Art Aware

Rumi’s ‘The Elephant in the Dark’

2012-01-22T09:00:00.000Z

‘Disagreeing over the Description and Shape of the Elephant’

An elephant was in a darkened hall –

Hindus had brought it as a spectacle.

Into that darkness everybody passed

to have a look at it, so many people.

Since seeing with the eye was not permitted,

they felt it in the darkness with their hands.

The hand of one fell on the elephant’s trunk.

This someone said, ‘This structure’s like a drainpipe’.

The hand of one reached to the creature’s ear –

It seemed to him as though it were a fan.

When one hand felt its leg the person said,

‘To me the elephant’s shape is like a pillar!’

And one who put his hand upon its back

remarked, ‘This elephant’s just like a sofa!’

Just as each one had touched whatever part,

so people formed their view from what they’d heard.

Their statements differed as their point of view –

one man would call it ‘chalk’, another ‘cheese’.

If each had held a candle in his hand,

the disputes would have vanished from their speech.

The sensual eye is like the hand, that’s all –

a hand can’t grasp an elephant entirely.

The Ocean’s eye is one thing, spray’s another.

Give up the spray! Look with the Ocean’s eye.

Spray leaping from the Ocean day and night,

you see the spray not Ocean – how surprising!

Translated by Alan Williams from the third book of Rumi’s Masnavi, ed. R.A. Nicholson III.1259-1271, (ed. M. Este‘lami III. 1260-1272).

Alan Williams is Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Manchester, England, and the author of Rumi Spiritual Verses: The First Book of the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi, London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2006 and an audiobook, The Spiritual Verses, read by Anton Lesser, translated and abridged by Alan Williams, London: Naxos, 2007.

Magical Gallows Humour in Tehran

2012-01-15T23:07:00.000Z

Expectations have been enormous for the follow-up to Persepolis. Would it be a new masterwork full of rebellion and subversion? Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud have instead taken a completely different trajectory with their new film "Chicken with plums." The result is a wonderful, surreal melodrama.

Scene from Marjane Satrapi's ''Chicken with Plums''

By Susan Vahabzadeh, Qantara.de

One thing has to be made clear from the start – food is a big deal for your average Persian. If you can't shake someone out of a gloomy mood with their favourite dish, it can only mean that they are desperately unhappy. Nasser Ali Khan (Mathieu Amalric), the mournful hero of the new film by Marjane Satrapi, the creator of "Persepolis" (once again in collaboration with Vincent Paronnaud), sees no meaning in life after the loss of his violin.

At first, he attempts to find a comparable instrument as a replacement, but when he does not succeed in his quest, his reaction appears quite drastic. He decides to die. That is the opening premise of "Chicken with Plums," and the rest of the film is an exploration of misfortune and melancholy, as well as a fabulous explanation of why some people simply have had enough of life.

Angels of death and a good dose of black humour

"Chicken with Plums" takes us on a journey to Tehran during the era of the Shah. The film actually has the look and feel of the cinema of that time. It is as if Douglas Sirk filmed a melodrama in Persian, yet, with a surreal touch and featuring mysterious antique dealers, angels of death, and a good dose of black humour.

"An exploration of misfortune and melancholy": Marjane Satrapi's "Chicken with Plums" tells the story of a man who decides to die after the loss of his violin

There is even a brief excursion into the future with a glimpse of what awaits Nasser's children. His daughter becomes a chain-smoking scoundrel and his son is stranded in provincial America. What we see from these lives in exile and how they both fade into the culture into which they have become entrapped would in itself be material enough for a full-length feature. In all likelihood, a comedy.

Yet, Satrapi wants to savour the sense of misery. She combines diverse thematic elements – emotional, societal, political, and the hopes and dreams of 1950s Iran, which contrast sharply with the sense of confinement and bourgeois mentality associated with Europe in the same post-war era.

A wild and original tapestry

Marjane Satrapi can't boast of a violinist among her relatives – while Nasser Ali Khan is a violinist and a renowned one at that – but she still did not have to stray too far from her own biography. She helps herself to her family's anecdotal treasure house and has spun together the memories into a wild and original tapestry.

The drama of Nasser's life is rolled out bit by bit and the viewer sees how he has only succeeded in making a failure of himself. We see him trounced by his brother and bossed about by his mother. And then there is Irâne, the great love of his life, played Golshifteh Farahani, one of the few Iranians to star in the film, who he failed to marry.

Of course, this is the woman who he could never forget, the source of all happiness and all evil. We are all the same when it comes to love, says Marjane Satrapi. If we have money, we can even alter death, but not love.

"Savouring the sense of misery": Iranian-born French graphic novelist, illustrator, animated film director, and children's book author Marjane Satrapi

A plethora of emotional failures

Nasser's mother pushed him into marrying the wrong woman, Faranguisse (played by Maria de Medeiros). He finds no pleasure in her company, apart from his favourite dish. It was she, who in a fit of jealousy, broke his violin.

Almost like a collection of slapstick sketches, Nasser contemplates all forms of death, which he finds either disgusting or degrading, until he finally decides to shut himself up in his room and wait eight days until he simply dies. Every day, we follow him on a journey into his past, and every day is an encounter with a different person and a different emotional failure.

Like her autobiographical animation film "Persepolis," Satrapi's "Chicken with Plums" is based on one of her graphic novels. The animation universe with its chimerical wafts of mist has here cleaved its way into live-action cinema. Despite this, there was a certain degree of disappointment at the film's competition premiere in Venice this fall. Many in the audience had expected a more subversive and rebellious line from Marjane Satrapi.

Little leeway for open politicizing

Yet, Satrapi and Paronnaud announced long before they had begun work on their second film together that it would be a very different project from "Persepolis." And, in many respects, this is true, not only because it is not an animated feature, but because it deals with a completely different period in Iran's history and there is less leeway for open politicizing.

However, the manner of narrative with its magical gallows humour and the way reality and the supernatural flow into each other is something that both films have in common. "Chicken with plums" does not pursue a single target but is more a tapestry of fairy tales built upon the interwoven stories from Nasser's life. This labyrinth structure is clearly intended. If one really wants to get to the bottom of the yearning for death, then there is no need to start with simplifications.

Last but not least, "Chicken with plums" is an ode to free will. Nasser's life is a reflection of the dilemma facing those who know they should rebel and fight injustice, but who often resign themselves to achieving very little in this world. And this in itself is hardly an apolitical question.

Susan Vahabzadeh

POULET AUX PRUNES, F 2011 – Director and screenplay: Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud. Camera: Christophe Beaucarne. With: Mathieu Amalric, Maria de Medeiros, Golshifteh Farahani, Chiara Mastroianni, Isabella Rossellini, Jamel Debbouze. Prokino, 93 minutes.
Translated from the German by John Bergeron

Via Qantara.de

Missing

2011-12-31T13:27:00.001Z

Agahi (‘Missing’), a poem by Shafi’i Kadkani
Translated from Persian by Alan Williams

A child called Happiness has recently gone missing

bright sparkling eyes

with flowing tresses and high hopes.

If anyone catches sight of her

inform us

this is our address:

Between the Persian Gulf

and the Caspian Sea

Iran Onscreen: Truth through the Prism

2011-12-29T11:30:00.000Z

‘Sometimes self-censorship or social censorship is worse than actual censorship, so when I make a film I don't think about what is allowed and not allowed.’

– Jafar Panahi

by Dan Geist in Berlin, Tehran Bureau

Can a movie tell a story set in contemporary Iran without being seen as a "portrait of Iranian society"?

In re A Separation's Oscar dreams, should the Academy Awards be considered an arm of the U.S. State Department?

If cinema is dead, why do Iranian censors continue to pay it so much damned attention?

A few of the questions that linger from the conference "Cinema in Iran: Circulation, Censorship, and Cultural Production," held this past week in Berlin under the aegis of the Annenberg School for Communication's Iran Media Program. The two-day event drew scholars -- many of Iranian birth or heritage, many young and in midpursuit of doctorates -- based around the United States and Europe, as well as Israel, India, Australia, and Brazil.

By the very nature of its national focus, such a conference promotes readings of an ethnographic bent, but several presentations made clear the risks in taking individual films primarily as social portraiture, as Iranian movies often appear to be received in the West -- and, among films aimed at the foreign festival and arthouse market, often seem intended for such reception. Norma Claire Moruzzi of the University of Illinois at Chicago warned of what she called the "romanticization of Iran as a dystopia," routine in such internationally intended pictures. An apt caveat, though time pressures thwarted an exploration of the particular strokes employed in that sort of portraiture -- an important consideration, as regular festival attendance could similarly convince a credulous film lover that London is the lake of fire and Paris, perdition.

