Correr Museum celebrates 700 years since Marco Polo's death with an exhibition on calligraphic cultures

From April 24 to October 15, 2024 at the Museo Correr in Venice, in the Galleria dell’Ala Napoleonica, the exhibition entitled THE WAY OF WRITING Seven hundred years of calligraphic art between East and West, curated by Monica Viero and Monica Dengo, can be visited. This is a new Fondazione Musei Civici event designed to promote the knowledge and practice of handwriting; this year dedicated to the celebration of the 700th anniversary of Marco Polo’s death and the calligraphic cultures that the merchant encountered on his journey en route to the East.

Six contemporary artists from Armenia, Iran, Iraq, China, and Italy engage in dialogue with ancient documents and manuscripts, preserved by the Correr Museum Library and on public display: a journey in which the Silk Road becomes the Way of Writing, to investigate the different artistic, historical, and cultural declinations of calligraphy. The authors in the exhibition Gayane Yerkanyan and Sarko Meené, Golnaz Fathi, Hassan Massoudy, Mingjun Luo, and Monica Dengo, different in geographical origin, culture, age, heritage expressive and material, are united by their particular relationship with the calligraphy and handwriting of their country of origin, the investigation of what the forms convey as symbols, forms in space, or signs, and maintaining a relationship of cultural identification with their origins. Examples include two precious manuscripts of the Quran from the 17th and 18th centuries illuminated in gold leaf, a volume for the catechism of Dominican missionaries in Chinese, passports, “health passes” and letters of faith with Islamic characters in Turkish and Arabic, commercial attestations for the trade of precious stones in Armenian, to a rare specimen of Tripitaka passages with Burmese characters on palm leaves.

Gayane Yerkanyan ’s (Yerevan, Armenia, 1989) work consists of decontextualizing Armenian letters to offer new visual and symbolic meanings. There are no words in her works; the meaning is the letters themselves. The artist’s works in the exhibition, in particular, have an approach closer to geometric drawing than to the direct and spontaneous sign proper to handwriting. Hers is a sign that is almost devoid of gestures and yet laden with those imprecisions that are characteristic of direct handwork, which does not intend to hide its humanity. In her works, Sarko Meené, stage name of Armine Sarkavagyan (Yerevan, Armenia, 1984), reflects on the exploration of meanings related to memory, handwriting and Armenian letters through the manuscripts of her grandfather, the writer and poet Karpis Surenyan, particularly through his book The Mystery of Being Armenian. Fascinated by the heavily edited and barred pages, she superimposes a wire mesh over her grandfather’s written text, creating depth and allowing light to penetrate through the layers of matter. Symbolically, the stainless steel mesh represents protection. The deceptive appearance of the wire mesh, initially resembling silk, emphasizes themes of femininity and strength, the various aspects of life as the reflection of continuity between past, present and future. Golnaz Fathi (Tehran, Iran, 1972) combines traditional calligraphy with contemporary artistic expression by stretching the boundaries of the very concept of calligraphy: while maintaining the visual essence of the written word, Fathi makes what she calls non-writings, that is, writings devoid of semantic value and intended to be interpreted not with the eyes but through the heart. The inspiration for the scrolls in this exhibition comes from the poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273). Each scroll is reminiscent of a litany, an obsessive repetition of forms that we would like to read but cannot as well as the artist cannot read them, thus becoming works that seem to be a negation of codified language, the paradoxical image of the impossible attempt at real communication of being. Hassan Massoudy (Najaf, Iraq, 1944) blends the essences of the contemporary and the historical by interweaving elements of Eastern and Western artistic traditions. He simultaneously breaks away from its boundaries, promoting an evolution of writing forms. Inspirations for her compositions are drawn from a wide range of sources, ranging from the verses of poets to the prose of writers from different cultures to the eternal wisdom of folk sayings. Divided between Chinese and Swiss cultures, Mingjun Luo (Nanchong, China, 1963) conceives of her work as a “third space,” a hybrid and fertile ground where she develops her own language, in a continuous movement between Asia and the West. His series in the exhibition Break the Character contradicts Chinese tradition by presenting fragmented and exploded ideograms to the point of abstraction. The deconstruction of Chinese characters and their loss of semantic value causes them to become abstract, while retaining the essence of traditional ink calligraphy. In the circular work Traces of Writing, which contains the ideograms of the Daodejing, a text of Taoism attributed to the Chinese philosopher Laozi, the artist writes characters that seem to disappear in a fog, melting into oblivion. The text, he says, is his response to the traces of history that come and go, false and real, unpredictable. The work Meravigliarsi by Monica Dengo (Camposampiero, Padua, Italy, 1966) is a way of going beyond boundaries, exploring the concept of “boundless writing,” expressed by the loss of definition of the edges of the letters, which dissolve into the space of the canvas. From a distance the circular work looks like a flower, as if by trespassing beyond the edges, the letters become a single form. Some of the letters can still be read, going so far as to make up the word WONDERFUL. Viewed closely, however, the black marks become more hazy and the word, losing definition, dissolves.

The exhibition at the Museo Correr is part of the calligraphy review La via della scrittura, curated by Monica Viero, which includes two workshops of four days each scheduled for October 2024, at the Abate Zanetti Glass School in Murano, in collaboration with MUVE Academy. The courses will include a Western calligraphy teacher and teachers from Arabic, Chinese, and Tibetan calligraphic cultures.

For info: https://www.visitmuve.it/

Image: Hassan Massoudy (Iraq), With clay we create pots, but the emptiness within them gives the pot its function (Laozi) (2003; ink and pigments on stiff paper, 27 x 20 cm). Courtesy of Fondazione Musei Civici Venezia

Correr Museum celebrates 700 years since Marco Polo's death with an exhibition on calligraphic cultures

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