Painting Poetry with Dia Al-Azzawi

When the German poet Rilke saw a sculpture of Apollo, he wrote the line “you must change your life.”[1]Something in the sculpture is magnetic, arousing in Rilke the desire for transformation. Perhaps the great work lays his life, as it currently is, bare: some level of mundanity, tolerated until this juncture, is suddenly seen for what it is. It is no longer adequate to live like this. Apollo, the God of Music, has made a simple command. You must change your life.

Rilke heeds this call in poetry. The aforementioned line comes at the end of ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo,’ a poem written in response to the titular sculpture. Art begets art, as the poem tries to extend and recapture the living force of the sculpture. In the poem, Rilke recreates the bust’s missing head. He senses its smile in the torso’s brilliance. He completes the sculpture, reversing the effects of time. The viewer is, in turn, the sculptor: art is not final, and it implicates Rilke in its creation. That final line, ‘you must change your life,’ now addresses his audience: the cycle continues as we are invited to extend the poem, the sculpture, and the creative act. We’re ushered into Apollo’s chorus.

Rilke is hardly the only poet to write in this manner. His poem is an example of ekphrasis, a written tribute to a visual work of art.  Many poets have dabbled in ekphrasis, perhaps prompted by experiences like Rilke’s. Moved by an artwork’s power, they attempt to reproduce its emotive power through language. Yet the relationship is not a one-way street; what happens when visual arts speak back? One answer lies inDia al-Azzawi’s dafatir.

Al-Azzawi’s dafatir hybridise book and canvas. The word ‘dafatir’ comes from the Arabic for canvas. Dafatir, therefore, resemble notebooks: they are composed of bound sheets, with several A4 canvases linked together into a ‘book’ of connected canvases. Like the adjacent images of a triptych, each canvas contrasts or echoes its neighbours. Some maintain the structure of books, while others spread out like accordions; others still are housed in cigar cases. The dafter on display reject the singular nature of the canvas. Instead, they present a set of connected images. These images are complemented by calligraphed lines from Arabic poems, etched onto the canvases themselves.

Al-Azzawi produced a range of dafatir inspired by poets. These are central to the Ashmolean’s Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry, which explores the dialogue between Al-Azzawi and his poetic peers. The exhibition showcases an array of dafatir, many of which are direct responses to Arabic poems. These dafatir transcribe linguistic feats into meshes of colour, shape, texture and space. The resulting works often extend the context of the original, recapturing its essence while adding unexpected new hues.

[1]Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, transl.  Stephen Mitchell, Modern Library. © 1995 Stephen Mitchell.

The poems quoted in the dafatir can be deemed the starting point of the work. Al-Azzawi’s illustrations respond to the words of a given poem, a process he describes as ‘free and emotive responses’ to the poet’s language. Al-Azzawi reproduces both the images of the poem, and the personal, subjective responses they conjure in him. There is a dance between the components of the poem and the observer, Al-Azzawi, whose replies are often just as mysterious.

Al-Azzawi has praised the ‘allusive quality’ of poetic imagery. For him, poetry’s references are evocative and indirect. Al-Azzawi works in a visual medium, and so must improvise to reproduce this elusive quality. To do this, he frequently leans on outlines of figures, abstract shapes, vibrant patches of colour, and fragments of text. We sense that Al-Azzawi sees poetry as liberating, inviting him to paint more loosely, unhindered by precepts of photorealism or ‘accuracy’. Poetry grants him licence to reject rigid notions of artistic merit. Painting is no longer about representing his subjects with visual accuracy; instead, it is about mapping moods and states, which, by definition, have no solid forms.

If a poem’s mysteries lie in the implicit relationships between images, the dafatir reproduce this in the link between their divided pages. These links are often just as elusive: one page’s muted greens and blues give way to passionate reds and yellows. Sometimes the pages spread like accordions, whereas at other times they look like traditional books. These differences, too, loosen or tighten the metaphorical ‘bonds’ between each canvas.