What of films that focus on a very specific aspect of the society in which they are set? Baharak Darougari of the University of Strasbourg looked at the different narrative strategies employed by three films -- Leila, directed by Dariush Mehrjui; Shokaran, directed by Behruz Afkhami; and Chaharshanbe-soori, directed by Asghar Farhadi -- to problematize the conventional treatment of polygamy. But whether arthouse or mainstream, like the films to which this trio stand less or more in opposition, can films consciously concerned with a sharply defined social problem do much to honestly inform the viewer about a culture when their topical program tends to flatten the social context?

The presentation by Orly Rahimiyan of Ben-Gurion University and the Ben Zvi University, who examined the image of Jews in Iranian cinema, raised a parallel set of questions. Does the inclusion of Jewish characters, a rarity, make a film more representative of Iranian society? Or less, given that Jewish people are themselves such a rarity in Iran? How are the answers affected when we consider, as Rahimiyan noted, that such roles are performed, virtually without exception, by non-Jewish actors? The presentation of Jews without reliance on stereotype sounds like the approach that would yield the most accurate portrait; but if, let us say, Jews were universally stereotyped in every other form of public culture, would not conformity with that practice convey the more instructive truth?

Throughout history, portraits have been created whose primary objective is to glorify their subjects, a tradition whose contemporary form would surely be recognized by the war veterans interviewed by Narges Bajoghli of New York University. She described how the men with whom she spoke all consciously distinguished between the official version of the Iran-Iraq War -- whose authorized onscreen depictions are just part of a vast exercise in cultural (re)construction -- and the "real" version of the conflict they lived firsthand. She reported a growing belief among filmmakers who focus on the domestically popular topics of the war and its combatants that they must "move away from creating superhero characters and depict soldiers as ordinary men." Western audiences, even the self-selected elite that seek out cinema from the globe's more outré corners, have scant access to such films; still, the trend does raise another interesting question for portrait hunters: What more clearly distinguishes any particular society -- its notion of the superhero or its notion of the "ordinary man"? How very different, in other words, is John Q. Public from 'Dash Ali?

Not much at all, perhaps, as indicated by John Limbert, who teaches Middle Eastern Studies at the U.S. Naval Academy. He also demonstrated that, undertaken with clear purpose, the explicit or implicit presentation of a film as a social portrait can have a salutary effect. In his class on Iran (where, as a member of the American diplomatic corps, he was held hostage for 14 months during the embassy takeover of 1979-81), Limbert challenges the prejudices of his students at the beginning of each semester by screening The Candidate, directed by Mohammad Shirvani. The short film depicts the efforts of a mother to find a bride for her son, to which end she sweetly accosts female strangers on the street. Limbert observed that the women depicted are "very smart and very practical," belying notions of Iranian femininity held by many in the West. He said the screening almost invariably achieves its purpose: "Some student generally says, 'They're just like us.' Then the course can begin...."

Still, comprehension suffers when every film, as the University of São Paulo's Ferdinando Martins put it, is "seen as a portrait of Iran" and its fictional aspects disregarded. Speaking on a panel devoted to the topic of cinema's relationship to public policy and public diplomacy, he echoed -- or rather, by the real-world chronology of the conference, presaged -- Moruzzi's observation about dystopic aesthetics, finding that those Iranian films which gain distribution outside the Middle East tend "to paint the devil worse than he is." In the view of Javad Asgharirad of the Free University of Berlin, those movies as a corpus create an impression that Iranians suffer from a low standard of living, little freedom, and great social stratification (as well as, by way of partial counterbalance, enjoying strong family ties).

Asgharirad did not take up the question of whether that impression is really worse than the reality or not, but rather focused on the tension between those films and the objectives of state entities such as the Islamic Culture and Relations Organization and Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, which look to use cinema to promote cultural ties with other nations and present an appealing image of Iran abroad -- mostly through religious-themed films circulated regionally, particularly to Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, as well as via the Internet.

Their work is most of what remains of a broader national film policy launched soon after the 1979 Revolution. Agnes DeVictor of the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne described how Iran was one of just four countries to successfully "resist Hollywood destruction of national cinema industries in the 1980s and '90s via public policy," making the Islamic Republic part of one of the more unlikely quartets in international cultural history, accompanied as it was by France, South Korea, and Burkina Faso.

Those state entities are the primary, but far from only, venues for what Northwestern University's Hamid Naficy, the conference's plenary speaker, characterized as the Islamic Republic's "instrumentalization" of culture and media. He presented a broad survey of the new public diplomacy scene that, involving a wide variety of channels more accessible than ever before to ordinary citizens, he said was at the same time both "potentially more democratic and empowering" and "more insidious, more susceptible to manipulation." Considering Iranian-American relations in what he insisted on calling the "mediatic" realm, he identified four sets of "public diplomacy players," distinguishable by both interests and means:

* The U.S. government
* The IRI government
* Iranian exiles and diaspora population
* Iranian internal public and dissidents

This structure is helpful insofar as it addresses the problem articulated by Asgharirad: that "most of the misunderstandings come when Iran is considered a monolithic entity -- not just internationally, but internally, as well." But yet it frames the United States as just such a monolithic entity, under guidance by its political institutions. Is that quite right?

Along with government-backed satellite TV and radio stations and the direct or indirect funding of exile media, government media, and NGOs, Naficy called out the "global distribution of U.S. pop culture" as channel 1 of his first item. However much we may be appalled by the leveling of aesthetics around the world that results from each step of that insipid mammoth, is the beast really being invited into Iranian hearts, minds, and smartphones because the U.S. government would have it so or because ordinary people just can't get enough? And as for how those virgin souls fell victim to false consciousness, let's dare call it conspiracy, but let's not comfort ourselves by imagining the perpetrators are a few Beltway egotists and their apparatchik cocoon. The minders of the Matrix lie beyond the stars.

Turn now from the cosmic dread evoked by the paramount percent to considerations more mundane: A Separation, already the most celebrated Iranian film of the West's infant millennium and with more accolades likely to come. Is the New York Film Festival, where Farhadi's film had its American debut, an agent of the U.S. government? How about the Village Voice, whose 98 critical polltakers just ranked it the second best film of all 2011? The Golden Globes, which made it the first Iranian movie ever to receive a nomination? And with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences preparing to weigh in with its nominations a month from now, A Separation is on all the Oscar prognosticators' shortlists. These are all choices, with their attendant promotional effects, that fall within the rubric of public diplomacy, broadly construed. And who is determining that this particular example of Iran's cultural output shall be brought to the attention of Americans (however few, however influential)? Not Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton, one can presume. The monolith looms, to be sure, but it hasn't incorporated everything just yet.

As Naficy observed, and critic and filmmaker Parviz Jahed described in greater detail in his look at Iran's underground cinema, while the Internet and digital video facilitate new, more democratic media outlets -- such as Zanan TV, a new online channel devoted to the Iranian women's movement, introduced by contributor and activist Maryam Ommy -- creeping authoritarianism, which theocratic or military or corporate or monstrously hybrid in form, effectively restricts more mature and widely distributed modes. Cultural analysts are familiar with how financial motivations impose censorship burdens, uncodified but unavoidable, in the hypercapitalistic West; DeVictor noted how, with the cutting of much of the state funds that used to subsidize filmmaking in Iran, the domestic market is now dominated by generic "romances that are effectively TV on film."

But just because the private sector is so proficient at denuding cinema of its potential power, doesn't mean that official censors in a state such as the Islamic Republic don't still take an interest. In Iran, those in the artistic professions must navigate both a strict, if ever-shifting, moral code and a host of political flashpoints. And if artists are like everyone else in the country in this regard, only moreso, moreso still are Iran's filmmakers.

Liliane Anjo of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in the course of describing the recent trend of Iranian film stars -- including A Separation's Peyman Moadi -- taking to the stage, explained how there is substantially less censorship of theater than of motion pictures in the Islamic Republic. Cinematic censorship operates so intensely on so many levels that it has prompted the evolution of onscreen codes so intricate and comprehensive and yet clearly definable that in sum they can be construed as a novel, near-formal language; that was the conclusion this conference attendee drew from the fascinating presentation by Asal Bagheri Griffaton of Paris Descartes University at the Sorbonne.

In the West, the observation that cinema is dead has already matriculated from cliché provocation to melancholy truism. So what exactly is going on "over there"? Is cinema still somehow alive in Iran, or are they merely afraid of ghosts?

