Decolonization and Calligraphic Abstraction

Postwar decolonization engendered the rise of modernist calligraphic abstraction in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. An intensive search for new artistic languages began at that time, which would seek to recover expressivity that had been repressed under colonialism and that would also actively produce a new modern culture. Modernist experiments in calligraphic abstraction, by artists such as Ibrahim El-Salahi (Sudan) and Anwar Jalal Shemza (Pakistan), have foregrounded textual, abstract, and calligraphic modes and evacuated iconic signifiers. The illegibility of modernist calligraphy—in its dialogue with postcubist figuration and in its nonornamental renderings—reterritorializes the Arabic/Persian/Urdu script, foregrounding its discursivity, while also making its aesthetic permeable to the outside, thus problematizing a simple homology between art and national identity.