LipanjePuntin artecontemporanea - Roma is proud to present I Am You, a solo show by Wijdan curated by Khalid Khreis.

The exhibition I Am You is the artist’s humble gift to Rome, the city she loves, and to its people, who have given her so much love. Love is the feeling at the core of this exhibition. For Wijdan love is above all an enduring and sublime source of inspiration and has to be conceived as a condition of harmonious coexistence, as the willingness to establish a direct communication between the self and the other.

Wijdan’s own artistic practice is situated at the cutting edge of the modern calligraphic styles in the visual arts that incorporate contemporary ideas and western media. Attempting to catch the deep essence of the relation between human beings and surrounding environment, as according to the Sufism, Wijdan lives a perpetual state of enamourment with the world, people, beauty, nature and love itself: “…in my second solo exhibition in Rome I depict love with colour and line. I continue to play on the sufi idiom "Ýou are Me" that signifies the unity between the lover and the beloved, be it God, person or nature. I deeply believe that sufis have attained the highest form of love through their acceptance of all regardless of difference in faith, nature, appearance, weakness or strength”. Therefore for Wijdan the word “love” does not refer to an amorous feeling between two persons, as in all the anthropocentric narratives by now turned into a profitable source of gain (not only in the “western” world), as much as a not exclusive branched scheme of deep-rooted relationships linking all that exists in an animistic union. Wijdan is a calligraphic artist, not a calligrapher, a reason why she loves to work on the two levels of words: form and meaning. The bright colours and their pattern support the text in an unpredictable and peculiar combination; likewise the text seems to evoke the energy materialized by shapes and colours. The perfect harmony between these elements is just one of the many expressions of love as it is described by the Sufi doctrine.

Wijdan studied History and Politics at Beirut University College whilst continuing her artistic studies under teachers such as the Italian Armando Prön and the acclaimed Jordanian artist Muhana Durra, one of the first to introduce western abstraction into the mainstream of Jordanian art. In 1993 she received a Ph.D. in History of Islamic Art, from the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London. In 1979, Wijdan founded the Royal Society of Fine Arts in Jordan and a year later established the Jordan National Art Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman. In 2002, she was appointed Dean of the College of Arts and Design, which she established at the University of Jordan. Wijdan, author of several books on Islamic art, is the current Jordanian Ambassador to Italy.

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via di Montoro 10 – 00186 Roma
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