Well: Is cinema really dead? Pick your horizon. Yes, the sun set on cinema in the West on May 26, 1983, when a day after its ineluctable smashing of all opening-day records, word of mouth did not prevent a charmless, aggressively redundant, and cringingly schmaltzy children's movie called Return of the Jedi from having the biggest second day at the box office in movie history. But just like the Force, the West is all in our head. We can occupy ourselves with other things -- indeed, we often don't have a choice.

Iradj Ghouchani of Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich declared in his presentation on "The Effect of State Power on Cinematic Language," that in Iranian cinema, "everything has been sublimated." And as that great Westerner Sigmund Freud observed, sublimation is the very spice of psychic life. Since the day cinema fell on its light saber, countless great movies have been made, not least -- very far from least -- within the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Cinema is alive then, there and everywhere in the minds of those with the will to find their way into what Moruzzi referred to as "internal diaspora." She used the term specifically to refer to those artists who strive for independent expression within a realm under repressive, authoritarian rule. But it's a notion worth taking deeper, into the private mind of the artist. The University of São Paulo's Daniel De Sousa quoted director Jafar Panahi:

Sometimes self-censorship or social censorship is worse than actual censorship, so when I make a film I don't think about what is allowed and not allowed.

That's precisely the sort of internal diaspora within reach of every artist worthy of the name, from the Hollywood Hills to the shadows of the Alborz.

Dan Geist is a critic and senior editor at Tehran Bureau.

Via Tehran Bureau

One Born

2011-12-23T23:41:00.002Z

Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott,
‘a mighty fortress is our God’,
But Christmas comes too often.
There’s not a single year forgotten
but that I think ‘Please fortify
my brain
with this campaign’.

I now announce
(in Christian spirit)
that Christmas comes too frequently,
theologically too plural!
I once was a duophysite
– two years between each one might well be fine –
but for a Trinitarian, three years is more divine.

Design the Church’s calendar
(society’s as well),
then once in three years
hit the pages with the news that Christ is born,
and fit to govern for a thousand more!
On Christly love and ethics,
the people all agree.

Our campaign slogan’s ‘One in Three!’ not ‘Three in One’.
Invent a reason,
colleagues, friends and retailers,
and manufacturers?
But no, it will not work.
For ‘Christmas is a yearly feast. We need it now. Beginning early.
In the autumn. Rejoice, then, now and later.’

But didn’t Meister Eckhart say
once, ‘Christ is born each minute
in my soul’?
So constant Christmases are more the thing
The laughter, giggles, whispering
And mysteries stored
Divinely in the word.

© Alan Williams 2011

Andrei Rublev, Trinity, 1411 or 1425-27, Tempera, 142 cm × 114 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Image courtesy Wikipedia

Possibilities, Paradoxes, and Our Moment of Painting

2011-12-20T22:56:00.003Z

by Houman Harouni, Tehran Bureau

It's a good time for painting in Iran. In my visits, I make sure to go to the galleries in Tehran as often as I can. And I prefer to visit the ones that exhibit young artists most often, the galleries that are not geared for sales, but for the advancement of lesser-known painters. A great deal of energy is channeled into painting these days.

There are ways of measuring the impact of these artistic efforts. Some will measure them by their originality (whose measuring rod is almost exclusively not local), some by their relevance. And of course they will also be measured by the art market: how many paintings make it to international auctions, how much certain painters sell, at what prices, who is doing the buying. I am, however, more interested in what these channeled energies are expressing. For now, at least, I'm interested in what they reflect.

If there are more paintings being produced, it is partly because more paintings are being bought. It's a function of the growing stability of a wealthy class in North Tehran, willing to invest in the arts, and painting is the most investible art form. To that end, the inexplicably active art market in neighboring Dubai has also helped. There is also the relative reopening of Iran's actual and virtual borders: more artists can travel to the West, and, since the Internet, we do not have to wait for smuggled, expensive art books and catalogues to see the new trends. There are plenty of styles out there waiting to be applied to Iranian subjects, and there are plenty of painters willing to apply them.

None of these factors, however, can fully explain the creative force that runs through the young paintings I see in Iran. There is more to the picture than the market and international exposure -- it has, I think, something to do with what the painters see and with the possibilities of painting as a language.

In cities everywhere, public life is foremost a visual experience. The metropolis provides endless situations we can watch up close, situations that rise out of lives not so dissimilar to our own. Example: a fight between two taxi drivers, one old and one young. Example: a couple hiding in the darkest shadows of a coffee shop, speaking conspiratorially, haloed by the smoke from their cigarettes that catches the light they avoid.

But we cannot touch these compact dramas, we cannot interact with them. If we approach, they shiver and transform: The combative taxi drivers will stop their argument and attack you as a team. The couple in the coffee shop will stop their conversation and look you up and down like an anomaly.

Tehran is the same way, but its public experience is heightened because what you see often demands a conversation from you, because it houses contradictions: A middle-aged mother in the long black Islamic veil, the chador, and her colorfully dressed daughter who holds a guitar case -- the mother walking the daughter to her music lessons. In an old street, barely wide enough for a single car to pass, a five-story building has risen up, and a few meters away a second building is on the rise. A playground full of young married couples, none of whom have children.

In more extreme cases -- not rare -- the demand is more immediate: when a screaming young woman is being taken away by the police. The very image of women, particularly modern, working women, is a source of dissonance. Any law enforcement agency gives rise to contradictory feelings; so does any religious or educational institution.

The experiences require a conversation, but the vocabulary for this conversation is yet to be fleshed out. And then, what tone of voice would be appropriate? Emphatic, sympathetic, enraged? For many of us, in many situations, it is not even clear who we should be speaking with. Is it even our place to speak?

Painting uses the visual language of experience to begin a dialogue that cannot yet be verbalized. First, it assures the painter and the viewer that they are not alone in seeing the contradictions. Second, it infuses the images with feeling (something that is more difficult for photography to accomplish); it acknowledges that what we feel is not separate from what is occurring in society. Third, in the freedom of the canvas the painter creates new contradictions that, even if painful, hint at new possibilities.

There is no society that does not contain conflict. The question is to what extent are a people sensitive to these contradictions. Those Iranians who fight, complain, become depressed, drink too heavily, theorize, or organize -- they have become embroiled in social conflicts. Some see the conflicts more clearly, some merely experience them.

This is another reason why photography cannot serve the same function as painting. In a society where people are desensitized to contradictions, photography can highlight the existing conflicts. (I imagine a prosperous European society, past its major transitions, with the poor and immigrants sequestered in their own neighborhoods.) But in a society where people are bombarded by images that demand a conversation because history has sped up, the surface reality that photography captures can too easily approach the mundane. Whatever contradiction it might quote, chances are the viewers have already noticed in their daily lives. The successful photograph in today's Iran, rather, is one that can portray a consistency -- these being so rare, so abnormal.

The attention that the photograph pays to a scene is momentary (except in the case of posed photographs and collages), whereas painting implies sustained attention, struggle with the subject matter. As images turn into paintings, they present the subconscious of the painter and of the image, as well, which has inspired this sustained attention and effort.

Here, for example, the painting by Javad Modarresi (b. 1979). Part of a series, it's titled after a neighborhood in central Tehran. My brother still lives there. The building portrayed exemplifies the place perfectly. Everything here is intentional: the soot-covered walls, the broken windows, the water stains. It's a building from the period just before the Revolution...and already decrepit. To this scene the painter has drawn the lives of people who define its desolation. The bride and the groom, abandoned, considering the scene of their possible future. The store to the bottom left is a bookstore; according to the sign it is supposed to carry books on the law and political science. It is closed on a weekday, probably permanently (we know it's a weekday because the woman on the roof is wearing her work or school clothing and carrying a briefcase). Over the narrow entrance the painter has hung an out-of-place traffic sign: Danger Ahead! This is the type of danger that has brought the woman to the edge.

The central contradiction of the painting is embodied in the white plane. No photograph, of course, could have captured it. The plane is flying too close to the ground. The sky it navigates bends like a cup to contain its flight. There is no clear way to talk about what it represents. One should know something about the role that the possibility of emigration plays in the Iranian mind. One should know something about the paradox of its dream: the more you enter the social life of your country, the more you think about leaving it altogether. Emigration is precisely the type of ever-present contradiction that has yet to find its honest, eloquent dialogue. Any talk of emigration signals the end of another conversation: It comes up as the last resort, as a way out of confronting the problem, the hokey hope of the hopeless.

