Rachid Koraïchi talks about love, Islam and art

Rachid Koraïchi Interview by Polly Savage, translation by Gerard Houghton

Rachid Koraïchi will be showing at Art Dubai this year and is represented by October Gallery, Stand A9

Polly Savage: How did you begin working as an artist?

Rachid Koraïchi: This is something of a classic question – but of course the truth is that I don’t really know where the idea first came from to become an artist. It will have been a combination of influences from my early surroundings, particularly the environment where I grew up in the Aurès Mountain range in Eastern Algeria, a place of great natural significance and beauty. I was born in Ain Beida, a small town in the eastern central part of Algeria situated away from the coast and yet not part of the desert either. All aspects of that place, the architecture, the simple inscriptions on the walls, the sights, sounds and smells, all of these contributed something. One learns many lessons from the world one inhabits, from the history of a place, and from the vast open spaces of the great desert. One absorbs, perhaps, the destiny of becoming an artist, from the many traces of memory left by the ancient humanity that once shared your space.

My mother was also of an artistic nature, and had a good eye for embroidering beautiful designs, cutting cloth for clothes, and the many other creative processes of those times. Of course I then went on to a more precise and formal training in Fine Arts College, first in Algiers and then later in Paris, where I was fortunate enough to study with several different masters in a variety of ateliers and schools. Here I learnt to express the things that I had inside me, without becoming fixated on, or blocked by, the basic technical aspects of art.

PS: What have been the most important moments for you, in your life as an artist?

RK: Well, as I was saying, the frank physicality of that first encounter with my native region of the Aurès was an important moment, particularly the abundance of her agricultural produce, in such sharp contrast to the desert lands further south. I grew up during the War of Independence against the French, and saw the violence and chaos that resulted, but after that, I moved to Algiers, and I still remember the wonder of the sea, and of the many cultures in that capital city. I lived there during a period of such great hope, when we all began to realise what might be possible, and what could be created, in this brand new country. I then moved to Paris, another great city. I remember the sheer shock of its streets, its museums, its galleries, and the amazing series of spectacles forever on show. It was there, in that heady atmosphere, that I worked to produce my first installation, Salomé. It dealt with the complex theme of love – either that for a person or that for God. Looking back now at this piece, which was exhibited in the IMA (Institut du Monde Arabe) and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, I can sense that many of the themes that came bubbling to the surface in it were like seed crystals for other projects that I worked on later. Salomé was also subsequently shown in the Cathedral in Carthage, although there were issues with censorship that surfaced there – that too was something that would happen again.

PS: Could you tell us about your most recent work?

RK: I have been working for several years on a grand project called Les Maitres Invisibles (The Invisible Masters) which addresses the lives and legacies of the fourteen great mystics of Islam. It traces the historical development of the broad world of Islam, from the western fringes of Andalucia to the Middle East, and the further eastern outposts of the Levant. It draws together threads in the lives of great Sufi masters such as Jalaluddin al Rumi (Rumi) and Ibn al Arabi, whose fame, both as mystics and poets, has even spread to the West. I want to demonstrate that the world of Islam, in contrast to these perceptions of crisis, tension and violence, has another side entirely - that of the tolerant, sophisticated writings of the great Muslim thinkers and poets. Whilst they may no longer be present in this world, I want to show how they left an imprint on succeeding generations, and bequeathed us a message which is as relevant today as it was when it was written. This is a complex enterprise, which encompasses works that I have shown previously, such as the multifaceted installation Path of Roses, which was exhibited at the October Gallery in 2003. A project of the size and breadth of Les Maitres Invisibles has to develop over the course of several years, and might produce many individual works which reference a single, central theme in various different ways.

PS: You once said once that you were searching, through your work, for an ‘alphabet of memory’ – what did you mean by that?

