"texts" that draw from the kufic forms of Arabic calligraphy. These remain deliberately illegible to the viewer, thereby calling attention not only to the potential ambiguity of written language but also to the aesthetic powers of graphics in all forms.

The exhibition highlights mixed-media works on paper created by Hassan in the last four years. These compositions serve as allegories of the Arab Spring, transnational migration, and Nubian folklife. They also reflect the artist’s continual use of visual signs to capture contingent, unspeakable, and intangible sensory experiences. In them, we find the central message of his art: the meanings and interpretations of symbolic signs are not fixed; they shift over time and as they migrate from one context to another.

Walking through Fathi Hassan: Edge of Memory at Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, I felt the frustration, anguish, and urgency of Said’s claims circulating through the painterly and linguistic surface textures of Hassan’s works, as well as an acute awareness that the tensions of imperialism are not just of the 19th century, but distinctly of today. This timely exhibition asks us to engage with the historical legacies of imperial power alongside the representational possibilities, problems, and mutabilities inherent in visual and linguistic production to form connections between the lived experiences of colonialism and images of it.

Signs of our Times is the first major solo show presenting the work of Fathi Hassan over two venues in London, Leighton House Museum and Rose Issa Projects.

As part of VCUQatar’s Crossing Boundaries Lecture Series, ‘Signs, Traces and Calligraphy’ focuses on the first international impact of contemporary Arab artists in the West that started with “Signs, Traces and Calligraphy”, an approach that was not only new in the Western world – because they referred to their own cultural background – but encouraged artists to impose the own original signature and aesthetics in the world art scene.