Written by: Haroon Shuaib
Posted on: October 13, 2023 | 
| 中文
Untitled by Anjum Alix Noon
“Poetry, Illustration, Book-Art”, the art exhibition at the charming 8B2 Gallery in Chak Shahzad from 7 till 12 October was a unique experiment in ingenuity. Visual artist Anjum Alix Noon collaborated with the poet and artist Ilona Yusuf to create some striking interpretations of words on canvases, installations and enigmatic book-art. The exhibition was on display from the 7th to the 12th of October.
The exhibition at 8B2 Gallery in Chak Shahzad, Islamabad
Anjum, having done multiple creative collaborations previously with other art practitioners is a winner of Punjab University (PU) Award in Lahore and Le diplôme national d'arts plastiques (DNAP), also known as Paris Design Awards, in France. Nature has been her subject and her art has existed on an axis where reality and visual diction stretch proportionally. In “Poetry, Illustration, Book Art”, she advances her vision as objects of nature such as birds, dragonflies, and lizards start to become part of a lucid fairy-scape. Ilona Yusuf is an English language poet, editor, furniture designer and print-maker and together they explore the sequential nature of the poems and their transferal into the spatial. The exhibition, made up of both individual authorship and shared authorship of poetry, illustrations, books and installations, an intersection of text and images.
Anjum Alix Noon showing the many folds of a piece of book-art and Ilona Yusuf
According to Ilona, “There is an extensive tradition of writers composing ekphrastic poetry, a lucid description of artworks and likewise, artists have related inspiration derived from the written works. Book-art is a contemporary art practice conceptualizing the form of the book to express sensations. Artists’ books or sketch books, which often include images and notes, became a popular concept to explore though out the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, poets found in the Artists’ Books a space they could share with the visual artist. Book-Art is a rupture with the traditional illustrated book and often challenges the traditional ideas about it. It opens to poetry and visual arts a shared space, bridging the intricacies of sequential and spatial concepts. To put it briefly, text being sequential and relying on a logical order, and image being spatial that operates within a designated two- or three-dimensional area.” Ilona contributed two of her contemporary poems: one a cycle of poems called ‘Garden Sequences’, and the other, ‘Arizona Sunset’, to this creative investigation. For her, the inspiration came from a verse of Shiekh Saadi Shirazi, a Persian poet and prose writer, whose two most famous works are ‘Bustan’ (The Orchard) and ‘Gulistan’ (The Rose Garden). For Ilona, the following words of Saadi proved to be a stimulus: “If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft, And from thy slender share two loaves alone to thee are Left, Sell one, and with the dole Buy hyacinths to feed the soul’.
Untitled by Anjum
Following the inspiration from the Medieval era poet from a distant land, Ilona wrote eighteen poems for Anjum to draw from. In one of her pieces titled “Hollowed Bones”, she writes:
“Iridescence ablaze
in sun’s light
sharp whistle of feather
darting dive
then hovering
near still
fluid gyrations
of belly to tail
illimitable
nano seconds of
constant palpation.”
For Anjum, this collaboration was a chance to explore several creative aspects in this work, ranging from collaborative practice, concepts of book-art, difference between image and illustration and development of installations. “As a form of contemporary art and culture, a collaborative practice, by definition, is a teamwork in tension between flexibility and inflexibility. It is a stimulus to one’s creative process, that as a visual artist, I find absorbing. Even so, appropriation and assimilation ensue, the collaborative elements maintain their individuality,” Anjum reflects. One of the most fascinating dimensions where artistic expression between the poet and the artist found its natural manifestation is the book-art. “Book-Art delves into the form of the book; I have wanted to preserve the single dimensional value of the surface of a page, as a main focal point of this work. It stresses the flexibility from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional physical aspects of the material. On one hand, the flatness of the sheet of paper and on the other, the sculptural quality of the book. The single sheet is made of two unfolded pages, both two-dimensional spaces. The choice of using the accordion fold book retains closest the format of the single sheet. To accentuate the function of a two-dimensional image, I asked Ilona to share authorship on three images which intentionally have retained their original form. The page came first and then its deconstruction and metamorphosis, by folding into a book form, with 32 two-dimensional surfaces or pages. In textual poetry, the poet is bound by the sequential order of text. In doing so, it has created, for the poet space to explore and place the poetry”, Anjum adds.
Untitled by Anjum Alix Noon
The experience of Ilona reciting her poems to the visitors and then a walk through the elegantly designed 8B2 Gallery to observe the canvases and illustrations and book-art, was truly multidimensional and immersive. The poet and the artist were at hand to explain the concept behind the art-books and encourage the visitors to open and navigate through the Japanese Orihon styled accordion-folded structures. Orihon is a style of Japanese codex, a historic precursor to modern books with an accordion-folded structure, which was prevalent somewhere between a modern sewn book and an ancient scroll. According to Anjum, “Traditionally, illustrated books encompasses form, function and purpose, mass printing editions and the audience. I differentiate image and illustration. I refer to image as a fine artwork, which is a unique piece, and an illustration refers to traditional illustrated books that can be copied. This has been shown by repeated depictions of several motifs from Ilona’s poem and small illustrations portraying the poet.”
One such piece from Ilona’s poetry is,
“Dragonfly wing
tracing itself
gossamer on the terrazzo
luminescent shadow
transparent web
woven with oval looping lines.”
Untitled by Anjum Alix Noon
Perhaps the most profound takeaway from “Poetry, Illustration, Book-Art” is the realization of the exhilarating realm of collaboration and fusion in the world of art, and the possibilities such unions reveal. Many fascinating possibilities arise when artists from different disciplines join forces, pushing the boundaries of creativity and creating unique, boundary-breaking immersive artworks.
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