Adel Abidin, the Helsinki-based Iraqi-Finnish artist who was named as the winner of the Ithra Art Prize’s 5th edition, has unveiled the winning piece in the great Hall of Ithra (the King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture) – a large-scale wall-hung piece titled ON (in Arabic: Aan), which draws together threads of selective memory, the fallibility of history and lost oral storytelling traditions.
The work is made of Japanese rice paper layered with starchy glue, a technique that Abidin effectively had to learn to achieve his goals. A repeated stamp of the word Aan form a surreal, abstract image of Basra, with the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flowing over the city.
The mural resulted from a year’s research by Abidin into the Zanj rebellion against the Abbasid Caliphate (it took place from 869 till 883) and is based on scenes Abidin imagined while reading stories of the revolt. “The aim of the rebellion was to free slaves and seek social justice, which interested me,” Abidin told The National. “So I dug deeper and noticed that most of what I was reading is all rewritten accounts based on the word of someone else, who heard the news from someone else – like Chinese whispers – and it would say ‘Aan'” (Aan in Arabic roughly translates here as ‘on the authority or account of’ this or that person).
“It’s an old way of oral storytelling and whenever I read a passage with Aan, I liked that it gives history this intangible, vulnerable aspect. I wanted to create a single piece that really represented the feeling I got when doing this research, this fragility of history.”
Indeed, history is often intangible, and it can be a challenge to find reliable archival sources. Arab history in particular is often shrouded in ambiguity, especially from Abbasid times, with a wide range of interpretations and augmentations.
The Zanj rebellion was a 15-year-long slave revolt around Basra in the South of Iraq that reportedly led to the deaths of tens of thousands. The Zanj themselves originally came from East Africa, though the uprising also involved other groups and its leader Ali bin Muhammad, a slave-descended Arab, is thought to have originated in present day Iran.
How Ali was able to maintain a fifteen-year rebellion, and develop not only an army of thousands of slaves but his own polity, with a capital in Contemporary historians – notably Al-Tabari and Al-Mas’udi – give a lot of detail but only selectively, and they obviously detest the Zanj and the revolt’s leader. But they don’t tell us how the rebellion proceeded with apparent success for so long, involving for instance the establishment of its own cities and civic authorities (plunder in one suggestion from modern historians of the period); or whether Ali’s claim to be descended from Ali ibn Talib, a companion of the Prophet, is at all well-founded; or even why the alternative theology he proposed was so attractive to the rebels.
And of course it’s the victors who write history. “We don’t have anything written by the Zanj, so we will never know their side of history,” said Abidin. “I started thinking in their shoes, how they reacted and how I could start creating their own identity in the story.”
So each Aan stamp in the mural represents different accounts of the rebellion’s history, with the many layers of paper and overlapping stamps suggesting the number and sometimes contradictory nature of the stories. Abidin talked about himself becoming a contributor to the story by creating the new multi-layered account. “This resonates with the stress of the stamping – if you stamp hard you get a strong ink imprint, or if used lightly it leaves only a trace.”
Selected by an independent jury from over 10,000 submissions, Abidin was awarded $100,000 plus the full funding required to bring his project to life – unsurprisingly, the Ithra Art Prize is the largest art grant in the region. The work is now part of Ithra’s permanent art collection in Dahran.
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