Since the beginning of the 20th century, Switzerland, particularly Geneva, has been home to artistic treasures that bear witness to rich cultural exchanges between peoples and regions across time. Among these treasures is the exceptional Jean Pozzi (1884-1967) Collection of Indo-Persian paintings, calligraphies and illuminations housed at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Geneva (MAH).

The internationally renowned artist, Ghiora Aharoni, based in New York, was invited by the MAH for a research residency on the MAH Collection, with a focus on the Pozzi Indo-Persian Collection1.

A graduate of Yale University, Aharoni’s work is in the collections of The Centre Pompidou, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Vatican, The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Morgan Library & Museum, The Huntington Library and Museum and The Anu Museum—as well as private collections around the world.

Marie-Eve Celio-Scheurer: Your artworks are characterized by engaging time and text, and an interest in exploring dualities, such as the intersection of religion and science, and the intertwined relationships of seemingly disparate cultures. Could you tell us more about these interests?

Ghiora Aharoni: I think of time and text as media in the same way that painting or sculpture are considered a medium. They are forms of creative expression through which we can explore notions that might seem unrelated or oxymoronic. For example, in my work I shift the viewer’s perception of time away from the conventional notion that time is a series of singular events that follow one another in a chronological order. Instead, if we see time as something fluid, rather than linear, then we would look at history as a series of vertical narratives that are simultaneous and symbiotic—stories that are interconnected and always occurring. And if we look at language as a cultural signifier, etymology shows us, very precisely, that cultures which we have been conditioned to perceive as being oppositional, are at their very core, intimately intertwined. So, employing time and text as an artistic lens allows us to expand or reconsider or shift our relationship with fixed notions we might have.

MEC: Many of your artworks contain text, some of which references religious scriptures. You even invented two scripts: Hebrabic© (your combination of Hebrew and Arabic) and Hindru© (your combination of Hindi and Urdu). What has motivated you to explore text in these ways?

GA: Text and language embody enormous energy, as they convey meaning and are also nuanced with the mores of their respective speakers. That’s magnified with sacred text, as it is a cultural codex that defines a belief system, and in turn its adherents. In The Genesis Series (Fig. 1), there are different creation narrative texts: mystical texts about creation as well as the Genesis narrative, and the Enuma Elish–written in cuneiform–one of the oldest known creation narratives. The various texts are juxtaposed with icons from other belief systems, including Hinduism and Islam. All these narratives coexist—all variations on the same story—and in the absence of a cultural hegemony or hierarchy, their similarities, their interrelated narratives emerge and that interconnectivity becomes the meta-narrative of the series. I want viewers to feel that connectivity.

With Hebrabic© and Hindru© I paired languages that have a perceived cultural conflict but in fact are closely related. (For instance, the words for “home” in Hebrew and Arabic are almost identical, because both are Semitic languages. While the alphabets of Hindi and Urdu are visually quite distinct – and loaded culturally – their spoken forms are quite close.) By combining them, I wanted to underscore their interconnectivity and create a metaphorical rumination on “oneness” by creating a single, yet shared, phrase that could be read by speakers of either language, though infused with the identity of both.

MEC: You like to quote "Languages are not strangers to one another" (Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 1955) and to insert Benjamin’s reflections into your art animations. Can you tell us more about this quotation and how Indo-Persian calligraphies, like the ones in the Pozzi Collection, might relate to your research?

GA: Aside from etymological connections, I feel that all languages resonate with a particular ethos and are ambassadors of their respective cultures. While they are all unique, they are related voices in the chorus that we call humanity. And from a visual perspective, languages are conjoined through the medium of mark making…every language is a series of marks, a parade of characters created by the shape-shifting of the same line. Calligraphy has the ability to transcend language. In the Indo-Persian context, just as an image of the Buddha can visually capture his doctrine, the best Arabic calligraphy conveys not just the words but the feeling of spiritual transcendence. You can meditate on and appreciate the text as art, without knowing its literal meaning.

MEC: During your residency at the MAH, you presented a paper on the occasion of an international colloquium entitled “Studies in Indo-Persian Cultural Exchanges and the Pozzi Collection at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva”, and you gave a presentation to the Société des amis du musée (SAMAH). During your time at the museum, you examined the Pozzi Collection, as well as other objects in other departments including numismatics, under the direction of Gilles Perret, curator of the coin and medal collections, and archaeology, under the direction of Noémie Monbaron, in Egyptology at the MAH. What can you tell us about the experience of the residency?

GA: It was an inspiring experience to navigate and explore the collections of the MAH, especially as it is an encyclopedic museum, with these curators who were so incredibly knowledgeable. I see objects as both narrative and cultural transmitters, and the spectrum of objects that I encountered in the MAH’s collections—from cuneiform tables to ancient coins to Egyptian drawings—are not simply artifacts. The residency was an opportunity to contemplate their multidimensional identities, which embody their materials, their makers, how they were used and who used them. New meanings can emerge when an object is recontextualized or juxtaposed with objects from a completely different era.

MEC: Which of the artworks in the Pozzi Collection caught your eye and why? Do you think you will create a work inspired by and in dialogue with this collection?

GA: There were several works among the Pozzi Indo-Persian Collection with compositions that were juxtapositions of calligraphy that ran horizontally, vertically and diagonally, with each direction contained within color-blocked rectangles (Fig. 2). So text is an integral part of the aesthetic form of those works: the multi-directional positioning of the calligraphy reflects the multi-dimensional nature of text. For the past several years, I’ve been working on a brass sculpture, inside of which will be a rare and unusual emerald. The sculpture is incised with the Rumi poem, “Love is an Emerald”—so the text, like the text in the calligraphic compositions, becomes an integral part of the sculpture and takes on a metaphorical resonance as well. After seeing the artworks in the Pozzi Collection, I created a collage—or merger—of one of the Persian calligraphies, the text of the Rumi poem, and a rendering of the sculpture-in-progress. It was my rumination on our aesthetic engagement with text beyond a fixed point in time.

MEC: The process you described as a “collage” to create a work of art from a calligraphic composition is a reminder of the assemblage made by some art dealers and collectors, who created pages made from samples of calligraphy from different manuscripts combined with marginalia and painting. Folios were cut and split, and then pasted together to create a “new” page. This might be seen as shocking if we consider a work of art as inalienable and we reflect on the notion of authenticity. Do you think that a work of art has a life which can be carried on beyond its original creation, that it can be touched, modified, even destroyed, to be reborn? What are your thoughts about the notion of destruction/creation and authenticity? Is this something you can contextualize vis-à-vis the quotation by Andrea Emo: These writings, when burned, will finally cast a little light2 ?

GA: There’s a lot to consider in these questions…once a work of art leaves the studio, it’s physically impossible to maintain control over it. And throughout history, paintings—by artists ranging from Raphael to Courbet—have been altered to adhere to the preferred aesthetics of the time. What we can say is that it was not the artist’s intent. Part of my practice involves recontextualizing, embellishing or altering antique and vintage pieces—which include spiritual icons, cultural artifacts or everyday objects that have become obsolete. My goal in doing that is to re-activate the meaning inherent in the object, and to translate that narrative into a contemporary context, while retaining its historical identity. I think we need to be careful in considering the Emo quote, as there are many ways in which it could be interpreted. If we consider it literally, I believe it all comes down to intention: what is the intention of the burner? Is it to erase a culture? Then it is cultural genocide. On the other hand, perhaps it is an act of self-liberation by the writer, who is intent on freeing themself from what they have previously written, and illuminating a new path.