The Arts of the Book and Calligraphy
Sakip Sabanci
Museum, Istanbul
Fourteen years ago, a collection of calligraphy
works from the Sakip Sabanci collection toured the United States under the
exhibition title Letters in Gold. I vividly remember seeing the
show at the Harvard Museums and gaining my first small steps toward
understanding the intricacies, splendors, and fascination of Islamic
calligraphy.
Since then the Sakip Sabanci
"collection" has been established as a museum with its own building
on the Bosphorus, a short journey north of the clamor of Istanbul's city
centers. The new exhibition,
The
Arts of the Book and Calligraphy celebrates the tenth anniversary of
the Sakip Sabanci Museum (SSM), and wonderfully displays both the significant
permanent collection as well as some clever and provocative attempts at weaving
old technologies of the book with new electronic technologies. It also, as the
acronym of the title implies, gives an "ABCs" of the calligraphic
tradition, providing a fabulous education.
I'll be writing a full review for Material Religion to appear later this
year, but wanted to post some comments here that show the relevance of the exhibition
for those of us interested in iconic and performative texts.
The exhibition is set up to introduce the book as
object, an object that is technologically savvy, artistically creative, and pulls
its users toward veneration--the latter occurring in part through technology
and artistry. A large wall mural at the entrance depicts a line of people
bearing gifts for a Sultan; the gifts are all large books (see image above). And so we enter this
space that offers audiences an overview of bookmaking, including stitching,
binding, cover work, the creation of pens, and ultimately writing and
illustrating. Short videos document each of these processes, as finished
examples from the Ottoman period are displayed in cases. Other sections of the
exhibition focus on specific artistic forms like the hilye, levha, and kit'a. Many examples can be seen at the
website.
The museum carries the tagline "Where history
meets technology" for its permanent calligraphic collection. I spoke with Ayşa Aldemir Kilercik, the
Collections Manager of the museum and co-curator of the ABC show. She tells me
that the entire collection has now been digitized and SSM will be making it
public as early as this year. This will be welcome news for many of us working
on iconic texts.
The exhibition uses technology in one of the
better ways I've seen in a museum setting. Visitors are offered an iPad at the
beginning, and there are several stylistic QR Codes throughout that offer
lighthearted, animated versions of Turkish miniature paintings that highlight
the role of the book in various cultural and political settings. Here I am
looking at four hundred year old books and illustrations through an iPad, and then taking a
picture of the process (and you, reader/viewer, are adding another layer).
What struck me from a technological-textual
perspective are the various objects that had been scanned at high resolutions.
I was able to view the "original" object behind the glass case, then
look at the screened version on the iPad. The iPad sometimes would then include
translations, and further information, such as the image below shows. Of course,
I wanted all the information, all the translations about all the objects. I found myself looking
at the object, then studying the screen for close ups, then going back to the
original object. The activity heightened my sense of engagement with the object
itself, and shows the future of museum viewing as well as new technological
engagements with books.
Yet even with the limited number of works
available now in full interactive form, the promises of such interactive
technology are encouraging. The labor to do this is time intensive, and I
wonder if we might develop new guilds--not just a programmers--that create
these interactive works, creators who understand the texts, but also how to
creatively put them in new forms, surrounded by new information settings.
One thing is clear: technology must be seen on a
historical continuum. The making of books four hundred years ago is every bit
as technologically sophisticated as the new iPads, every bit as interactive,
creative, and sensually rich as video screens and digital manipulations. And so
the future of the book rests not in its eclipse but in its resituation, its continual remediation.
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