The dafatir are refreshingly intimate. Viewing them carries the voyeuristic intrigue of studying a painter’s diaries, even as we know they are performative works whose so-called ‘intimacy’ is created with the public in mind. The dafatir’s charming informality hinges on the typical role of a ‘notebook’, that is, a place for private reflection and practice sketches. They are steeped in a childlike playfulness at home in poetry and art alike. I feel the urge to reach through the glass and touch them. I want to thumb through their pages and feel their texture, to trace the calligraphed grooves…the dafatir are tactile, and I want to treat them as I would an family photo album. The prohibitive, look-but-don’t touch confine of a gallery space is all the more apparent here, with works that beg to be explored by hand.

Though they evoke play and privacy, the dafatir have a darker side. Their popularity among artists is in part pragmatic: they are easy to transport and quick to produce. This accounts for their prevalence in areas affected by war, where material scarcity drives artists to such economical forms.

War, soon enough, becomes the exhibition’s primary theme. Al-Azzawi is particularly moved by conflict in Iraq, his birth nation. Once a patron and curator of the Mosul Museum, Al-Azzawi laments its televised destruction by Daesh. Al-Azzawi’s work achieves a simultaneous mourning of innocent life and historical heritage, twin victims of contemporary conflict. The destruction of the Mosul Museum brings the two together and, as such, becomes a key focal point for Al-Azzawi. The dafatir are transmuted into means of decrying violence. Al-Azzawi becomes a voice of protest against the waste of life, innocence, and art.

At the centre of the exhibition is Mosul: Panorama of Destruction 2017/22. A sweeping ten-metre tapestry, the work depicts the chaos of war in the city of Mosul. Its scale contrasts sharply with the dafatir. Poetry’s brevity informed the dafatir’s intimacy, but war is maximalist, expansive, and indulgent. The tapestry form (this is not the only one of Al-Azzawi’s tapestries to broach war) is appropriate both in terms of historical precedent, and in terms of its sheer size. The Panorama dominates the small exhibition space, which metaphorically reflects Daesh’s intrusion into cultural spaces: invited or not, conflict takes centre stage.

The immediate temptation is to compare the Panorama to Picasso’s Guernica. Both are stark, black- and- white testimonies to war’s pandemonium. However, Al-Azzawi disavows us of this temptation. For one thing, the techniques differ considerably. Guernica haunts with its emotive faces; Al-Azzawi’s human figures, meanwhile, are mostly faceless. Their blankness, deprived of any features, floods the work with silence. They are dehumanised spectres: without Guernica’s facial expressions, the victims in Mosul have no means of communicating their suffering. Their pain remains is invisible and unheard. Perpetrators and victims operate beneath a fog of anonymity, without voice, without identity. Only political banners, weaponry, and facial hair (with its religious and political connotations) demarcate figures’ status and role. Curiously, destroyed statues have more detailed faces than the living human subjects.

Guernica’s shadow looms over the Panorama, even when the works differ considerably. If nothing else, this reminds us of Al-Azzawi’s presence in a long cultural tradition. He is yet another artist tasked with encoding war’s chaotic horror, producing works that lament, condemn, and warn against conflict. This is the artist-as-witness, a figure whose constancy across styles and generations reminds us only of war’s perennial presence. Is this one of the longest artistic traditions in history? When we see the Panorama’s surface-level resemblance to Guernica, we wonder what Guernica resembled, and what those predecessors resembled, until we imagine a long chronology of corresponding war canvases, poems, songs and novels. As that awful heritage becomes clear to us, our view of war becomes more panoramic.

Standing before the Panorama, we imagine the next artist to continue the chain. We imagine the next voice after Picasso, Al-Azzawi, and the others. How long before another artist vows to extend these cubic shadows, these lightless visages—how long before the easel stands lamb-legged before the latest wasteland?

Like Picasso and others, Al-Azzawi witnesses conflict from a distance. Picasso painted Guernica in Paris, far from the Basque town as it was bombed. Likewise, Al-Azzawi moved to London in the 1970s, leaving Iraq after the rise of Saddam Hussein. He was not in the conflict zone itself and witnessed Mosul’s destruction from London.

I mention this to consider a critique levied at such ‘witnesses’. Detractors may accuse such witnesses of appropriating trauma that is not their own. They ask if you can truly understand conflict without direct experience of it. Whatever your ties to a nation affected by conflict, your understanding will not match that of those who endure its conditions directly. The first, obvious tension is that war is not meant to leave witnesses. We rely on second-hand witnesses because the ‘direct’ witness is far less likely to survive. Nonetheless, critics wonder how satisfied we should be with ‘war artists’ who are not immersed in the conflict itself. Distance means survival, but it also complicates the legitimacy of the painter’s response.

