Australian Artist Puts a Fresh Spin on Islam

By Andrew Stephens - The Age - Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Saturday, April 21, 2007

The Dervish Series is the culmination of a five-year project by Melbourne-based artist Peter Daverington [b. 1974].

In response to living and studying music in both Turkey and Egypt, his drawing and sound installation explores the cosmology of the Whirling Dervish.

Using a format of drawings placed in sequence, The Dervish Series acts like still frames from an animation that narrates a visual journey of the Whirling Dervish, accompanied by an audio recording of the artist playing the Turkish flute.

In addition to the exhibition, Daverington will be giving a free concert performance of Turkish Sufi music inside the gallery with the Turkish Sufi Music Group of Australia, this will be held on Monday night the 7th of May at 7pm.

It is little wonder in the West - under a welter of war-talk, religious rivalry and obsession with fundamentalism - that not much is heard about Sufism, the mystic branch of Islam.

Most religions have a mystic tradition and Sufism, according to some of its old masters, many centuries dead, is more truly defined as a science - paradoxically one of the West's great gods - because it seeks to understand the fabric of the universe, material and spiritual.

We've heard the cliche about the gulf between science and religion, particularly in the monotheistic faiths, but what happens when these two great cathedrals of knowledge unite? Something spectacular: for while cosmologists and physicists have long been interested in the same quantum dynamics as the Sufis, so have artists.

Here in a warehouse in St Kilda, jammed between two smelly meat-packing factories, artist Peter Daverington is playing a recording of music he has made. On it, he uses the ney, an ancient wind instrument from the Middle East that features prominently in Sufi compositions.
The music accompanies his installation of big drawings from a long-time project called The Dervish Series, which explores Sufic mysticism.

Arranged around the warehouse for a preview are most of the 23 drawings to be shown at the cavernous Flinders Lane gallery, fortyfivedownstairs. They are like a numinous chain, conjuring Sufism's tenets. Yet the imagery he created and the mystical properties of Sufism are here grounded in the concrete: the Whirling Dervishes, perhaps Sufism's most beautiful expression - and its most commonly known form in the West.

Anyone who has seen the dervishes, in their flowing white robes, tall hats and graceful postures, will have been struck by their serenity as much as by their captivating ability to spin on their feet so mesmerisingly for such long periods.

They are Turkish and part of the Mevleviye, or Mevlevi Order. Their unusual spiritual practice of whirling is a deep meditation on the oneness of Allah or God. The order was founded in 1273 by the followers of the poet and mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi in Konya, a southern-central Turkish city.

The rotating of the dervishes is intended to help them journey to perfect lovingness, deserting their egos and carnal desires on the way. Their drill shares much (bar the spinning) with the meditative practices of the charismatics in Christianity as well as Buddhist meditations.

But even more interesting is the way the whirling - and Daverington's circuit of arresting charcoal-on-gesso drawings - inhabits an essential scientific belief about the way the universe's macrocosms and microcosms echo each other.

Just as the smallest subatomic particles whirl and rotate so, too, does the Earth orbit the Sun; and our Sun rotates around the hub of the Milky Way, the galaxies around the universe and so on. All the universe is in revolution. The dervishes whirl to achieve oneness with these levels.

Daverington's drawings are black-and-white and refreshingly direct. The first begins by illustrating the deepest, most impenetrable blackness - deep space? - speckled with pinpricks of light. They might be stars or minuscule galaxies in the velvet ebony of the universe.

Drawing might often be seen (erroneously) as the poor cousin of visual arts behind painting, photography, cinema, sculpture or printmaking. But it is their foundation.

Here, it is a powerful force to engage sympathies between Islam and the West - and to stimulate spiritual intrigue.

As the magnification increases with each drawing, the tiny white specks are revealed to be tiny dervishes in a transcendental spin. The sequence of 23 drawings ends with a panel that is mostly a brilliant, warm white - in contrast with the dark beginning. The transformation is spectacular and intellectually provoking.

From first to last, we zoom in from the big picture - the universe - to the smaller picture of whirling dervishes; then to a particular dervish and on to an even closer focus on that dervish's heart-centre. The magnification with every panel is intriguing because of the transformations: what were stars become dervishes, what were dervishes become spiritual ideas.

Panel 14 is the tipping point, where a dervish fills most of the frame, his head on that curious tilt that practitioners adopt when in the gentle whirl.

It is this drawing that Daverington made first and, not surprisingly, it won the Dominique Segan Drawing Prize in 2003. He also won an Australia Council grant and a Melbourne City Council arts grant, both of which paid for The Dervish Series.

While the notion to start with an abstract image, crop by stages to a figurative detail and then pursue it back to abstraction is hardly novel, this execution is energetic and has integrity. After all, it is about ancient spiritual truths; there is no place for the gimmickry that too often passes for depth in some contemporary art work.

Daverington's project began when he was profoundly moved on seeing the dervishes at a ceremony in Konya. He had been wanting to learn to play a flute and hearing the ney set him on a quest to seek the masters.

He studied classic Arabic music in Cairo for two years and went back to study with masters in Istanbul to perfect the Arabic style of ney playing and the Turkish style that he says has a deeper, more spiritual sound. He performed with the dervishes on two tours to the US in 1998 and 2000.

Last year, he recorded himself playing in the chambers of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, which goes with the Dervish drawings he started as a sequence in 2003.

The ney was believed to be Rumi's favourite instrument and its sound is said to be like the voice of a wise soul: listening to it while looking at Daverington's work makes this connection. As we do this in the St Kilda warehouse, Daverington quotes from a poem attributed to Rumi that says:

"We come spinning out of nothingness,

scattering stars like dust."

Poetry, music, drawings: all is one right now.

Exhibition: Peter Daverington 'The Dervish Series' Adrawing and sound installation

Gallery: fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

http://www.whosie-whatsit.biz/fortyfivedownstairs/calendar.php

Hours: Tue – Sat 11am – 5pm, Sat 12pm – 4pm