Ali Ansari

Metal leaf, pen and collage on cardboard. In Muraqqa of Street and Muraqqa of Penetralia, Ansari brings the tradition of Muraqqa making into the concept of contemporary objects. He combines the love poems of Saadi, a classical Persian poet, and the illustrations of Mohammad Tajvidi, an Iranian modern miniature painter with ready-made architectural model-making materials including brick wall patterns and scaled model roads in a Muraqqa-making manner to assemble a sculpture-like abstract model of an architectural structure. For the word sculpture, there is the word "Mojassame" in Persian which is derived from the word "Tejassom" which means materializing that refers to the act of giving a body to an imagination. In this sense, these two artworks are more of Mojassames than sculptures or artist's books. In both Muraqqas the artist generates new concrete poems out of Saadi's poetry by cutting bits of his poems from a printed book and collaging those bits next to each other to shape a new poetic form and content. The same is done with Tajvidi's illustrations in Murraqa of Penetralia where the artist cuts bits of Tajvidi's illustrations from an original printed version of the book and puts them together to compose a new image and narrate a nonlinear narrative. These two Artworks conceptualize the poetic aesthetics of love in the sociopolitical context of Iranian culture in an abstract geometrical way as Muraqqa of Street indicates the subject in the street as the most common public space where love and resistance happens and Muraqqa of Penetralia represents the theme in the innermost part of the house as the private space where love is freely revealed. PS: A Muraqqa (Persian: عّرقَمُ ( is an album in book form containing miniature paintings and specimens of calligraphy, normally from several different sources, and other matter. It reflects a collage-like quality in which each page is made up of several sheets of paper, cut up and arranged within decorative borders. A Muraqqa could be compiled over time, page by page, and often included miniatures and pages of calligraphy from older books that were broken up for this purpose, and allowed a wider circle of collectors access to the best painters and calligraphers, although they were also compiled by, or presented to, shahs and emperors.