In light of these questions, I wondered why Al-Azzawi chose the format of a ‘panorama’. The sweeping scale of the work is at odds with its emotive force. The distance evokes landscape works, yet the sheer power of its disparate images are more like tortured portraits. Its dimensions feel contradictory, so that we are at once removed and placed in its centre. Al-Azzawi seems to study the very notion of ‘distance’ from conflict in the panorama itself, conflating panorama’s literal distance with emotional proximity to the suffering at hand.

For Western viewers, arguably the primary target audience of this exhibition, this Panorama may evoke our own distance from conflict. Drone footage, aerial shots, cameras that pan over bombarded cities: in England, our views of war are panoramic. We are placed at literal and critical distance: our wide view comes at the cost of close experience. Conflict in the Middle East is so readily distilled into political and economic terms that the suffering of individuals is overlooked. Indeed, this dynamic is essential to war: the disconnect between its ideological terms and its visceral realities.

The Panorama seems to encapsulate both of these poles and, in doing so, breaks down whatever distance we feel from conflict. It brings suffering closer to us. The Panorama works as an attack on the distance created by spectatorship, drawing attention to the ways we make war digestible, logical, and permissible. We remember how often war is, to the lucky among us, a slew of sound-bites, graphs, and dispassionate shots of blasted high-rises. Al-Azzawi’s distance from Mosul perfectly positions him to interrogate the role of ‘distance’ in obfuscating war’s nature. And his personal closeness with Mosul’s victims is never in doubt.

In a video interview showing at the exhibition, Al-Azzawi claims he had to ‘abandon poetry’ in the face of war. Though a lucid speaker on his creative processes, this claim seems too absolute. It is hardly reflected in the dafatir on display at the exhibition, even when they are divided into subsections of ‘poetic’ and ‘war’ dafatir. When we look at Al-Azzawi’s treatment of conflict, we see many techniques similar to his treatment of poetic texts. Even in Mosul, seemingly so different from the dafatir, these techniques endure. We notice the logic of partial allusion, where fragments allude to a larger whole. The ways in which bodies blend, jostle, and blur recalls that ‘allusive’ quality that Al-Azzawi admired in poetry. Where it once invited him to capture poetry’s nebulous evocations, it now becomes a way to depict violent chaos.

Disembodied limbs in the dafatir Four Children Playing Football are exemplary of this. Their disconnected fragments tease at a narrative just out of view. Initially, the ambiguity of this fragmentation is total. Is this an innocent childhood scene, or a web of dismemberments? This duality is but one of the many effects Al-Azzawi achieves by bringing poetry’s lessons to the frontline. Indeed, poets have also been witnesses, from Ancient Greece to occupied France. War has its own poetic tradition.

Four Children Playing Football is composed of two images set in a wooden box, far more economical than the other dafatir. One image is sketched in pencil, while the other utilises sculpted clay. Both represent legs and arms, with two heads in their centre. The pencil sketch is riddled with holes. A band of red runs horizontally across them both, connecting them.

Like the figures in the Mosul tapestry, the work’s figures are faceless and shady. At first glance, the wooden frame compounds the work’s ambiguity. It makes the work appear a treasured item, a prized heirloom brought out for special occasions. It also induces claustrophobia, with the titular children entrapped in its narrow space. Before I learned the context of the work, it sat between opposites: between innocence and slaughter. A placard tells me that it was inspired by children killed while playing football. They were struck by an Israeli shell in 2014, during the Israel-Gaza conflict. The ambiguity continues even in light of this. Has Al-Azzawi trapped that moment of innocent play in amber, moments before tragedy, or has he frozen atrocity in full view? Or has he, somehow, done both?

Whatever the case, Four Children  highlights how war infects the most innocent aspects of humanity. This work is indicative of how conflict changes the poetic logic of Al-Azzawi’s dafatir. Though they maintain their indirect allusions, they become smaller, darker works. Their text is muted, their figures anonymous. Dafatir  were previously indulgent and joyful. Now they are lightless and stark. Colour drains away. What colour remains is invariably the red of blood, not of passion. These dafatir are microcosms of the destruction of the museum, testaments to what war makes of us.

