The Art of Receiving: Afaf Zurayk's Return Journeys

Reviewed by Kareem Estefan (Brown University) Published on H-AMCA (May, 2019) Commissioned by Jessica Gerschultz (University of Kansas) Afaf Zurayk, Sarah Rogers, ed. Afaf Zurayk: Return Journeys. Beirut: Twig Collaborative/Saleh Barakat Gallery, 2019. 96 pp. An expansive yet intimate view of a singular artist whose career has yet to be sufficiently celebrated, the monograph Return Journeys documents four decades of paintings and poems by Afaf Zurayk, many of which were recently on view for the first major retrospective of the artist's oeuvre in her hometown of Beirut (January 18–March 1, 2019). The exhibition at Saleh Barakat Gallery and its eponymous publication offer a welcome opportunity to appraise the work of an artist whose abstract paintings and multimedia works are remarkably subtle, as Zurayk frequently opts for a small scale, employs a minimal, earthy or black-and-white palette, and prioritizes explorations of light and line over recognizable subject matter. Zurayk's work is unmistakably personal, probing the vulnerable depths and complexities of emotion, but it is not confessional. Rather than divulge details or depict discrete situations, she continually pivots around potent symbols and forms—keyholes, eyes, faces—to reveal a subjectivity that is porous to the world, shaped in precarious relation to others and to nature. Since the early 2000s contemporary Lebanese art has acquired international renown, via artists such as Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, for theoretically sophisticated works about Lebanon's 1975–90 civil war that use experimental documentary methods—mostly in lens-based media—to examine the politics of archives, memory, and representation. Yet the important, now-canonized contributions of the "war generation" of Lebanese artists risk overshadowing a more diverse spectrum of creative practices in Lebanon, one that reaches back before the war to painters such as Huguette Caland and Helen Khal, both major influences on Zurayk. It might be said that the rupture of the civil war created a polarity between those conceptually oriented artists who took the war as their subject, and those more painterly artists for whom questions of form and material remained central—while the subject of war often entered the work, it was transmuted without remark. In light of this history, the title Return Journeys carries a dual resonance. It may suggest Zurayk's own displacements from and returns to Lebanon (she first departed for Washington, DC in 1983); however, if it points to the political conditions of migration and diaspora that have marked the lives of millions of Lebanese, it more strongly evokes the psychological and spiritual travels undertaken by the artist, journeys which may arise from emigration or exile but are, ultimately, universal. In the wall text that frames the exhibition, Zurayk presents her art as a journey inwards: "My life in art is a perpetual return to what resonates within me and what prompts me to open gates into unknown gardens: to plant and to weed, to prune and to cultivate, both senses and thoughts into a coherent, organic and complex whole." The artist's horticultural metaphors signal a psychic pull toward nature as an organizing life force, but the attraction of the organic does not render the self a timeless entity detached from the world. In addition to Sarah Rogers's introduction and Zurayk's essay, Return Journeys includes six brief texts by patrons and colleagues of the artist, including the exhibition curator, Sylvia Agémian, gallerist Saleh Barakat, and supporters ranging from an urban development expert to a Jungian psychologist. The immense value of this monograph lies not in its prefatory essays, but in the compilation of a remarkable artistic oeuvre that can be appreciated in its breadth for the first time. Reproducing Zurayk's drawings, paintings, and sculptures from 1978 to the present in three chronological sections (1978–2000, 2000–10, 2010–19), Return Journeys affords an immersive experience of slow attunement to the artist's distinct visual language. Zurayk's monograph organizes her work chronologically, but her practice has followed less of an arc than a spiral. Themes, symbols, styles, and colors recur cyclically, while her art gradually inclines toward more profound abstraction and spiritual intensity. Zurayk's earliest drawings and paintings remain the most direct in their subject matter and more frequent tendency toward figuration. "My Lebanon" (1985), for example, is a series of fifteen small ink and watercolor drawings that render distinctive features of the artist's home country—its palms and cedars, hills, and sunlit balconies—with a childlike simplicity and warmth. The interplay of light and darkness is a constant feature of Zurayk's painting. Return Journeys is perceptibly a visual diary of continual and perhaps unconscious returns that underscore the artist's process as a subjective voyage with an indeterminate and circuitous path. The full review continues online at H-Net.