11.12.2008–25.01.2009
Exhibition

Nabila Irshaid
Disko Diwan

Opening: 10 December 2008, 8 p.m.

Artist Talk with Nabila Irshaid,
January 8, 2008, 7 p.m.

Simultaneously with the annual exhibition in the main hall, the Salzburg Kunstverein opened the show „Disko Diwan ” by Nabila Irshaid, winner of the sponsorship award for Salzburg in 2007, in the Cabinet.

In her exhibition Nabila Irshaid varied the tradition of Mu´allaqat*. Four poems on love and faith were applied to the wall on transparent sheets. The poems, which come from Arab and Jewish cultures, were presented in the native languages of the authors (Ibn Arabi, Abu l-Ala’ Al-Ma’arri, Hilde Domin and Mahmoud Darwish) along with translations into German or Arabic, respectively. The poetry was thereby freed from paper as a medium and the writing is perceived as a semantic symbol and ornament in the three dimensional space. The poems broached the issue of the „religion of love ” as a universal faith, the faith of the heart. At the same time, the poems, just recently set to music by the composers Hossam Mahmoud and Herbert Grassl, could be heard from four loud speakers. In the Cabinet - darkened, eggplant colored, and lit only by a disco ball – a sensual space installation was created, where the viewer could visually and aurally discover and contextualize the poem in the play of light. The view of the connecting element between cultures and religions should be made clear.

*Mu´allaqat is a 4th century pre-Islamic collection of poetry, lore indicates that the individual poems were hung up on cloth panels in the Ka´aba in Mecca. Everyone who entered the holy place was also meant to come in contact with poetry.

Nabila Irshaid was born in 1964 in Osnabrück, Germany and lives and works in Salzburg. Between 1994 and 1999 she studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts) in Hamburg. In her films, video work, and installations she deals with issues of cultural difference again and again. In 2006, within the scope of “OFFMozart,” she developed the installation “FLYING CARPET,” which she presented in the Museum der Moderne Salzburg Rupertinum, among other places.