Still, something of Al-Azzawi’s playfulness persists. Even as conflict’s shadow spreads over the exhibition, experimentation stands firm. In one instance, Al-Azzawi uses a friend’s cigar case as the ‘frame’ for a dafatir. The friend visited Al-Azzawi by chance and allowed him to use the case. Al-Azzawi seems willing to entrust his creativity to a higher influence, or to sheer luck, much like poets of past and present. The Muse clearly isn’t averse to the odd Havana. It is touching to see Al-Azzawi innovate and play even as war demands a singular, solemn attention. These fragments of joy become testimonies to a greater endurance.

The Ashmolean is a fitting venue for two reasons. The first is that the exhibition is free. The second is that it houses various artefacts from the Arab world, as well as from Persia. Both are sources of influence for Al-Azzawi. Some reside on the museum’s first floor, while others have been placed directly in the Painting Poetryexhibition on floor -1. The latter offer the most fruitful insights. For example, one display features a 15^thCentury copy of Nizami’s Khamsa (Quintet). This book includes an account of the Bedouin love story of Layla and Majnun. Visitors can study the work’s traditional illustration on an open display page. Beside it, we see one of Al-Azzawi’s dafatir responding to the same love story.

The 15^th Century book demonstrates a conventional relationship between text and image. The text is the primary component, while the image is added to supplement the text. The dafatir modifies this relationship. Though it begins with the same story, its imagery is indirect and evocative. It contains fragmented human and animal forms, knotting black lines, and red backgrounds which suggest passion and danger. By comparing Al-Azzawi’s version of Layla and Majnun to older depictions, we see how he draws on and reinvents tradition. A tale of averted, forbidden desire, its fragmented forms remind us of stolen glances and furtive, repressed longings.

In other places, traditional context is far subtler. Take, for example, Al-Azzawi’s use of the phrase ‘Land of Darkness’. The term was originally used to describe Mesopotamia’s rich, dark soil. It suggests fertility and potential, presenting an idyllic image of the land. Al-Azzawi applies this moniker to his work Iraqi Book of Darkness, 2020.

I found myself most drawn to this dafatir’s exterior, the jacket where we’d usually find a book’s front and back cover.  The front page is black, while the back is white. The white side bears trickles of red and a bloody handprint. The human figures are also monochrome. Their bodies are characterised by jumbled lines, barren patches of emptiness, and anonymity—there are no faces, depriving us of an easy emotional core. Inside the Book of Darkness, we glimpse gloomy figures and shadows. Blood trails from page to page, reminding us of violence’s extended legacy. Its stains pass on to ‘separate’ times and places, just as shapes and shades recur across the dafatir’s divided pages.

The ‘darkness’, once describing Mesopotamia’s promise, now denotes torment. The binary split down the middle of the dafatir could speak to a contemporary crossroads, as the region faces ‘darkness’ of past, present and future. Can an Edenic, fallow Mesopotamia be returned to—and should it? The split could just as easily evoke conflict: simplistic binaries linger in the background, framing and menacing the fragile human forms at the centre. Whatever the case, Al-Azzawi demonstrates a firm belief that the past, distant as it may seem, can elucidate the present—even when that present literally erodes the past’s relics. The bitter humour of reclaiming the name ‘land of darkness’ permeates this work.

The same applies to Al-Azzawi’s interest in Persia. Iraq was once a key part of the Persian Empire. As such, Al-Azzawi’s study of Persian tradition allows him to interrogate contemporary Iraq. We’re reminded that empires are impermanent things, whose collapse, definitive as it may seem, in fact leaves a stubborn cloud of dust and a maze of debris. Al-Azzawi, like so many others, trawls through the rubble, with a fervent faith that there is something worth salvaging. He seeks traditions which can enrich modern aims, be they artistic or social. Other parties, meanwhile, seem more interested in laying further waste.

The Panorama of Destruction includes destroyed artefacts and statues, which, according to the exhibition’s placards, are from Assyria and Hatra. By including them, Al-Azzawi tries to preserve what has been destroyed. He creates in his work a place where fragile legacies might survive, if only long enough that we can sift through them, changing and being changed by them. As we see Daesh soldiers mingle with the dust of prehistory, we should be reminded that geographical demarcations, for which so many have been asked to die, are always in flux.