The first place where the dialogue disintegrates is between those who dream of emigrating and those who have done it -- the expats. Hokey hope is hard to dismantle, but even harder if you come to the conversation with a shield you have constructed after years of alienating and humiliating experiences, or with a vision of your own success that has nothing to do with the problems at hand. And it's not just between expats and nationals that communication about the issue fails. The conversation falls apart within the individual mind, because it concerns the nature of the problems we perceive in our own lives. Thus the plane in the painting could not help but be perfectly white, perfectly poised to leave the space of the canvas -- which it never will. A perfectly abstract airplane that did not rise from any runway and will never land at any airport.

It's a rich painting, and there is more to point out. The briefcase in the woman's hand, for example, intrigues and disturbs me. The painter is right to place her where he has: What will she do next? What will the new generation of working women do, perched to fly and with seemingly nowhere to go? To truly talk about it, we will need to reassess our own interests, as men and women, in traditions, in the new urbanized economics; we won't be able to do it with borrowed vocabulary or borrowed values, and we won't be able to do it in the isolation of our respective social enclaves. The conversation must be as local as this painting, set in the midst of its own depression. Unlike this painting, however, the conversation must be approached with the clear faith that another option is possible.

As a people, we Iranians have two choices in regard to our conflicts. Either we become desensitized to them, accept them as the natural order of things, cover them up with the smaller dramas of our private lives or television, and forget them -- in which case, Iranian painting will lose its imperative and become, finally, entirely decorative. Or we will manage to give clear voice to our problems and enter the long-awaited dialogue between our many groups and classes. In that case, literature and political thought, which are for now dormant, will attract the artistic energies of the young generation.

In either case, this moment of painting is short-lived. We should enter it while we can.

Houman Harouni has written for Iranian Studies, Connect, and Harvard Educational Review, among other publications. His "Bīstoon Chronicles" appear regularly on Tehran Bureau. He currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Painting: "Darvazeh Dowlat" (2010), by Javad Modarresi.

Via Tehran Bureau

Art Embargo: IRANIAN ART & THE SANCTIONS

2011-12-17T09:55:00.001Z

With a range of global sanctions against Iran, how does one buy Iranian art?

by Daniel Grant, Artnet

In March 2011, the Leila Heller Gallery in New York City held an exhibition of 38-year-old artist Shirin Fakhim’s provocative found-object sculptures of Tehran streetwalkers, her first solo show in Manhattan. A number of works were sold, for around $10,000 apiece.

But Fakhim lives in Iran, which has been targeted with a range of economic sanctions by the U.S. and other countries around the world. Most of the Iranian artists Leila Heller represents live and work outside of Iran, but not Fakhim, who resides in Tehran. Getting her artwork out of Iran and paying the artist for sales of her work in New York can be tricky.

According to regulations first established by the U.S. Department of the Treasury following Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, “goods and services of Iranian origin may not be imported into the United States, either directly or through third countries.” A ban on “any brokering function from the United States or by U.S. persons, wherever located” is also in place. Banks in the U.S. cannot transfer money to Iranian banks.

So how is an art gallery devoted to showing contemporary Iranian art supposed to operate?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that the third-party brokering prohibition is routinely ignored. The country of Dubai is helpful to the trade in Iranian art, since it is located near Iran and has not placed any embargos on Iranian goods and services, nor are there any U.S. sanctions against Dubai. It also hosts the Dubai Art Fair (with Abu Dhabi Art as well in the neighboring emirate), which brings the work of artists living in Iran out of the country for collectors to buy.

It is in Dubai that the Leila Heller Gallery obtains works by Shirin Fakhim. “She produces in a studio of a friend of hers in Dubai the works that we show in our gallery,” Leila Heller said. Of the sales from Fakhim’s show earlier this year in New York, sales were made to buyers in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East, and the artist was given her money in Dubai, “where she has a network of friends and connections” that enable her to take it back to Iran. “It’s a bit challenging, but we’ve found ways to work with her.”

The market for contemporary art by Middle Eastern artists is growing, and many of the most noted artists are Iranian, if for no other reason than the fact that Iran is the most populous nation in the region. The auction-house presence in the region confirms the trend. Christie’s held its first sale in Dubai in 2006, followed by Sotheby’s (in Doha, Qatar), and these have become twice-annual events.

Getting around the sanctions against Iranian trade is just one more art to be mastered by all involved. “We go through third-party countries,” said Mamak Nourbakhsh, owner of Gallery Mamak in Tehran, which has been exhibiting the work of contemporary artists since 2001, “particularly those from Turkey.” The majority of the gallery’s clients live in the West, “Europeans more than Canadians and Americans.” The sanctions have not really hindered the careers of emerging artists in Iran, Nourbakhsh said, but had made “more complicated.”

Things can become even more complicated when Iranian government officials get involved. Ray Waterhouse, co-owner of London’s Waterhouse & Dodd (which dubs itself “international art brokers”), noted that one artist he represents, a photographer who lives and works in Tehran and whose work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran, had the experience seeing one of her politically charged works destroyed by customs officials in Iran. “So, the Iranians may find ways of sanctioning their own artists’ work,” Waterhouse said.

But in the end, the biggest factor in the growth of the Iranian contemporary art market is the fact that a sizable number of these artists no longer live and work in Iran, “or they don’t live there full-time,” said Omar Mazhar, one of the directors of the London-based Rose Issa Projects. “They work outside of Iran, they ship us their work from so many other countries. The sanctions really don’t create a problem for us.”

Reza Bangiz, Fortune Teller, 2008, at Gallery Mamak, Tehran, image courtesy artnet

Shirin Fakhim, “The Tell-Tale Tart,” Feb. 25-Mar. 28, 2011, at Leila Heller Gallery, New York, image courtesy artnet

Daniel Grant is a contributing editor of American Artist magazine and the author of The Business of Being an Artist and several other books.
Via Artnet

Iranian film industry thrives amid continuing censorship

2011-12-16T10:49:00.008Z

Pirated versions of Iranian films sold on the streets of Tehran. Photographer: kamshots

By Sakina Shakil, The International

Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran’s film industry has been thriving amid the turbulent political scene and in spite of strict censorship laws. The relationship between politics and film has been especially pronounced when Iran’s controversial presidential elections coincided with a burgeoning international recognition of the country’s film industry. Many Iranian films have competed in international film festivals and several were awarded prestigious prizes. Mr. Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly won numerous awards including Best Narrative Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival award and the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival in 2009. Ms. Shirin Neshat won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival for Women Without Men.

Moreover, many of the latest Iranian films—many made by women—discuss women’s roles in Iran and how they have been developing in a country where politics, religion, and culture are deeply intertwined. Indeed, creativity often feeds off censorship. As Ms. Negar Mottahedeh, an associate professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University and author of Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema, told CNN, "film cultures have flourished oftentimes when they have been under restrictions."

Post-revolution Iranian cinema has been praised both domestically and internationally for bringing attention to critical issues the country has been dealing with during the past three decades. By connecting people outside of Iran to Persian society and culture, Iranian filmmakers have opened up the industry to a new audience. Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, the Netherlands and Australia host Iranian film festivals. "It is a cinema that’s very engaged first with its own cinema history and culture," Mr. Shannon Kelley, the head of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Film & Television Archive, told the Los Angeles Times. "It’s also a very internationally informed cinema with techniques as sophisticated as what anybody else is doing in the world. The beauty of their work translates to other cultures."

Problems faced by the industry

But the Iranian film industry has significant barriers to face within Iran. Strict censorship laws often prohibit the distribution of many of Iran’s internationally acclaimed films within the country itself. Mr. Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, which won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and the US National Society of Film Critic’s award for best foreign language film in 1999, is banned in Iran allegedly because of its incorporation of suicide as a theme. Mr. Jafar Panahi’s films Offside and The Circle, the latter of which won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion prize in 2000, are also banned in Iran; both films deal with women’s rights.

Censorship also creates problems when it comes to the production of films in Iran, such as with Offside, which depicts a group of women who dress up as men in order to attend soccer games in Iran. The film had to be shot in secret, and as Mr. Panahi described to National Public Radio, it was no easy feat: “Everything is taking place in secret. Nobody knows about it. They were actually hiding in a car, sitting there and shooting, and the actress runs to the stadium to get in. She’s arrested, and she’s beaten up, and they arrest all of them and put them in a car. And I go and tell them that, ‘If you do this, I will tell everyone about it,’ so they finally let them go.” Mr. Panahi also said that his lead actress was momentarily traumatized by the experience.

