Rashad Selim

Iraq

“In the autumn of 2008 I found a piano looted of its keys and hammers waiting by a skip with an open chest full of the strings of history held in industrial cast iron. Strung bows, guitars and the harps of Ur; the Middle Eastern santour, inspiring as it did, the hammered dulcimer, which in turn gave the clavichord that beget the harpsichord, in a linear progression to the piano, the programmed robotic player piano and today’s key board shorn of strings for the digital sample. I felt a resonance with the wreckage of Iraq fading – yet ever present - in the global meltdown. Handling the piano into my studio the spontaneous encounter with sound and object refreshed my naiveté and sense of wonder.” – Rashad Selim

Title: Geo-piano : "Divan Alter-native" (2009) is a place, interactive furniture, sculpture for the senses in homage to the ageless avant-garde, the child, discovery and voyage.

My mosaic ink on paper work combines a spectrum of techniques, media and interests to seek beauty in the geography of personal moments, place and enduring commonalities caught in the politic and ecological flux of our time.

This new series continues my exploration of the Arabic letter Ain , the Sanskrit Ohm and the Greek Epsilon. Their apparent formal similarity, as well as their auditory connections - as with other letters in world scripts representing the sound ranges A-E-I - strikes me as significant.

The word ain in Arabic translates as ‘eye;’ aini means ‘my eye’ and is the most common Iraqi endearment as in ayuni, ‘dear as my eyes’. Ain can also mean origin, as in water spring and thus source of place. Its sound conveys a primordial expression like the bursting of a bubble. Babies, and I imagine most vertebrate animals, can produce this ‘eh’ sound. Likewise, Ohm and Epsilon are rich in symbolic and spiritual significance. The Mosaic Etudes and Couplets with Absence on exhibition with The Recessionists display visual space with Ain and Ohm and create the Epsilon in the cut.

I work simultaneously with several printmaking disciplines (block, stencil, intaglio, collagraph and viscosity printing), a process that I have termed ‘Offset Monotype’ and in which I find deep pleasure in the transitions to sculpture and painting.

My printmaking technique is inspired by Mesopotamian Cylinder Seals and uses various densities (hard and soft) of inking rollers to sample and deposit sensitive impressions onto the papers’ surface building up layers of traces. Time and degeneration, memory, patterns, palimpsests and fractals bond with light to simulate a multi-dimensional environment of vast yet intimate spaces. My imaginary spaces reference the sea, horizons and Ur-ban landscapes generically and the roof tops of Baghdad, the stairways of Amman, the terraces of Yemen, the gardens of Morocco and Gaza on the coast specifically. They are lit with the electric nights of the Britain I call home.

Mosaics are by nature geometric, and in my search through geography the square orientates. As with tiles or tesserae or the pixels that make up the digital image, the grid is clearly a favoured element of composition. Humbled by the empirical modernity of Islamic geometry, I can help to save a defunct piano with it.

I look to pavements, road works and Qadhath (unique plaster) work decorating the town houses of Sanaa (Yemen) for asymmetrical interventions to enliven the grid and I see betrayal by sophisticated barbarians who have left mangled gridiron and buckled pylons in a trail of grief through the latticework of life. And then I remember the archaic wild man lured towards civilisation, tearing through nets, fences and traps and present a monument to the caryatides, who Uphold – like Atlas, like the votive offerings in the image of labourers buried in the foundations of ziggurat cities.

Each of these monuments embedded in the picture, frees a same-like unique other who frees another. It is a kind of promise to enjoy density of meaning in peace and unity – however illusionary – or of order in a state of discovery/recovery, however chaotic.

- Rashad Selim 2009