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Emna Zghal: Contemporary American Artist
How did your journey start as an artist?
“First, I grew up in a home where there were paintings on the wall. My father painted, and his last oil painting was done when I was 2 months old. I never thought that I had the predilection to be an artist while growing up. At 17 I started doing painting on silk, and I was fascinated by the medium, and I decided to go to art school after I graduated high school, and that was the start of my art journey.”
You have been quoted: “Poetry has always been central to my art practice; it is my source of inspiration and method of thinking. Whether in my abstract images or in my work with text, I view all the marks I make on the picture plane as words, as emotionally evocative, if not completely decipherable, symbolic entities.”
Who are the poets that influence you? Are they Arab, Western, modern, jahalieh? Adonis inspired a new direction of your paintings? How so?
“The poets that influenced me are many; Adonis, Baudelaire are important ones. I am now delving into the works of Borges. I grew up reciting Abu Kassim Al Chabbi. Somewhere in my early teens I was in love with the universe of Jacques Prévert. Both made me want to write poetry, reading them left me with a creative charge and a license to experiment. When I started to paint, I wanted very much to function like a poet. I was not interested in narrative and less still in theory. Things have changed a bit since.”
Plato’s philosophy, Islamic art, organic wood, geometric figures, it’s really fascinating how you incorporate all those vastly different entities. Can you tell us about that?
“Ah Plato! Well this wise man of his day—and beyond—proposed to banish poets from his Ideal City, because of their unruly nature. Plato’s work, while seen as seminal to Western culture, had also tremendous influence on Arab and Islamic culture. Islamic aesthetic draws from neo-Platonic concepts of absolute perfection. Geometry is an expression of that aesthetic. One cannot see a straight line in nature, but one can mentally deduce it; the same goes for perfect symmetry and so on.
I, on the other hand, am of the school of the Spanish architect Gaudi, who found beauty in things crooked and not straight. He threw many of these geometric tiles from the top of a crane and applied their randomly broken shapes to his organically shaped buildings. I learned to appreciate tiles and stucco work in traditional Tunisian architecture through my professors at the Beaux Arts in Tunis, but I found it exasperating to have to use a ruler! I wanted my colors to explode out of the shapes and if possible out of the picture-plane. The infinite aspect of these tiles and stucco motifs was, and still is, very fascinating to me. In short my work wants to preserve that sense of infinity, but without the rigidity and the predictable aspect of geometry.”
You tackle a myriad of issues through your art? In addition to space and philosophy, you tackle social issues such as racism, charity, media propaganda? How did you do that through your book Cultures of War?
“Cultures of War came from my experience living in the United States during the build up for war in Iraq and the actual invasion. I was trying to understand why arguments like, We will liberate them and bring them democracy, resonated with the American public! ….I wanted to explore what traits of American culture made some Americans amenable to such thoughts. Monolinguism, racism, charity, and an overrated sense of strength came to mind. I gave myself the assignment to use the words of American poets, authors, and leaders to address those traits: people like Baldwin, Sontag, Chomsky, and Mother Jones among others. In my eyes, they are all poets that are thought of both as insightful and foolish. In other words, the breed Plato would have banished; these voices are the promise of a potential renewal of a society. I end the book with a verse of the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz translated by the American Naomi Lazard: Someday perhaps the poem/ murdered and still bleeding on every page/ will be revealed to you.”
How does being an Arab woman play into your art?
“To the first question, I am inclined to answer: I don’t know. Being Arab, Muslim, African, Francophone, and even woman are all, and at least in part, cultural constructs that do not have a fixed meaning. They do evolve and mutate as people who carry these identities do. In my lifetime, all have meant different things at different times and contexts.
To take Arab, for instance. While I was a young artist in Tunisia, it meant a more expanded sense of belonging than simply being Tunisian. I was trying to learn everything I could about modern and contemporary Iraqi paintings, and how they negotiated the cultural issues of the time.
When I moved to New York City and met Arabs from the Mashriq, I realized that it meant something different to them than it did to me. I encountered people for whom being Arab carries a strong ethnic meaning, and rarely does this sense of ethnicity make room for other manifestations of the Arab identity….
So to answer your question about how being Arab plays into my art, it does so with poetry. And while poetry is not exclusively Arab, poetry is a very valued art in Arab societies. Having access to the language is an enormous privilege.”
Ahmad K Minkara
DIA Magazine