Moreover, Iranians involved in the film industry live under close scrutiny, and participation in activities considered illicit by the government often lands them in trouble. BBC News reported in August 2001 that Ms. Tahmineh Milani, a filmmaker who often incorporates themes of liberalism and feminism in her work, was arrested for her stances. A statement from the public relations office of Tehran’s Islamic Revolution Court said that Ms. Milani “showed support in her work for the counter-revolutionary groups which wage war against God” and that she had “exploited art.”

The months surrounding the elections in Iran were especially ripe with trouble for filmmakers. In 2009, the AP reported that Mr. Bahman Ghobadi, whose film No One Knows About Persian Cats was featured at the Cannes Film Festival, had been arrested upon returning to Iran; he was accused of criticizing the Iranian government while at Cannes. Also that year, the AFP reported that Mr. Panahi had been arrested along with his wife and daughter at a commemoration for protestors killed in Iran’s post-election violence, and Reuters reported that Iranian actress Ms. Fatemeh Motamed-Arya and movie producer Mr. Mojtaba Mirtahmasb were forbidden from leaving the country by Iranian authorities because of their activities after the elections.

Censorship: past, present, and future

Despite the obstacles faced by the Iranian film industry, optimism remains that it will continue to flourish internationally and domestically. Ms. Motamed-Arya told AFP while attending the 2005 KaraFilm festival in Karachi, Pakistan that she believed Iranian film had a steady future ahead: “Iran is a magical country and you can’t say what is coming next, and I can’t say whether change will come in cinema in the near future or not. But I have not lost the hope for better Iranian cinema.”

But what exactly would this “better Iranian cinema” entail? And how would such improvements be achieved? Ms. Motamed-Arya, for one, believes that the removal of censorship in Iran would allow filmmakers to explore diverse topics without anticipating film-bans, and would also allow an Iranian audience to experience a different cinema than what exists today. She also believes the complete censorship on films showing sex, violence, or alcohol leaves filmmakers with limited topics and themes to pursue.

The film industry’s battle with censorship began following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when strict censorship laws were enacted that forbade films to depict couples touching or a woman to appear on screen without wearing Islamic garments that hid her hair and body shape. Permits for scripts and film production became harder to attain, and the censoring government created dilemmas for filmmakers who had to choose between the films that they wanted to produce and those that were allowed.

Some believe that the censorship and government control motivates filmmakers to push creative boundaries, which leads to more affecting films. Mr. Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University, told CNN that the impact of the Islamic Revolution created “a condition of creativity to express the trauma that the nation has experienced,” and that censorship created a barrier that filmmakers have to cross in creative ways.

On the other hand, people from Iran’s film community rebuke the perspective that censorship can be an asset. Ms. Maziar Bahari, a documentary-maker, told The Guardian that she found it patronizing when censorship was credited for the industry’s boom: “I think romanticizing censorship is a great disservice to Iranian artists. Censorship has had a negative effect on Iranian arts for centuries. I believe without censorship we would have many other great artists and filmmakers whose talent and effort cannot bear fruit because of governmental, religious and social restrictions."

For films to be produced or shown domestically, they must succumb to rigorous inspection by Iranian authorities and often have to give in to heavy censorship. Directors who have yielded to government demands in order for their films to reach a local audience described the feeling of doing so as demeaning to their work and to themselves. Mr. Babak Payami, director of Silence Between Two Thoughts, told The Guardian that he was crushed after the first version of this film was seized by Iranian security agents and he had to make a second edition, which he felt did not live up to his original vision. “I was alone in a little lab and I cried my eyes out through the entire film,” he said.

Mr. Bahman Farmanara’s feelings echoed Mr. Payami’s following the censorship of his film, A House Built on Water. The film won five awards at Iran’s Fajr International Film Festival in 2002, but after its premiere, numerous cuts were demanded by Iranian authorities and three scenes had to be deleted.

In 2008, AFP published an open letter signed by about 50 Iranian filmmakers who wished to alert the public to their feelings about the country’s censorship laws. The letter said: “The lack of attention to the cultural cinema, which is considered a national asset, is worrying. The decision-makers in cinema, instead of coming up with ways to reach more elevated national and international horizons, have isolated and even deleted this kind of cinema from public audiences.”

In response, Mohammad Hossein Safar Harandi, Iran’s minister of culture at the time, protested that films the government chose to censor were “distant from family and ethical values,” and that their negativity was the reason they should be stopped.

Finding ways around censorship

For filmmakers who refuse to succumb to censorship, filming in locations away from Iran is a popular option. According to CBC News, Mr. Mohsen Makhmalbaf opted to film in Afghanistan rather than Iran because he felt this would allow him greater control over production. But he also emphasized that external locations are not a viable solution to overcome censorship. Mr. Makhmalbaf believes that if Iran continues to implement censorship laws, other filmmakers will follow his example and pursue production elsewhere, pushing Iranian artists out of their country.

Iranian filmmakers also often turn to other alternative topics that are less likely to incur inquisition and censorship from the government. According to Mr. Dan De Luce of The Guardian, it is government restrictions, especially those concerning the portrayal of women, that explain why some of the greatest Iranian films focus on children’s lives or portray life outside on the street rather than inside the home. Ms. Motamed-Arya also believes that this is a common occurrence, but that searching for acceptable topics is not an easy task.

Censorship not only creates problems for filmmakers, but it also makes film distribution a challenge. Mr. Sid Ganis, the former president of the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences, told CNN that it was hard to get Iranian films distributed in Iran not only because of the small number of cinemas, but also because of the government’s intrusion on the distribution process.

Distribution challenges force the Iranian people to turn to illicit methods, like piracy, to view films that are prohibited by the government. An Iranian man who makes a business of selling pirated DVDs told AFP: "I usually sell between 50 to 80 DVDs per day for 20,000 rials each. The business is good. …I will have my long list of customers as long as these films are not shown in cinemas." But while piracy may allow for local access to banned Iranian films, it has an inherently negative element in that no proceeds from film sales go to the film’s producers, impairing the economy of the Iranian film industry.

The Iranian film industry may have its barriers, but it is bolstered by the support of the Iranian people, and seems to continue to thrive. Individuals like Mr. Ali Afsahi, an Iranian cleric who was arrested in 2006 for educating students about the various media of film, continues to believe that education and dialogue can lead to more freedom for the film industry in Iran with the added bonus of improving Iran’s relations with other countries through art. He told BBC News: “Film is a very important medium, and they must understand that before they repel it. I try to expand the idea that we must know each other… we must make a dialogue…”

Via Blinkvision News and The International

Nostalgia for the Past I Have Never Had

2011-12-15T11:21:00.003Z

This article was originally written in Persian and published on Mardomak website. Read the original article in Persian here.

by Gelare Khoshgozaran

The YouTube video of Shirin Neshat’s TED Talk has by now been shared numerous times by a large number of Iranian Facebook users.

Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat explores the paradox of being an artist in exile: a voice for her people, but unable to go home. In her work, she explores Iran pre- and post-Islamic Revolution, tracing political and societal change through powerful images of women.

Shortly after the video was released on Youtube, a similar video of a TEDx Talk by another Iranian woman artist, Morehshin Allahyari, became available. The latter, though obviously not getting anywhere near as many hits as Neshat’s, was soon shared by users on social media websites and became very popular amongst the similar Facebook users or TED Talks fans.

Art activist Morehshin Allahyari teams artists from the US and Iran in a creative exchange designed to build bridges between the countries. She urges us to take action and think about how we can use our own talents to extend what collaboration can look like.

Shirin Neshat, a woman in her fifties, dressed in a black outfit donning her signature hairstyle and facial makeup appeared on the TED stage to tell her “story” to the audience and listeners. Morehshin, on the other hand, half the age of Neshat, in her colorful outfit and with her pinkish hair, a constant smile on her face and a tone that was a mixture of irony, sarcasm and bitterness, was talking about the social role of art as a potential medium to bridge two countries at conflict, Iran and the United States.

After watching both of these videos, what became apparent in the concerns of these two Iranian women artists during their talks was the challenge of the exiled artist in attempting to alter the image of Iran and Iranians, especially Iranian women, in the eyes of the West. The expressed dissatisfaction and frustration was indicative of the urge to create and present a new image of, in Allahyari’s words, “what Iran, truly, is and is not”.

