“HOUE”
- Category
- Exhibition
- Date
- 1 November - 31 December 2017, 8:00am - 8:00pm
- Venue
- Bahrain National Theatre
- Tickets
- Free Admission
The Bahrain National Theatre will host the “HOUE” installation by French-Iraqi artist Mehdi Moutashar. The HOUE installation will be exhibited at the Theatre’s foyer, allowing the visitors to directly interact with it.
“Houé” is an Arabic word formed from two letters: an aerial letter, the aspired ‘h’, developed from a double movement – concentric and eccentric, and the waw (O) which follows a helical layout. A back and forth movement similar to breathing is born from the entanglement of these two letters; the first as a breath, the second as an instrument.
Houe literally means “the other, him, the one who reflects my image and confirms my humanity”. It is also the root of the word identity, but beyond this first meaning, Houé (Him) is the name used by mystics to signify God.
Houé’s calligraphic from, written from right to left using a qalam, a sharpened dried reed filled with ink, starts with a thick, intense, black line and narrows towards the end like a hair.
The material shape of the lines forming these three successive angles complies with this logic, as does the general structure: the beginning of the second angle appears halfway along the first, the third starts halfway along the second… So it is the construction in its entirety which results from the logic underpinning it.
In this respect, its development in space clearly refers to the concept of the arabesque, to that essential idea that painting, sculpture and architecture all stem from a single measurement. While the different levels that this work introduces subtly match those of the human body: the lines of the knees, the core and the solar plexus…
Mehdi Moutashar was born in Hilla, Iraq in 1943. He moved to Paris in 1967, and since 1974, has lived and worked in Arles. He was a professor at Ecole National Superieure des Arts Decorantifs in Paris, from 1974 to 2008. Moutashar's work has been exhibited globally, in such countries as Bahrain, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany Iraq, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the UAE, and the US.
