Spirit, the mythological bird of art Ali Najjar’s text has been translated form Arabic from Amir Khatib and I have tried to make it as more “readable” as possible but here there are two important elements you must understand before reading. First, Arabic can be a very poetic language with a lot of allegories and metaphors difficult to translate and secondly Ali – a very good personal friend – is not only one of the best contemporary artists, but he is also a poet and sometimes his writing is a poem that follows pathways of a painting or vice versa. - Thanos Kalamidas
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n Iraqi popular tradition, the soul dissociates from the body the moment of death, tensile into space like a hidden bird. These birds, always accordingly to the Iraqi mythology, move to the other wold ignoring or better avoiding any acknowledge of their connection with our world. Our spirit that left us with those birds and want to heavens will never be seen again. Even though a fantasy, this tale describes in multiple ways the weight of the physical world, the lightness of the spirit (a bird can carry it) and the same time our struggle between the impossible and the eternal. In fact in the end the bird absolutely disconnects from our physical world showing that eternity is something we cannot catch from our physical form. The same time Sumerian traditions want a boat to carry the dead into a new world. In this new world they find food and drinks but this is depending on the generosity of the alive and the sacrifices they have done. Oddly there are sculptures describing this other world as old as since 3,000BC. So what the spirit really is and does it really have to do with death?