The most interesting and confusing issue though, in the different approaches and positions that these two artists had picked towards such a complex and multi-faceted issue, seemed to be the huge gap between their respective generations. Neshat’s words were a perfusion of nostalgia for the past that Allahyari’s generation intends to regard from a retrospectively critical point of view. Neshat’s claims for a “glorious past”, such as “Iran was once a secular society and we had democracy; and this democracy was stolen from us by the American Government, by the British Government” helped make this gap all the more evident. It became obvious that, instead of yearning to revive “what we once had”, the new generation—more fond of the present tense conjugation of the verbs—is one that believes in a self-reflexivity towards the past; A self-reflexivity that seeks help from historical memory but is skeptical of “what [perhaps] we once had”, regarding the past critically in order to have a clearer view of what we have at the moment to be able to build a better future.

Neshat considers it part of her social conscientiousness as an artist to be the “voice of her people” even though she has no access to that country and its people anymore as an artist in exile. But the question here is how is it possible for an artist to be the voice of a people that she is culturally, historically, and geographically so distanced from?

According to Neshat, her frustration with the falseness of the image of Iranian women in the Western mind has caused her to dedicate a major part of her practice to a “criticism” of this image. However, what artists such as Neshat and her followers simply take for granted is that the image that the West has of the Iranian identity is not one that is immediate, neutral and organically formed—The roots and origins of this image and the way that it has been formed, communicated and received throughout the years is one that deserves its own respective in-depth study. The question at hand is as proposed substitutes for this stereotypical image of the “Oriental Woman” in the realm of the Aesthetics, what other aspects of this identity do Neshat’s images reveal, and to what extent do they actually challenge and criticize this cliché that she claims they are disapproving of?

During her talk, on the big TED screen behind Neshat appears the image of an Iranian Woman in Chador, with her two fingers on her half-opened mouth with a Henna tattoo on her hand that reads “Ya Ghamar-e Bani-Hashem”*; the makeup and tattoo, even if considered and read as symbolic, are to a great extent exoticized and bizarre, beautiful and unnerving. The women in Neshat’s works, to me as an Iranian woman, portray the exact same identity that, in Edward Said’s words’ “looks like nobody I have ever known in my life”; images of larger-than-life contradictions in unfamiliar subjects that are charming, as much as repelling, are reoccurring exaggerations, and elements that, put together, construct nothing but a rather more distasteful cliché of Orientalist representations of the Middle Eastern identity.

In her talk, Neshat mentions that she had made those photographs after traveling to Iran after a good twelve years of being apart from it, when she had encountered an Iran that, according to her, had transformed from “Persian” to “Islamic”, “a country that was totally ideological and that I didn’t recognize anymore”, she explains. As she keeps talking, the pictures of the slideshow on the background change. Next, appear news photos of Iranian women in arms, Basij Militia women and Islamic Policewomen on the big screen behind her. Some of these pictures—not photographed by Neshat herself—are from the time of the war and others are more recent. “I became very interested in this issue as I was facing my own personal dilemmas and questions. I became immersed in the study of the Islamic Revolution; how indeed it had incredibly transformed the lives of Iranian women” she says as a photograph of her wearing a black chador, staring into the camera while pointing her gun towards the viewer appears.

Her use of the word “Persian” reminded me of everything that makes the word “culture” and its meaning, its connotations and its notional collocations as a word, all the more vague and complicated for me. I was confused, as the “Islamicized” Iran that she was talking about, was the only Iran that I had known in my entire life. This made me think that women like Allahyari and myself are the generation that once constituted the exotic-looking little girls who had made a desire in Neshat to revive the past that was different from the present of Iran that she had encountered when she had visited it after the Revolution. We were the little women—raised in a society that had once seemed alien and frightening to her—who have grown up today and turned into the women of the Green Movement, a huge inspiration to her: “Women who are educated, forward-thinking, non-traditional, sexually open, fearless and seriously Feminist”, she adds. Having heard this last statement of hers, I could then make sure that despite all the repetitive dropping of the word “feminist” when describing and talking about her work, Neshat had never made clear what the word “feminism” meant for her, and in what way it exactly related to her work.

The use of the word “Feminist” as interchangeable with “feminine” has already become a very common mistake amongst a lot of people in Iran (and probably elsewhere); in that everything that has an attribution to “being a woman” or consists of an image of a woman is mistakenly considered “feminist” with no regards to the history, definition and the origins of a movement and methodology that is essentially against most of the beliefs and constructs that underlie the exotica of the likes of Neshat’s imagery. This addresses one of the biggest misinterpretations and a common misreading of the works of Neshat: beautifully exotic women, wearing makeup while half-clad in Chador that gives them a layer of sorrowfulness evoking both fear and sympathy in the eyes of the viewer. Not only do Neshat’s images lack a Feminist criticism of the stereotypical images of the “Iranian woman”, they are complicit in the constructs and “standards” that Feminism is radically against.

* The phrase literally meaning “Oh, Shining Moon of Bani-Hashim”, is calling the name of Abolfazl, a famously courageous Shia Muslim martyr in the Battle of Karbala. The use of this phrase is at the times of feeling great awe or fear.

Via CVAD New Media Art Blog (University of North Texas) and W.O.R.D.S

Iran via Video Current

2011-12-14T10:31:00.006Z

Thomas Erben Gallery presents Iran via Video Current, A project of OtherIS – a curatorial initiative conceived to address cultural production and exchange with countries under international sanctions, curated by Amirali Ghasemi (Tehran) and Sandra Skurvida (New York)

Week-long screening of current video art from and in relation to Iran, until17 December 2011

The main question in transnational art production is who represents whom and for whom? This project engages the problem of representation via an ongoing exchange among participants in Iran and elsewhere, as conveyed in the two distinct, yet co-related video programs focused on Iran — one by Tehran-based artist and curator Amirali Ghasemi and another by New York-based curator and scholar Sandra Skurvida. Both curators started their research from their respective locales, yet both programs include artists who live in Iran and elsewhere around the world.

In her program entitled 1979/1357-, Skurvida revisits the sightlines of the most prominent, controversial Western observer of the Iranian Revolution, Michel Foucault. Both his advocacy and the ensuing critique of it reverberate in the appraisals of the recent and current events. The year denoted equally as “1979” and “1357” signifies the difference in time borne out of the societal spaces that are not the same. This negotiation unfolds in the works by Abbas Akhavan, Morehshin Allahyari, Amir Bastan, Bahar Behbahani, Kaya Behkalam & Azin Feizabadi, Barbad Golshiri, Arash Fayez, Mirak Jamal, Farhad Kalantary, Sohrab Kashani, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Amitis Motevalli, Nosrat Nosratian, Anahita Razmi, Jinoos Taghizadeh, Negar Tahsili, and Katayoun Vaziri.

Ghasemi anchors his purview in the present moment and a worldwide network associated with Parkingallery, Tehran, which he founded in 1998. His program, entitled If We Ever Meet Again… (With a Hidden Track), introduces a generation of artists raised after 1979. This generation may be characterized by its responsive attitude — as if it “had no plans,” according to Allahyar Najafi’s video — yet it holds forth a conscious presence in the environment of impositions, sanctions, apprehensions, and expectations. Such a presence asserts an unconditional attachment to the specificity of the origin — apart from the conventions established by the diaspora — yet it extends this original stance towards other contexts, as communication in the personal mode is shared in the featured works by Naghmeh Abbasi, Mehraneh Atashi, Setareh Jabbari, Anahita Hekmat, Payam Mofidi, Shay Mazloom, Amirali Mohebinejad, Allahyar Najafi, Nassrin Nasser, Shadi Noyani, Ramin Rahimi, Shirin Sabahi, Sona Safaie, Bahar Samadi, Hamed Sahihi, and Zeinab Shahidi.

Bahar Behbahani, Saffron Tea, 2008. Video, 12.00 min, image courtesy the artist and OtherIS.

Kaya Behkalam & Azin Feizabadi, Negotiation, 2010. Video, 36.00 min, image courtesy the artist and OtherIS.

Barbad Golshiri, Cura*; The Rise and fall of Aplasticism, 2011. Video documentation of an aplastic play, performance at 4th Moscow Biennial. Image courtesy the artist, Thomas Erben Gallery and OtherIS; photo by Sergey Morozov.

Anahita Hekmat, Apparition #1 & #5, 2004 - 2008, Video, 4:57 min, image courtesy the artist and OtherIS.

Sohrab Kashani, The Adventure of Super Sohrab, 2011. Video, 4.27 min, performance, and photo series, image courtesy the artist and OtherIS.

Gelare Khoshgozaran, rial & tERROR, 2011. Video, 16:27 min, image courtesy the artist and OtherIS.

Nassrin Nasser, Raining Ashes, 2011, Video, 07:10 min, image courtesy the artist and OtherIS.

