After qabbani

after qabbani

After Qabbani is a neon sculpture extracted from Nizar Qabbani’s poem Language[1] as a personal reflection on society and its constructs, and symbolises my conscious disengagement with such fabrications.

It references the baggage that an 'ism' implies particularly within the political, and suggests a forced retreat from the inevitable deterioration of the suffix over time. Many 'isms' begin with a society’s good intentions, but gradually an 'ism' as an ideal takes over the same society’s psyche and drives the labelling of those who do not support it as the enemy, resulting in an oligarchy that cripples the same society until such time that the next revolutionary 'ism' rises from the downtrodden masses.

'Isms', and therefore language, have a direct and cyclic relationship with society and its time.

[1] As translated by Paul Weinfield