Yazan Halwani

Yazan Halwani was born in Beirut in 1993, three years after Lebanese Civil War ended. In 2007, he made his first contact with street art by tagging walls in Beirut, inspired by the US and European graffiti scene.
Halwani’s work tries to reinvent Arabic calligraphy and make it more universal. Most of the time, he removes the meaning of words to only preserve shape, and infuses meaning by making calligraphic compositions where the letters become pixels of a face, a tool for musical notation, or an express movement. As a calligrapher, Halwani states that traditional Arabic calligraphy is highly associated with the meaning of the Arabic sentences it writes, whereas the calligrapher’s work should be revolving around the shape, stroke and visual meaning. By breaking away from the meaning of the word, he makes calligraphy understandable by everyone.
Halwani has painted and exhibited his work in Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, France, Germany, Tunisia, Singapore and the US.