Hamed Sahihi, Sundown, 2008, Video, 03:30 min, image courtesy the artist and OtherIS.

Curators’ Talk at ICI (Independent Curators International), December 20, 6:30–8 PM, 401 Broadway, Suite 1620, NYC

Project space: Raha Raissnia and Behrouz Rae

Via Thomas Erben Gallery

Flying Fingers

2011-12-13T15:30:00.004Z

There are very good reasons why Mohammad Reza Mortazavi is known as the drummer with the "fastest hands in the world"; listening to him perform, one gets the impression that one is listening to an ensemble of drummers playing a variety of instruments. Marian Brehmer reports

Iranian Tombak Virtuoso Mohammad Reza Mortazavi

By Marian Brehmer, Qantara.de

It is not exactly the most likely of settings for an Iranian solo drummer. The trendy "Lido" club in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin is the type of venue that is more usually frequented by indie or electro bands. With no seats for the audience, it is standing room only.

On the stage are four drums – two Iranian frame drums, or dafs, and two tombak hand drums – silently awaiting the animating touch that will give them life. The daf is the rhythmic heart of traditional Sufi music and is also used to accompany prayer and chanting in many Muslim countries, while the goblet-shaped tombak is the most important percussion instrument in traditional Persian music.

There is tension in the air; the concert is late in starting. The "Lido" is packed, the atmosphere stuffy, and the sense of expectation almost palpable. It is amazing how many young people have come along. This is a very different gathering from the usual Iranian exiles that so often make up the lion's share of listeners at a concert of Persian music.

A ripple of applause suddenly greets the appearance on stage of a slim, almost inconspicuous man. When he says a few words into the microphone, Mohammad Reza Mortazavi seems shy, perhaps even too shy for the stage. Once he has a drum in his hand, however, a transformation takes place and he begins to work his magic, mesmerising his audience.

The title of Mortazavi's 2010 album "Green Hands" is an allusion to Iran's Green pro-reform movement of 2009

"When I play the drums, I push myself to the limits, until those limits completely disappear," says Mortazavi

Amazing talent

The life story of the drummer with what the German television channel ZDF referred to as the "fastest hands in the world" is true storybook material. Mohammad Reza Mortazavi grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and took drum lessons from the age of six. His amazing talent astonished his tombak teacher, who, after three years, felt that there was nothing more that he could teach his prodigy. At the age of ten, he won the national tombak competition, the annual gathering of Iran's finest percussionists.

Nowadays, Mortazavi is very different from traditional tombak players, having developed many new drumming techniques as well as his own very distinctive playing style. In the past, he routinely filled concert halls in Iran and his appearances in Tehran were invariably sell-outs. His most recent album, in German Geradeaus (straight ahead), came out in November; the Kreuzberg concert is being held to mark the official release of the CD.

Amazing just isn't the word to describe what Mortazavi manages to do with his drums during the course of the evening. Listening to him, it is difficult to believe that the sounds are being produced by a solo drummer rather than an ensemble of several instruments. There are the rapid, melodic runs of the tombak – proper melodies twisting and turning, sometimes doubling back on themselves. But there are also the resonant hollow beats on the daf that Mortazavi so playfully tosses into the air. It all seems to come so easily, so naturally, even the flashing blur of those incredible flying finger movements.

Defying the laws of nature

In the quick interplay of the stage lights, his music seems almost to defy the laws of nature. "That's not possible," one listener is heard to remark more than once. It is clear from the faces of many in the audience that they had not expected to see such a display of virtuosity. Some of the less inhibited are dancing, shaking their hair loose to the rhythm; others just listen, spellbound.

"In the rhythm of my music I find a pulse that I share with my audience. Then I can feel my audience, there is no longer any distance between us," says Mortazavi. Though his compositions are all conceived and planned in advance, Mortazavi responds to the atmosphere he picks up from his audience when he is on stage and improvises continually.

When he is playing, Mortazavi appears to be in a world of his own. His hands take on a life of their own, his eyes, as though in trance, gazing out to some undefined point in the crowd. "When I play the drums, I push myself to the limits, until those limits completely disappear," Mortazavi says.

Ten years ago, Mortazavi made the decision to leave his native country, Iran. A successful concert in Munich gave him the motivation to move to Germany, where has since appeared many times on TV and last year played a solo concert at the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the high points of his career. Mortazavi is now more famous in Germany than he is in Iran. Unlike many other exiled musicians, though, he often travels back to his home city of Isfahan.

The album Green Hands

The title of the album he released in 2010, Green Hands, is also an allusion to Iran's Green reform movement of 2009. "Green is the colour of growth and of nature. It is a positive colour. I associate green most of all with freedom," Mortazavi declares. "Many of the traditional musicians in Iran have aligned themselves with the Green movement. But their music is not free."

For Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, freedom is also about a willingness to experiment and to create new music on historical instruments. Mortazavi's way of doing things, however, does not meet with universal approval; many musicians of the classical school do not really like what he does.

In the second half of the concert, Mortazavi really casts off the musical shackles. One moment, the beats of his drums sound like techno beats, the next like a rock drummer letting off steam. For his final number, Mortazavi plays Eine kleine Nachtmusik on a mini-tombak.

The crowd goes wild, refusing to let him go. Again and again he is called back on stage by their rapturous applause. Even after an hour and a half of continuous playing, he is still prepared to reward the reception he has been given with four encores. After the concert is over, as we converse on the couch, Mortazavi is once again his quiet, introspective self. It is hard to believe that this is the same man whose dynamic performance, just a short time ago, so electrified his audience.

Translated from the German
by Ron Walker

Editor: Aingeal Flanagan

Via Qantara.de

Clandestine Trade

2011-12-08T09:30:00.006Z

By Melik Kaylan, WSJ

Two utterly disparate artworks now on view in Manhattan—a centuries-old masterpiece and a modernist grotesque of immense price—are linked by a history that has remained largely in the shadows. At the Metropolitan Museum's newly reopened Islamic galleries you can see the first, the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, or parts of it at least. A gloriously illuminated manuscript from the 16th century, generally considered one of Muslim civilization's foremost artistic expressions, it came to be known as the "Houghton" Shahnama. Why it is no longer called that, why the Met has some 78 of the initial 258 pictorial folios, and how and why the remainder of the original volume went back to Iran in a clandestine swap for the second artwork are all part of the story.

You can see that second work, simply known as "Woman III," at the Museum of Modern Art until Jan. 9 as part of "de Kooning: A Retrospective." Willem de Kooning's prominent place in modernist art needs no expounding here. Suffice to say the painting last changed hands, into the possession of hedge-fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, in 2006 for $137.5 million. Mr. Cohen purchased "Woman III" from entertainment magnate David Geffen, who had acquired it from the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1994 via a Swiss dealer. "Woman III" originally went to Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art in the 1970s during the last shah's time and had remained there since.

Up until 1994, the Shahnama's owner was Arthur Houghton Jr. of the Corning Glass Houghtons. He gave Harvard its Houghton Library and presided for many years as chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Philharmonic. Four years after Houghton's death in 1990, "Woman III" was exchanged for what remained intact of the Shahnama (118 paintings with 500 pages of calligraphy plus exquisite binding). That much is on the public record. And when the intricate deal was done and "Woman III" sold off, some $9.5 million went to the Houghton family trust. Virtually unknown, however, is the role of Arthur Houghton III in the stealthy deal—one that required steely nerves, considering his job at the time. A longtime foreign-service officer, he worked in an office of the White House, advising on international strategies in the war on drugs while Iran was still under an official U.S. embargo dating from the 1979-81 hostage crisis. Then, as now, relations between the countries were icy. The younger Mr. Houghton remembers the mood as "extreme hostility bordering on paranoia."

The Shahnama, or "Book of Kings," began life as a 10th-century verse epic by the Persian poet Firdausi chronicling the mythological adventures of Persia's pre-Islamic rulers. In the mid-16th century Shah Tahmasp of the Savafid dynasty, which first united Iran under Shi'ism as the state religion, commissioned a pictorial manuscript of the epic. His court deployed the Muslim world's finest artists. Some went on to launch the tradition of Moghul miniatures in India. Tahmasp intended the work as an act of propaganda and legitimation, linking his dynasty to the country's old genesis myths. In the end, in the 1560s he gave the volume to the new Ottoman ruler, Sultan Selim ll, as a gift—a peace offering after some 40 years of war between the two globe-spanning empires.

