Alsajanjal
Group exhibition in Bahrain on the concept of "language". Artworks, statements, curator's text.
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Our written language was not influenced by other languages… Our spoken language was!
Our written Arabic language wasn’t so much influenced by the neighbouring languages despite the mixture of Arabs with other nations.
The order of common Arabic alphabet underwent changes and dots were added to existing letters to avoid ambiguity. Arabic words remained unchanged, but some terms were borrowed from Persian and Greek as well as modern written European languages, such as imperialism, ideology, romanticism, philosophy, bus, radio, telephone, computer, etc…
Borrowing of words is not a new phenomenon. In fact, the Arabic language had borrowed a number of Persian words, such as narjes (daffodil), zi’baq (mercury), a’ajor (tile), jawhar (jem, core…), tarboosh, mahrajan (festival), feiruz (turquoise)…
Unfortunately, foreign languages have invaded our minds before our tongues and became widely used in our schools, streets and homes. Some feel embarrassed to speak Arabic, considering that foreign languages represent culture, and many of us boast of using these languages. Personally, I am not against culture and if we want to know about our enemies, then we have to know their language. I am rather against language invasion of our minds. A proverb from New Zealand says: "If you grow up without speaking your language, you won’t know yourself."
This art work is a live picture of the reality of our spoken language and colonial influence on the introduction of many foreign language terms into our spoken language.
This barrel of oil has been extracted from our fields but we didn’t benefit from its price. All our income from this oil is an empty barrel used to help us to satisfy our time and space requirements.
The words engraved on the barrel don’t reflect a state of borrowing from other languages and don’t indicate words that don’t exist in our language. They are rather the outcome of language invasion of our spoken language that we inherited from colonialism.
© Photo: Ammar Hammad
Group exhibition in Bahrain on the concept of "language". Artworks, statements, curator's text.