The Ashmolean’s collection allows us to study Al-Azzawi’s works alongside the traditions he draws upon. This is invaluable to newcomers. It is the ideal set of conditions for any dialogue between two art forms. It is like reading Rilke beside that godly torso. We are freest to evaluate these works when we can study the art they respond to. With Al-Azzawi, this means sweeping leaps between different historical alcoves, from Mesopotamia to Persia. You almost feel that ‘you must change your life’ has been whispered again and again over the years, across collapsing empires and against winds of repression.

The opportunity to study dafatirs alongside their inspirations is a powerful one. However, it is not as expansive as it could be. We can see plenty of the history that Al-Azzawi draws on, but what about the poets? The Ashmolean commendably translates the exhibition’s plaques into Arabic. However, it does not translate the poems quoted on the dafatir into English. This is a baffling omission. The exhibition is devoted to the interplay between poets and artists, yet many of the poems, including quotes etched on the dafatir themselves, are unavailable in English.

It would be delightful to untangle the links between Al-Azzawi’s imagery and that of the poems, but the exhibition does not facilitate this. This is even more shameful since the poets in question are some of the Arabic world’s most esteemed contemporary voices: Mahmoud Darwish, Saadi Youssef, Adonis. The latter Syrian poet, Adonis, has been dubbed the Arab world’s greatest living poet, an accolade to match the exhibition’s claim that Al-Azzawi is ‘the Arab world’s most influential living artist’…this hardly means that the average visitor will know Adonis’ verses, let alone in their original language. The exhibition could bring light to these poetic voices as well as to Al-Azzawi’s work, yet its focus is primarily on the latter. Ironically, this lessens our appreciation of both.

I was told by Ashmolean staff that there was a conscious decision to forgo translations of the poems. Some people would argue that the point of recreating artworks in a new form is to create something that can speak for itself. If the visual form has truly captured the poem’s evocations, shouldn’t we understand them without the poem? This is all well and good, in theory; but the dafatir do not conform with this view. They quote fragments of the poems directly. The way the text is set beside, within, or against images and colours is part of their overall effect. Sure, the beauty of the calligraphy is evident, and it’s romantic to think of language reduced to pure form (which is easy if you don’t read the language), but the relationship between dafatir and poem is left unclear. My inability to read the text, a product of my humble trilingualism, means my experience of the works is partial. I don’t think this is the fragmentation that al-Azzawi is interested in; it is simply an oversight that hamstrings an otherwise compelling exhibition.

The Ashmolean does offer a series of free tours around Painting Poetry, the last of which takes place on June 9^th. The tours are led by the exhibition’s curator, Dr Francesca Leoni, in collaboration with Oxford University students who study Arabic literature. These tours greatly elaborate on Al-Azzawi’s poetic inspirations and offer readings, close analysis, and an overview of contemporary Arabic poetry. Visitors interested in Arabic poetry should seek these tours urgently, and the Ashmolean should offer more of them.

Adonis and Darwish are published by reputed publishing houses: Yale University Press and Copper Canyon Press, respectively. They enjoy the kind of acclaim that garners Poetry Foundation pages and Guardianprofiles. I would encourage visitors to spend some time with their work before visiting the exhibition. You may start to understand what Al-Azzawi relates to in their poetry, especially if, like me, you find Al-Azzawi’s description of poetry somewhat surprising. His reference to the ‘allusive quality’ of poetry didn’t ring true for me at first: it didn’t conform with the poets I’d studied, let alone my own works. I knew that poetry could flit and evade, but I wondered how Al-Azzawi could distil poetic logic into any one principle. The vast variation of poetic ideals made it hard to picture a single quality, extractable for a painter’s use. Reading the same poets as Al-Azzawi, though, I could see what he meant. I also sensed affinities between painter and poet on political and social questions, as well as on aesthetic fronts. Discovering these affinities makes the colours of the dafter that little bit bolder.

For example, consider the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Darwish shares Al-Azzawi’s concern with ancestral lands, with history’s erasure and displacement. It is easy to imagine the two in agreement, even if their ‘versions’ of Darwish’s poetry—the original and then Al-Azzawi’s visual response—differ greatly. Reading Darwish is a good introduction into the ‘allusive’ poetic logic, especially where his verse is as fragmented as Al-Azzawi’s visual language.

