Hand-carved Arabic sculptures featured at Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit

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The Vancouver Art Gallery is exhibiting Vancouver and Paris-based artist Marie Khouri’s five hand-carved sculptures until Nov. 19, showing the curves and beauty of the Arabic script.

Framed by the staircases in the gallery’s rotunda, Khouri designed each of the white pieces to spell a message in Arabic that is also the name of the exhibit — “I Love.”

“I realized when living in Canada, in North America … the [words] ‘I love’ could be used in such different situations and in very ridiculous situations at some point, [like] when somebody says, ‘Oh, my God, I love these shoes,’ or ‘Oh, my God, I love this place,’ or ‘I love this movie,’” Khouri says.

“In France, [there] is a very deep meaning that surrounds this term and [is] only said when really meant. So it was a take on that a little bit, on how one should step back and really try to assess and use the right terminology in the right situations.”

Khouri says she sculpts sentences that speak about certain situations and times. Her first exhibit of Arabic sculptures when spelled out was called “Let’s Sit and Talk,” which was featured 10 years ago in Vancouver’s Equinox Gallery.

Born in Egypt and raised in Lebanon as a Catholic with a Jewish father, she says the message called for peacemaking in the Middle East, where politicians should talk instead of using weapons.

Khouri says she designed the Arabic letters by first creating models that were 10 centimetres each and could fit in the palm of her hand.

To create the sculptures, Khouri carved each letter to scale in Styrofoam, covered it with a hard coat similar to resin, sanded and formed the texture, and then coloured it with automotive paint.

The sculptures also went through three different studios and manufacturers, so the individual applications could be done on each piece as some of the materials do not work well together.

The sculptures can be read from a bird’s-eye view — an intentional design as Khouri did not want to create abstract letters but ones that she could recognize and understand. She also designed the sculptures to be benches, where visitors can sit on and touch each of the pieces.

Khouri used Arabic as a way of reconnecting with the Middle East because after her father was assassinated during the Lebanese Civil War, she came to Vancouver as a refugee in the mid-1970s. Later, she moved to France, worked as an interpreter, and had a family before she started sculpting at 32 years old and returned to Vancouver.

While she may not speak Hebrew, her ambition was to have the sculptures be “both in Hebrew and in Arabic, facing each other as literature, knowledge, and culture, being able to shape borders differently than war has been able to do it.”

The “beauty and abstraction” in the work of both Iraqi-British architect and artist Zaha Hadid along with British sculptor Henry Moore influenced Khouri’s pieces, she says. 

She appreciates the gallery was open-minded and recognized her sculptures as true artwork.

“I find that today academia doesn’t quite respect when you do something that is utilitarian,” Khouri says. “If you do a sculpture that is a bench, then it’s seen as design more than sculpture.”

For those who visit the exhibit, she hopes they understand that “Arabic can be seen as just another language and not often a language of hate as it just happens to be sometimes with some extremists.”

For more information on the exhibit, visit the Vancouver Art Gallery’s website. To learn more about Khouri, head to www.mariekhouri.com/.