Pouran Jinchi and the Marks Left When the Words Are Gone

In 2009 Pouran Jinchi began painting pages of the Quran with the words taken out. What remains in her Tajvid series are the small signs that tell a reader how to pronounce the sacred text, together with the markers that divide it into chapter and verse, the sura and the aya. She copies these from the pages of different Qurans and reproduces them faithfully. Only the text itself is missing, as Meer described the series when it was shown in New York in 2018.

The idea is simple to state and hard to look at for long. Tajvid is the discipline of correct recitation: pronunciation, phrasing and the attitude proper to reading holy words. Ordinary Arabic writing leaves those diacritical marks out, since readers do not need them. In the Quran they guide the reader to reproduce the sound of divine speech exactly. With the words removed, a set of instructions for approaching the holy becomes a code with no subject, floating on the canvas. Jinchi keys each painting to a single colour, blue, yellow or green, which pushes the marks further toward pure form while never quite letting go of their meaning.

From Mashhad to New York

Jinchi was born in 1959 in Mashhad, Iran, and now lives and works in New York. She was trained in traditional calligraphy from childhood, according to an interview in Islamic Arts Magazine, and that early discipline shapes everything she has made since. The calligrapher’s training is about control: the correct proportions of each letter, the right weight of the stroke, the hierarchy of a page. Her work as a contemporary artist takes the same skills and turns them toward breaking those rules apart.

The Vilcek Foundation, which showed her work in 2008, described the method concisely. Starting from traditional Persian calligraphy, she takes the letters of the Persian alphabet apart, repeating and layering them until they turn abstract, producing work that is plainly contemporary. A letter repeated until it stops being legible becomes a texture. A letter layered over itself becomes a field. The source never disappears, but the reading does.

An exhibition about arrival

The Vilcek exhibition put that practice in a specific frame. Il Lee and Pouran Jinchi ran from 2 June to 31 July 2008 and opened the foundation’s new headquarters in Manhattan, at 167 East 73rd Street, with a reception on 5 June. It paired Jinchi, from Iran, with Il Lee, from Korea, and was curated by Art Projects International. The foundation’s exhibition page presented both as foreign born artists whose work was rooted in the experience of immigration and integration, and described Jinchi’s mixed media paintings as drawing on Iran’s traditions of literature and calligraphy.

For Jinchi the frame is apt but not limiting. Her subject is less the experience of moving between countries than the experience of carrying a script, and the culture written in it, into a setting where most viewers cannot read it. To many of the people looking at her paintings in New York, the letters are already abstract. Jinchi makes that condition visible and then works with it.

The Blind Owl

Literature gave her a second major body of work. In 2013 Jinchi turned to The Blind Owl, the novel Sadegh Hedayat wrote in the late 1930s. The book is preoccupied with death and was, for the most part, banned in Iran, as the exhibition announcement on e-flux notes. She took as her starting point a sentence from the novel: “I write only for my shadow which is cast on the wall in front of the light. I must introduce myself to it.”

The series, shown in Dubai from 18 September to 24 October 2013, was her third solo exhibition with The Third Line, and it moved well beyond ink on canvas. The interview in Islamic Arts Magazine lists the works. Pink Painting is ink on canvas, 122 by 122 centimetres, and Black Painting is ink on canvas at 152.4 by 122 centimetres. Untitled #3 is made of copper and paint. Dots is ink and copper on paper in 95 pieces. The Blind Owl (Pattern) uses pens and copper on Shojoshi paper, in 71 pieces; The Blind Owl (Purple) is ink on paper, also in 71 pieces; Untitled #1 is enamel on panel, again in 71 pieces. Untitled #2 is plexiglass and permanent marker.

The recurring count of pieces suggests a work built in units, each sheet or panel carrying a fragment, so that the novel is distributed across a grid rather than read from beginning to end. The materials change the weight of the letters, literally. Ink on paper, copper, enamel on panel and marker on plexiglass each give the same source a different density, as if the narrator’s words had been tried out in one substance after another.

The announcement describes her as interpreting the Iranian tradition of calligraphy and Islamic geometry through contemporary aesthetics, and as relying on the weight of letters, phrases and quotations to carry her own narrative. In the interview, Jinchi linked her choice of Hedayat’s book to personal loss and to its themes of death and endings. She also offered an image of how she sees the relation between a life and the work that comes out of it: “The artist is the loving gardener tending to the tree in hope of a perfect fruit.”

Text you cannot read

Seen together, the Tajvid paintings and the Blind Owl works pull in opposite directions from the same source. In Tajvid the sacred words are absent and only the apparatus of reading remains. In The Blind Owl a once forbidden text is present, but broken into fragments across dozens of pieces until it resists being read. In both, Jinchi sets the viewer in the position of someone who knows that a text is there, and that it matters, without being able to take it in directly.

That position is not only formal. For a calligrapher trained in Mashhad and working in New York, the gap between seeing script and reading it is a daily fact. Her work does not try to close the gap. It makes the gap the subject, and treats it with the precision of the craft she learned as a child.

In collections

When Art Projects International in New York showed the Tajvid works from 1 May to 2 June 2018, the selection consisted of three large canvases and a large ink scroll on paper from the 2009 series. Meer reported that pieces from the series belong to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Both Meer and the 2013 announcement list her among the artists in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian Institution.

Those holdings place a set of marks designed to guide the voice through a holy text in museums where the visitors, for the most part, will meet them in silence. The pronunciation guides now guide nothing. They hang on the wall and wait for a reading that the painting has made impossible.