The exhibition features only one traditional canvas. This is A Wolf Howls: Memories of a Poet, produced in 1968. It preces the dafatir, which Al-Azzawi produced from the 1970s onwards. As a forerunner of sorts, it offers an insight into how Al-Azzawi’s interest in poetry developed and, perhaps, his only attempt to render poetry in conventional visual formats.

Where the dafatir relate to specific verses, A Wolf Howls depicts a generalised ideal of the poet. Its forms are more clearly defined than those of the dafatir, with less fragmentation of the human body and an atypically intact wolf. Its colour scheme is more muted than the bright hues of the other poetic dafatir. Its background is a deep black, resembling the war dafatir’s muted colour scheme. A Wolf Howls seems to balance aspects of Al-Azzawi’s war dafatir and poetic dafatir. The narrative is difficult to pin down: its emotional stakes are apparent but its precise contexts are elusive.

According to the exhibition’s placards, A Wolf Howls is ‘is based on an unpublished poem by the Communist poet Muzaffar Al Nawab that narrates the story of a mother who lost her son during the aftermath of the Ba’ath coup.’[1] In light of this context, it is all the more surprising that  Al-Azzawi talks of ‘abandoning poetry’ to face war. It would be hard to ask for further proof that poetry and war are intertwined.

The wolf, meanwhile, is an older poetic motif. Nocturnal encounters between the poet and a hungry wolf can be found, for example, in poems by Al-Buhturi and Al-Farazdaq. In their poems, a starved wolf approaches the poet and a tense friendship forms. These are mystical encounters between man and beast, at the interface between humanity and nature at large. Such an encounter appears to be depicted in A Wolf Howls, yet it is conflated with the violent aftermath of the coup. Once again, ancient tradition clashes with recent history, placing artist and poet at a strange intersection—wolf and man meeting on the dune.

On my third visit I talked with two students leading a tour. They elaborated on the role of the wolf in Arabic literature. Sometimes it did occupy the aforementioned role: a wild force that was momentarily tamed. In other places it was a thing to be slain or fought against, a measure, therefore, of heroic prowess. Later, wolves, or predatory animals more broadly, are used as shorthand for dictators and autocrats—both with metaphorical aims and simply to avoid censorship or repression. It is enriching to consider how the wolf’s varied symbolic meanings apply to A Wolf Howls, and to the maternal grief it expresses.

Once again, such contexts weren’t immediately available. When I first viewed A Wolf Howls, I saw a figure in the throes of sleep paralysis. They lay with hands in the air as a wolf trod over their legs. In front of them, a feminine figure gazed out at the viewer. I imagined night terrors, as though the poet was haunted by the titular ‘memories’. Had their memories manifested as a wolf, conjured up where the poet’s imagination clashes with his emotional turmoil? Even as the foundation of Azzawi’s subsequent obsessions, A Wolf Howls remained fittingly cryptic. It seemed to depict the dark side of the poet’s sensitivity, the torment to which an attuned individual must be exposed. If this was Al-Azzawi’s idealised poet, then the poet was somebody who felt things more deeply, whose imagery was an overblown map of their internal territories. Even as I invented my own contexts, I sensed the fundamental unease at the work’s core. I was further convinced that Al-Azzawi’s poetic sensibilities were perfectly suited to depict conflict, just as the poet may hear a distant wolf’s howl and dream its teeth over his face, alpine, marble, chalk to write with.

This, of course, is the temptation of writing about a painter who paints poems: you want to write poems in response, in a spiralling mise en abyme. I will rein in this temptation to underline the location of A Wolf Howls in the exhibition. It sits at the beginning of the gallery. A display of statues from Iraq, dating as far back as 2500 BCE, occupies the adjacent wall. Their eyes, in particular, help us understand the blank, round eyes we see in A Wolf Howls. Al-Azzawi praises the statue’s rejection of ‘rigidity and imitation’. They nurture his interest in visual arts which aren’t simply about direct representation.

