Ikram Kabbaj
(Morocco, b. 1960)
Osmosis, 2007
Alabama Cremino marble, carved in Grinnell, September 2007
48 x 78 x 78 inches
Commissioned for the Grinnell College Art Collection, Marie-Louise and Samuel R. Rosenthal Fund
Located: east of the train track between Rosenfield Center and Lazier dormitory.
A Moroccan Goddess in Grinnell
I meant to use this title the moment when I saw sculptor Ikram Kabbaj in action at the track field of Grinnell. So dedicated, working on her marble, like a lover courting her hard, sometimes unresponsive beloved. But here lies the pleasure, all the pleasures in the Arab convention of courtly love: the harder, the crueler the marble beloved, the more loving, bent in love like an Islamic arch in an ancient mosque, the lover becomes. It is raw pain for the two sides, pain of love, love’s labor that is so deep it hits the roots where pleasure/pain is undistinguishable.
The other day she was holding her marble model in one hand close to her breast, rocking it as she was saying, “This is my baby.” This dedicated love, artist’s love, is surely capable of discovering the heart in the hardest marble, an Alabama marble. Without this kind of dedicated, single-minded, near religious love the marble would never give shape.
Ikram, this tiny woman of Morocco, is worshiping and being worshiped by a stone. In her splendid isolation, she is competing with God, because she is a creator like Him. Hence is the cause of the banning of the plastic arts in Islam that was zealously learned from the jealous God of the Old Testament: “8. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 9. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me.” (Deuteronomy 5:8-9)
It is not, I suspect, the fear of worshipping the idols instead of God that caused early Muslims’ hostility to art; rather it’s the fear of the creativity of the artist, since all creativity must be a monopoly of God. But the artistic passion might be suppressed, yet it is indestructible, like an unstoppable river, it’s the libido, that cunning, fluid, stubborn god, or actually goddess Dionysius in Euripides’s The Bacchae. This artistic passion, ever persistent and assertive, finds its own ways even in the most self-repressed religious devotees; despite their own religion, they find themselves insinuating their artistic passion, or rather their artistic passion insinuating itself in form of arabesques, or in the stunningly beautiful calligraphy of the Qur’an, and the intoxicating power of the Qur’anic chanting.
The artist, even when he or she, out of belief in the blasphemy of art, suppresses artistic urges will inevitably and unconsciously create a palinode. Hence the essence of our humanity: it is in this eternal wrestling with God that the artist asserts her equally divine nature. Imagine a world without God, and we will have a foreboding vision of a world where every thing is lawful and permissible. Imagine a world without artists; it means the complete absence of salubrious challenge and adventure — that emptiness would bore even a jealous God.
Professor Saadi A. Simawe, September 16, 2007
About the Artist
Ikram Kabbaj received her education in sculpture from the Ècole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She lives and works in Morocco between Casablanca and Marrakesh. Her work was featured in the Rabat Biennale at the Muhammad VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2019. Her work was featured in the exhibition INSTALLATIONS: 7 International Artists with Roots in Morocco, 2007, curated by Kay Wilson, curator of the collection and she carved Osmosis during an artist residency at Grinnell College.