TONIGHTS Face exhibition at the Arts Center. Featuring artist Ibrahim Bu Saad. Poet Qassim Hadad and musician Khalid Al Shaikh and directed by Abdullah Yousif, Promises to be at the cutting edge of avant-garde art Literally.

Al Shaikh promises that the exhibition, which is first of its kind in Bahrain and the Gulf, will take the audience into another dimension.

Qassim Haddad has chopped words of his free verse poetry and pasted them onto a series of paintings of faces by Ibrahim Bu Saad. inking the words and art is the computer generated music of Al Shaikh.

"The exhibition celebrates the three senses ? visual, oral and aural. You must experience all three sensations at the same time." says Al Shaikh. The exhibition is inspired by similar artistic experiments in the States and Europe. It also contains some surrealism
"The aim is to blur the boundaries that exist between sensation. The idea for the project was conceived two years ago.
"Independently, Hadad had completed some free verse. And they decided to put the phrases and words of the poetry into the body of the painting. There was no logical meaning to it. They cut up the words so that they didn't necessarily make sense and pasted them to the paintings. The faces already had an element of mystery. But by mixing the Arabic script of the poetry with the faces, you increase the sense of mystery."
Al Shaikh, a lute player and singer, created the music for the exhibition with the combination project in mind. "The music was the third stage. It is open and free. But I had one major problem when I was trying to compose music for this project. That was that the rhythm of the free verse was difficult to adapt to the music. I had to figure out how to catch the expression of the poetry." exhibition with the combination project in mind. "The music was the third stage. It is open and free. But I had one major problem when I was trying to compose music for this project. That was that the rhythm of the free verse was difficult to adapt to the music. I had to figure out how to catch the expression of the poetry."

Conveying the meaning of the words in music was a difficult task. But Al Shaikh struggled to emulate the free flowing emotion of the poetry. "I had no frame of reference. What I did was to insert spoken words into the music. That is, I created the music and placed a spoken, not a sung word into the melody."

The poetry of Haddad is actually spoken within the framework of the music. Doing this gave me more freedom to match the free flowing nature of the verse."

By cutting words from Hadad's poetry and transforming them into SoundBits that could be incorporated into the body of the music, Al Shaikh managed to distil the essence of poetry into pure sound. "The tune doesn't rely on the words, but the feelings and emotions."