated in London and graduated from the Chelsea Art School in 1979, is exemplary for its reception in the contemporary mainstream. Houshiary was included in the 2006 MoMA exhibition for her acrylic and graphite drawings built up from the painstaking repetition of a single Arabic word or fragment of script—usually an intentionally illegible scribble—into fields of light and texture of potentially limitless dimension. The artist employs human breath as a metaphor, embodying a concept of perpetual expansion and contraction. For Houshiary, where the word remains detectable, it functions as a “vibration of energy,” a principle that remains consistent even in her freestanding sculptures of painted aluminum bricks stacked neatly together in vertical latticeworks that whirl rhythmically skyward.

Houshiary, who began her career as a sculptor in the 1980s, forges such monumental forms by the multiple repetition of discrete units of structure, referencing a wide range of textual, architectural and ornamental Islamic traditions: the calligraphic flourishes of a royally commissioned Quran; the intertwining tendrils of a stone window screen; or the floral motifs multiplying in serial fashion along the ceramic-tiled surfaces of a mosque. This profoundly additive aesthetic implies an underlying principle of “reversibility,” the Muslim understanding of grand systems as the stuff of composite structure—the entire cosmos being implied in a single atom, and vice versa. It is dramatically reflected in Houshiary’s recent commission (with architect Pip Horne) for a design for the climactic east window of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, London, where she has installed a series of glass panels etched with abstract forms converging upon a central ellipse of filtered light. The concept derives, in part, from the artist’s recent experiments in lending her forms ever more kinetic effects by animating them with computer technology. A similar real-time process occurs in the church through the changing effects of weather and daylight.

Similarly, the Cairo-born, New York-based Ghada Amer, currently accorded a full-scale retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, overlays freehand paintings of famous works by the New York School with texts that throw into critical relief the originals’ highly gendered, hyper-masculine underpinnings. Amer’s method for questioning common signs of gender discrimination—marketing ploys for Barbie, Disney cartoons, fashion spreads, pornographic pictures—is to overlay representational prints of prone female nudes with hand-stitched text in roman block lettering. She leaves the ends of the letters dangling in the air like sparks flying from the force of her repeated piercing.

In so doing, works such as Pain Desire (2006), which provides a dictionary definition of the titular words embroidered on the canvas, subvert the apparent beauty of the object by exposing its cultural, social or political contradictions. Nor is this process limited to conventional media. In her recent room-size installation, Le Salon Courbé, installed at Francesca Minini Gallery in Milan in 2007, Amer transformed the gallery into a neoclassical lounge with furnishings embroidered with the word “terrorism” in Arabic. The lounge’s ornate, rose-red wallpaper was inscribed with the word’s English definition; its juxtaposition with the Arabic suggests a tense, if highly-mannered standoff.

The Iran-born, New York-based artist Shirin Neshat (see Almanac 1) occupies an ambivalent middle ground between the object-based qualities evident in Houshiary or Amer and the installation-oriented output of contemporaries using social and cultural critique to question whether our perceptual capacities ever allow a truly objective reading of current events. Dating from a period of her life when Neshat was finding her voice as an artist, the series “Women of Allah” (1993-97) is informed by her mixed Iranian and American upbringing (she was educated in California). The black-and-white portraits of herself and others, included in “Without Boundary,” provocatively collapse extremes of rebellion and submission, militancy and femininity. Neshat modeled the photos on newspaper clippings depicting the involvement of women in the Iran-Iraq War. The addition of hand-written poetry, alternately written with miniscule precision or in broad strokes, turns what would be sensational, but ultimately plastic, images into potent artifacts.

In the decade since then, Neshat has set aside black-and-white still photography in favor of video installations and the filming of her free adaptation of the magical realist novel Women Without Men (1989) by the renowned Iranian writer, Shahrnush Parsipur, which is banned in Iran. Neshat’s interpretation of the book comprises five video installations filmed from 1994 to 2005. She documents the lives of five Iranian women beset with domestic and social obstacles to personal fulfillment. Each film takes place against the backdrop of political upheaval, such as the 1953 US- and UK-orchestrated coup of the democratically-elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh. In retrospect, the element of calligraphic inscription in Neshat’s early work assumes the status of an underlying, narrative screenplay that mixes reportage, reverie and cultural criticism.

Neshat’s abiding interest in setting text and image together in motion, implicit in the filmmaking process, is stripped down and retrofitted to a sprawling three-dimensional format in the work of Emily Jacir, whose ongoing project, Material for a film (2005- ), earned her a Golden Lion award at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Commemorating the October 1972 assassination of Palestinian activist and translator Wael Zuaiter in Rome by the Israeli Mossad, which suspected him of involvement in the deadly kidnapping of Israeli athletes at that year’s Munich Olympics, Jacir’s installation is a material embodiment of a textual model. The work derives from a related 1979 book by Janet Venn Brown—Zuaiter’s companion—with Jacir even appropriating her title from one of its chapters. Jacir retraced Zuaiter’s movements, occupying his domestic quarters, culling his personal effects—telephone lists, telegrams, personal correspondence—along with the last book Zuaiter was reading and other ephemera. Selected reproductions of this material were displayed in a U-shaped partition in the Venice Biennale’s Italian Pavilion galleries. As visitors progressed through the space, they triggered a narrative reaction, bringing everything to life. At a prior showing of this work at the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, Jacir underscored the archival effect with an installation of 1,000 blank books shot through with a .22 caliber gun.

Jacir’s multi-faceted work in turn parallels that of Lebanese artist Walid Raad (see AAP 52), who carries a similar elegiac element even further into a mode of critical reflection. Raad, included in Enwezor’s “Archive Fever” exhibition, questions whether any act of remembrance or reconstruction—indeed the very writing of history—can be viewed as an objective construct. He assumes the character of a fictitious personage, manufacturing his own windows onto history. Focusing on the quirky, the marginal, the absurd and the peripheral, Raad suggests the mutability of truth by undermining the veracity of the photograph, the video or other tools used to determine the content of collective memory, history and social organization.

From 1989 to 2004, Raad was the sole member of the Atlas Group, a fictitious quasi-official entity with the avowed goal of documenting, researching, and presenting to the public the war-punctuated history of modern Lebanon. Positing the artist’s subjective viewpoint as a necessary equal and opposing balance to broader agendas, Enwezor writes in his catalog essay: “While the Lebanese civil war may have been real, its history is a minefield of interpretation, subjected to constant manipulation by ideological and sectarian forces.” Raad’s contribution to the show, We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask (2006), is a compilation of diagrams, notes, videotapes and photographs produced by a fictitious team of a car-bomb investigator and a journalist documenting one of many Beirut explosions in 1986, suggesting that the accruing of data, ephemera, documents, photographs and other such items may be arranged in any manner that suits the storyteller.

If MoMA’s “Without Boundary,” was, then, prescient in citing the potential for a current generation of West Asian artists to push calligraphic and text-based traditions in new directions, subsequent developments have only proved the accuracy of that critical outlook. Disproving assumptions that a long calligraphic tradition of West Asia is destined to remain the stuff of mere ornament and decoration, contemporary artists hailing from the region—no matter where they may be based—have successfully reinvented the single word or letter, as well as other typographic derivations, to give their work poetic reverberation. Others are proceeding even more assertively, carefully culling, like cinema-studio stylists, textual and documentary artifacts once cast off by their subjects to address gender or other identity politics, international relations, warfare and terrorism. In either case, whether newly working within calligraphy or recently gravitating toward the methods of an “archive fever,” such artists are quietly advancing a conceptualism for the new century that effectively expresses an individual viewpoint while keeping in mind the complexities of a global audience.