RK: I come from Algeria – a relatively young country politically speaking, being not much more than sixty years old today. I grew up during a time when the long years of colonisation had all but effaced our living memory and deep historical perspective of this place, which has seen so many different civilisations come and go over time. The extraordinary history of our many ancestors has effectively been destroyed, and the ordinary man in the street is now cut off from this incredible past: the Roman and Byzantine remains, the Emperors and Saints, the Carthaginians, the Berbers and the many other peoples who have passed across this part of Africa, even long before the arrival of Arabic culture. But a tree cannot live and develop if it has no roots – these roots are vital to its stability and sustainability. My insistence on an ‘alphabet of memory’ draws attention to the many traces of these past worlds that still survive and that remain half-hidden parts of our consciousness today. I try to recover these signs, these hidden links that allow us to read back into the book of our inheritance. Tracing this alphabet lets us revive these references, acknowledge them, and make sense of them, in our present world today. Although we often think that we are ‘inventing’ things that are new, in reality this pre-existing alphabet allows us to rediscover the things that we had before, but which have become lost in time.

PS: What is the place of the written word in your work? How do you understand the relationship between text and image?

RK: Well this is a complex subject since writing in Arabic uses both to some extent – the form that letters take is often critical, and letters can be used to imply all kinds of imagistic overlays. Throughout the entire Muslim world, whilst many languages are used, prayer itself is only ever performed in Arabic, since this was the language of the Prophet’s revelation. Writing is therefore a reflection of the word of God, and for this reason it is central to our culture. Because this world is a reflection of that other reality, it is as though everything in the real world exists as a mirror image of that other world, and it is to emphasise this fact that I often employ mirror writing in my work, as a kind of global graphic. This inversion of text also serves to give a kind of equality to the spectators, since it is equally difficult to read whether you are versed in Arabic writing or not. Even for an Arabic speaker, the text appears to operate simply at the level of glyphs, as shapes on paper.
Writing and drawing are not two different things – they are essentially one and the same – they come, so to speak, from the same breath. My work is about the power of gestures, whether they be gestures of language, or geometric constructions such as those of architecture or mathematics. I must stress, however, that I am not a calligrapher as such – I am an artist who uses writing in his work. I share some of the same intentions as a calligrapher, but I have not been trained in the formal excellence of Arabic classical calligraphy, which requires a quite different formation and years of precise study.

PS: Do your works share an overarching idea or message?

RK: I think that it would be pretentious of me to claim that I am trying to put across a particular message. Music, a parallel form of art can have great complexity and beauty without containing any specific ‘message’. My work evidently has an aesthetic component, and some of these parts can be vessels for specific thoughts or ‘meanings’ that I wish to communicate, but there is no such thing as an overriding position or, for example, a political message. Indeed even as the creator of my work I must still allow each spectator to receive what I have done in his or her own particular way. Each person sees the same thing, but they might also all arrive at very different perceptions and interpretations of the meaning of a work. This is very important since that is how the exchange is maintained, and how an artist communicates with his or her viewers.

I suppose on the largest scale, I could say that I leave, in my works, traces of my own passage, records of things in order that the spectator might know that I have been here, lived in this way, and had various thoughts. But I have no intention of teaching them something, of saying that this is how things are. Rather it’s a dialogue, a matter of showing them that this is the kind of truth that I have found for myself, and to have them question whether the values that they have found are similar or indeed largely divergent from my own.

If there is a large difference, so much the better, because then we have the possibility for engaging in a fruitful dialogue out of which both of us might come to see something larger than our own personal position. After forty years of having lived in the Occident, I am very aware of how much my experience has been formed and shaped by the things I have encountered and learnt here. It’s an ongoing exchange, and I believe that I have much to contribute to this place precisely because I bring ideas and a fertile imagination born out of my own past elsewhere. That is my function here – to ask questions and to stimulate a response, so that both sides of the dialogue are well represented. All I can offer is the profundity of who I have been, and who I have become, as I integrate myself into the particular conditions of this place. My art speaks almost exclusively of that ongoing interaction.

Photo Credits:

Rachid Koraichi, The Invisible Masters, 2008

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