More fundamentally, they mirror A Wolf Howls in that they are precursors, early forms that paved the way for the future. They are cultural foundations that were later imitated, sanctified, and defied. A Wolf Howls is the same. It is something early, something whose echoes we trace in the subsequent dafatir. The exhibition sets Al-Azzawi beside both ancient history, and his own personal prehistory. A Wolf Howls too is the dark soil from which the rest has bloomed. A trip upstairs to Gallery 31, meanwhile, shows how a new generation has taken up dafatir.

Painting Poetry occupies a small exhibition space, on the subterranean floor of the Ashmolean. Al-Azzawi’s first solo show in the UK, it is nonetheless an unceremonious display. It was quiet on both my visits, somewhere between reverence and emptiness. Ultimately, there’s something appropriate about the exhibition’s humble scale. The intimacy of the space echoes that of the dafatir. Mosul: Panorama of Destruction better lives up to its title in a modest space like this. Its contrast with the dafatir is all the starker. Though the work deserves its podium and plinth, I was glad for the relative tranquillity of the exhibition. Of course, even a quiet exhibition is home to the odd clash between audiences: on my first visit I saw selfie-stick users chastised for posing with Mosul. An older gentleman interrogated them, asking them if they knew what they were duck-facing beside. Even testaments to horror become aesthetic commodities, props, and risk being implemented into the Spectacle of war. I like to think Al-Azzawi would laugh at such a sight. On my guided visit, I’m assured that he is not one to protect his work from Instagrammers…and the Ashmolean are certainly eager for a pinch of virality.

Al-Azzawi may take some comfort in seeing his work housed in the Ashmolean, having mourned the destruction of similar spaces. Al-Azzawi’s story grants me new appreciation as I tour the rest of the museum. Even as I sense the parallels between the Ashmolean’s colonial legacy and the brutality Al-Azzawi decries, I also appreciate the fragility of the artefacts on display. The relics could be destroyed so easily, and swathes of history would be lost. In light of this fragility, they seem more engaging: the urge to write in response to them grows stronger. Al-Azzawi renews our interest in tradition, both as a source of identity and a route to new creation. If I am to ‘change my life’ in response to Al-Azzawi, I will do so by seeing these relics as alive—both in their fertility for creative inspiration, and in their mortal vulnerability.

Though Al-Azzawi’s work speaks for itself, translation of textual elements should be a priority for future exhibitions. The Ashmolean’s display is well worth seeing, both for the potency of the work and for the artefacts alongside them. However, this is fundamentally an exhibition about ‘painting poetry’ which fails to make the poetic texts accessible. This leaves Painting Poetry’s exploration of the relationship between two art forms incomplete.

Regrettably, the art press has done very little to cover Painting Poetry. National papers appear disinterested in reviewing it. It has received some attention in Oxford, as well as coverage from papers which focus on the Middle East, such as The National News. As Al-Azzawi’s first solo exhibition in the UK, it is lamentable that it has fallen by the wayside. Far more attention has been given to the Ashmolean’s Knossos exhibition, which focuses on Crete and the myth of the Minotaur. I wonder if this reflects enduring biases in favour of classical antiquity, and against Middle Eastern art. These biases may be shared by The Al Thani Collection Foundation and His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani,, who are billed as top sponsors of the Knossos exhibition but not the Al-Azzawi display (unless they are Painting Poetry’s anonymous sponsors).

Whatever the case, it is bleak to see Al-Azzawi’s work confined to a small corner of the Ashmolean, even where this enhances the dafatir’s  intimacy. The first solo exhibition of a prolific, bracing artist should be far more ceremonious. Painting Poetry is well worth the visit, but it leaves you with a hunger for Al-Azzawi’s work, one that it cannot quite satisfy. It is a fitting introduction to a bold, mournful, poetic voice. I only wish that there was more to see and more of us seeing it.

[1]See also https://www.barjeelartfoundation.org/collection/wolf-howls-memories-poet-dia-azzawi/, accessed 11/05/2023.

Acknowledgements:

The museum’s original texts were instrumental in contextualising Al-Azzawi’s works. The Barjeel Art Foundation’s website, as well as Al-Azzawi’s own, provided valuable background information. The tour led by Fatima el-Faki, Nadia Roeske, and Dr Francesca Leoni offered a greater exploration of Arabic poetic tradition, contemporary and ancient, than I can summate here.