Writing and space are
connected in a different way (as in Written Room) in the work Safari. Characters and
ornaments cover a giant sack. The title promises adventure, wilderness and
exotic worlds. The hunt though leads to the museum. Usually signs refer to
something, but here they cannot be made precise; they remain vague. For the
Western viewer, the writing does not refer to something, but to the Other per
se, to the inscrutably foreign, for which the Orient also stands. This
unfathomable, this covered aspect is visualized directly through the
ornamentally rich chador fabrics sewn into the sack. The sack is thus literally
a foreign body.
Some of the materials sown into the sack are usually
used for Shiite mourning ceremonies. They are brightly coloured mass-produced
fabrics, the same as Forouhar used for the installation Funeral Service of 2003. If one can read Persian, then the dirge for the Shiite martyr
Imam Hussein is recognizable. There we can read for example: “This king without
army accompanied by tears and sorrow, the wounds on his body are more numerous
than the stars in the sky … this fish, sunk in a sea of blood, is your
Hussein.” The meaning though remains normally concealed in the Western context
of the museum. What remains are the exhilaration of the colours and the
oscillations of the script. The shapeless, cumbersome sack further emphasizes
that they do not bow to the familiar order.
Dr. Alexandra Karentzos, Intersections, catalogue of the same named exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Australia, 2005
