introduction
by Dr. Erich Paproth

Ladies and Gentlemen, my dear colleagues, and... – I would especially like to extend hearty greetings to all of you as friends of bookart here in the Museum der Arbeit in Hamburg this evening.

It is my pleasure to draw your attention to our very special “baby”, which has in the meantime become a real teenager and is threatening to fly the nest:

Contemporary Bookart from the Arab World

This wonderful exhibit of Arabic bookart now runs the risk of falling apart.

With combined forces and the implementation of everything possible to implement, we pulled this exhibit together. I remember how, more than a year ago now, we developed the idea and nurtured initial hopes for a magnificent realization, also in collaboration with the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt, possibly, but certainly with other cultural institutions. This expectation was not only based on personal contacts, but on a collaboration with the library in the year 2002. Also decisive for our project was the call of the Frankfurt Book Fair, a bearer of clear hope. But then, by the spring of 2004, practically every thought about institutional collaboration had been ruined once and for all. When we received only meager response to our first invitation for participants, we met to bury the project “Contemporary Arab Bookart”.

Yet because the idea for this project seemed so daring, courageous, and interesting, we – in particular the organization BuchDruckKunst in Hamburg under its President, Ms. Wibke Bartkowiak – we agreed on a renewed and tougher approach to the theme. It simply couldn’t be possible that my profound experience of Arab bookart should turn about to be only a wilting plant. My personal contacts with the Arab world were then employed to make more or less mouth-to-mouth propaganda for our project. Hilda Hiary (Jordan) and Mohamed Abu El Naga (Egypt) are not only fantastic artists, but were also excellent communicators. We owe them a great debt of gratitude! Slowly but surely, e-mails arrived, the first books appeared, and initial rumors and realizations about institutional cooperation with the arts and artists in Arab countries surfaced. We had finally found a path that could be traveled and, as you can peruse in our little catalogue or on the website www.arabbookart.com, selected 19 artists from the numerous submissions, artists whose accumulated works are remarkable and which the Museum der Arbeit – thank you – provided a particularly accessible and open venue in the framework of this weekend’s trade fair.

Among these 19 artists are 5 women, which more or less reflects the rather high proportion of female bookart representatives. And in this regard, please remember that we are here speaking about artists living in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Palestine, or Bahrain, working and living there.

At this point, I would also like to mention, from my personal experience as well, that the social estimation of plastic artists in Arabic countries is distinctly higher than in our own regions. To view this situation as a challenge and consider it an incentive is something this exhibition seeks to remind us of and to contribute to.

So then, what is Arabic about this bookart? And please don’t ask what “bookart” or even “bookart in the Arab World” is. Or: What is the Arab World? I would love to pass the last question along to the directors of last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair!

Providing answers to such questions... What is the “book”? Here, too, we would end up in an etymological labyrinth (and here a reference to the wonderful work with this name by Cosima Lukashevish) which wonderfully and beautifully carries us off to the Middle and Northern European language realm, and ultimately to the Indian one (and thus back to the Arab World). In any case, the word “book” does not lead to “Buche“, the German for “beech” tree, which indeed has nothing at all to do with the word “Buch”, German for “book”, or “Buchstabe”, German for “letter”.

“Book” is a “lot”, a “collection”, a “piece” or a “portion” of an intellectual value, which, materialized was driven to a sign/symbol, a “magical sign”.

“Bookart”, then, is the “capability” of placing/leading/putting/bringing-together, dealing with the sign, the “magical sign”.

Which brings us back to the question about the “Arabic”. What is specific to the Arabic? Is it the arduous but significant examination – quite in the wake of the Structuralists – of the philosophical dimension of the history of cartography? Is it the arduous but ennobling search for one’s “self” in the “other”, as Dr. Mohamed Abu El Naga presents it to us in his catalogue contribution? It is simpler and more direct to perceive the debate in one’s own feelings of foreignness. Look at the works of these artists. For example:

Ms. Amal Elgamal from Alexandria,

or “Notes from planet called earth”, the work so highly regarded in Frankfurt, by Mr. Herrn Faisal Samra, born in Iraq and today again living there in part and otherwise in Jordan.

Particularly in their materiality, the works by Mr. Mohamed Youssef and Ms Lilian Karnuk seem unusual, perhaps even requiring time to get used to, but specific for the Arabic language realm, and unique: leather, painted leather, tooled.

Moving in the opposite direction, “Privat Book”, a work by Ayman Elsemary from Cairo, Egypt, stands out. What is he looking for in his allusion to “Brit Art” – a beautiful comprehensible work!

Are we looking for the “Oriental” or the stories from “A Thousand and One Nights”? We don’t find them here. Our eyes only slowly open to this wonderful, unbelievably active cultural realm, which we hope to have provided a small section of by bringing this exhibition together with respect and love. In any case, it bears witness to high quality, also of our own visibility and ability to perceive.

I would like explicitly to direct you to our little catalogue. Self-portrayals and extensive pictorial material await you there to open your eyes for something different, which then also becomes something of your own, understandable, and remains sensitive and worthy.

Thank you for your attention.