Pouran Jinchi

IRAN/USA, 1959

Pouran Jinchi’s Recitation

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

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titles, and the numbers that mark the end of each verse.

In Recitation, the Qur’an is presented not as text but as image; as the site of a painterly intervention within a system of signs and meanings. In Recitation, the Qur’an is as much an idea to be recognized and a form to be perceived as it is an actual text to be read. Through a single gesture of erasure, Jinchi brings focus back onto the visual pleasure of the religious text, while teasing apart the apparent unity of religious form. As she separates consonants from vowels, she also subtracts legibility from the “recitation.” The Qur’an (whose name literally means “to recite”) becomes a stand-in for its own identity. Yet Jinchi remains within the bounds of prescribed behavior toward the sacred Muslim text: Its authority has not been tampered with—it has been wholly displaced.

Within the history of Islamic art, legibility was often secondary in use of Qur’anic text, whether in lavishly illustrated manuscripts or in architectural ornamentation. In Recitation, Jinchi draws on the histories of the Arabic alphabet as abstract geometric shapes, and the Qur’an as a bearer of collective meanings. The rational system and minimal, repetitive forms of Recitation ask us to reconsider the ways in which any text—the Qur’an being a prime example— establishes a communicative relationship with its audience.

Media Farzin

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