Pouran Jinchi IRAN/USA, 1959
Pouran Jinchi’s Recitation
40
The Qur’an, the Muslim book of revelations, is the subject of Pouran Jinchi’s Recitation. Jinchi is a trained calligrapher, and frequently uses Persian and Arabic scripts in her paintings and drawings. Her compositions are based on letters and phrases from Persian poetry and everyday language, which become visual motifs as they are layered in intricate arrangements or singled out as symbolic forms. Recitation, however, stands apart from her earlier works in taking a religious text as its source material. The Qur’an is the oldest and most sacred book of Islam, and has inspired calligraphic invention since it was first established as an authoritative text in the seventh century. But no matter how elaborate the calligraphy or illumination, the artist is forbidden from taking poetic license with the text itself. Recitation renegotiates this religious edict. The “Tajvid” series, the main component of Recitation, is a group of large ink on paper drawings that unfurl from the ceiling to the ground. On these scrolls, Jinchi has copied out selections of the Qur’an by hand, producing a text that is faithful to the original in every way, but is missing all of the consonant letters. Only the guiding vowel sounds are left: These are the diacritical marks, or the tajwid (tajvid in Persian) of Qur’anic recitation. Tajwid is a system of stylistic rules that guides the reader through the conventions of Arabic pronunciation, intended to maintain the text’s consistency through time, for readers from different language backgrounds. But in Jinchi’s rewriting of the Qur’an, the lack of main consonant letters means that the text is completely unreadable. All that is left of the text are the vowel sounds, the chapter 10