Sometime around the turn of the 20th century, the Shahnama mysteriously disappeared from Istanbul and in 1903 resurfaced in the possession of Baron Edmond de Rothschild. In 1959, Arthur Houghton Jr. acquired it as a possible gift to Harvard. Instead he kept it, perhaps thinking of the Met as a better recipient. In 1964, a highly respected Harvard curator was permitted to photocopy the volume's content and had it painstakingly unbound. With the work in that condition, Houghton began to disperse various pictorial pages, first as a gift to the Met, then as a way to establish the gift's tax value by selling other pages, and again in a straight sale of a painted page—perhaps the book's finest—to the Aga Khan. Many art scholars regard Houghton's conduct as bafflingly destructive. He was, after all, a great friend to the arts. Whatever his thinking at the time, his son, as executor of his late father's estate, took on the volume's sale but refused to break it up any further. He contacted Oliver Hoare, a leading young London dealer in Islamic art, a popular figure with close connections to Britain's royal family.

After several false starts, Mr. Hoare found a possible buyer: The Iranian state. Despite the extreme risk to his job, the younger Mr. Houghton signed on to the idea—not least because it offered the chance to make honorable restitution by repatriating the much-depleted masterpiece. The negotiations involved numerous middlemen and inevitably fell through several times until the Iranians formed a top-level task force comprising supreme leader Ali Khamenei, President Hashemi Rafsanjani and other leading figures. Still in recovery from a decade's war with Iraq, Iran's treasury was so diminished that an executive decision was made to trade pieces from the Museum of Modern Art in Tehran in lieu of cash. The entire process took more than three years. Early on, Mr. Houghton asked Mr. Hoare always to use code over the phone, referring to Iran as Spain and the Shahnama as an orange shipment. Mr. Hoare almost scuttled everything by absentmindedly phoning Mr. Houghton at his White House office to say that "the Iranians are really interested in the Shahnama." For his part, Mr. Houghton made sure never to phone from his office.

Speaking of it on the record for the first time, Mr. Houghton says, "The deal involved huge risks to everyone: myself, Oliver Hoare and the Iranian leaders. But none of us could put it down."

With the help of Swiss art dealers and other intermediaries, the deal went through. On July 27, the Shahnama traveled in wooden crates from a Lloyd's bank vault in London to a Paris airport for inspection by Iranian art experts, then on to Vienna's airport. The next day, a high-level delegation of mullahs arrived in a government Boeing 727, offloaded the de Kooning onto the tarmac and took away the Shahnama to Tehran, where it remains today at the Tehran Museum.

Thinking back, Mr. Houghton savors the achievement: "All of us felt we were in the grip of a great event, the return of this majestic work to its country of origin—and the symmetry of 'Woman III' returning to America." He adds with some amazement, "And the damn thing is—it worked!"

Images:
(1st) The Feast of Sada,' from the Shah Tahmasp's Shahnama. Metropolitan Museum of Art

(2nd) 'Woman III' by Willem de Kooning. Corbis

Via The Wall Street Journal

Poet, Activist Remembers Life in Iran Pre-Revolution

2011-12-04T20:56:00.006Z

"At that time, nobody paid attention to what girls did when they got together."

Q&A | by Rasheed Abou-Alsamh in Brasília

Saghi Ghahraman is an Iranian lesbian poet and gay rights activist who lives in Toronto. Born in 1957 in the holy city of Mashhad, she studied classic and contemporary Persian literature at Azarabadegan University in Tabriz. She left Iran in 1982 after attacks on the women's organization she worked at, and was a refugee in Turkey until 1987 when she emigrated to Canada.

She now works with PEN Canada's Exiled Writer program, and is on the editorial board of the literary magazine Descan. She has published three collections of poetry and one collection of short stories. She also serves on the board of the Iranian Queer Organization.

Ghahraman recently spoke about what life was like for her growing up as a lesbian during the Shah's regime and just after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

***

Lesbians in Iran do not get much attention internationally. Is this because the Iranian authorities pay less attention to them than to gay men? Are some of them also arrested and charged with being homosexual?

The gay movement in Iran started right before the Revolution, and then picked up again around 1990, with gay men leading the fight without any lesbian involvement for a very long time. Lesbians appeared very slowly and reluctantly around 2005 or 2006, and without much fuss or pretense in making their presence felt as part of a social movement. So the attention is rightly given to gay men.

Iranian lesbians were heavily oppressed by the Iranian women's movement and its concerns. Lesbians were told to be quiet so as to prevent any labeling of the movement by the regime. They argued that all activities in the women's movement should deal only with Muslim women's requirements, lest the movement [be] attacked by the regime with allegations of Westernization of the movement.

When lesbians began to show up in society, or online, they were mostly interested in meeting, eating out, and having some fun with other women, and then going back to their "normal" lives. Many of the lesbians have married, either by force or by choice. You might know that, according to sharia in Iran, women aren't allowed to study, get a job, rent apartments, be operated on in hospitals, travel, rent hotel rooms, etc., without a male kin's permission. To have this permission, many lesbians have to get married and comply with traditional requirements and respond to their own desires and preferences only in the private setting of "all-women parties." That limited women being outspoken, or from taking chances with the law and/or the negative publicity of being openly gay.

I have heard about lesbians in various cities of Iran being murdered, or arrested and jailed. I have even heard of harsh treatments in jails of lesbians, but I have not directly interviewed women who have been arrested or jailed.

What was it like for you to grow up in Iran during the Shah's regime as a lesbian? How did things change for you after the Revolution of 1979?

At that time, nobody paid attention to what girls did when they got together. Parents thought it was the safe way to have girls mingle only with girls, and this gave us a lot of room to explore. I had my own early experiences when I was ten years old, and my first serious sexual relationship at 16, and my first love at 19, and nobody ever suspected anything. It [lesbianism] was practiced, but wasn't talked about.

I remember a married woman who was a distant relative, who was said to be a lesbian, and had many girlfriends who were changed every couple of months, and although no one approved of her, no one attacked or insulted her. She was a very strong woman, with a husband who very obediently followed her instructions and kept quiet and seemed okay with his wife's active extramarital life.

All the harsh treatment, the stigma and horror around gay men and lesbians began right after the Revolution with the strong force of the regime encouraging parents and the public to harass homosexuals.

I fled Iran three years after the Revolution. I was working with a communist party and its women's branch at the time. I had stumbled into an unpleasant marriage and right after the Revolution, by changes in the laws, I had lost the right to get a divorce.

I had a very supportive father who would do everything to protect me, and when the party was cracked down upon and demolished and members arrested and executions started, he was convinced I couldn't stay and arranged for smugglers to take me over into Turkey via the bordering mountains. I was never out [of the closet] when I was in Iran, and I wasn't there long enough to face complications. The last person I said goodbye to before I left for the border was the woman I loved and spent four years with in a room in the university dorm. And then I was out of Iran. But I had many problems within the Iranian community in Canada, and had my share of fights.

Has life improved for lesbians in Iran over the past 20 years?

Life went downhill and became horribly unbearable during the first decade of the Revolution. It started to get better only when people found the means of finding venues to have private lives, and also by seeking asylum in the West. During the last couple of years, it has gotten worse because now everyone is looking for signs of homosexuality and their first guess when faced with a woman refusing dates, suitors, and marriage is that she is a lesbian, and thus, the family and political pressures begin.

In the Persian Gulf Arab states, because of the extreme segregation of the sexes, especially in Saudi Arabia, this has allowed a flourishing subculture of lesbianism to develop in girls' schools. My Saudi women friends tell me that there were many lesbians in their classes who had romances with other girls, giving them flowers, chocolates, and other gifts. Does a similar thing happen in Iran, and do the teachers punish the girls or look the other way?

I remember when I was about to start my grade 1 elementary school, my mother told me on the way to school not to talk to "baroonis," not to accept gifts from them, and not to follow them when they asked to go with them, anywhere. I asked, who the baroonis were. And she said, "They're girls who are sweet on girls, and give them flowers or chocolate and follow them around everywhere."

This was my first encounter with the image of girls who fancy girls. And, yes, it was a common scene to see a girl admiring another girl, getting too close to her, and shadowing her everywhere. Rarely would the other girl respond openly, but then it was common knowledge that in private they'd be having more intimacy.

Parents would not allow their children to hang out with the other children of the opposite sex, but it was very common for girls to sleep in the same bed when sleeping over and take showers together, so having a relationship without being exposed was very easy. I remember I had many occasions to make out with girls at my house or theirs, with our parents taking their afternoon nap not very far from where we were supposed to be taking ours. My girlfriend, when I was 16, visited me every day, and we spent hours and days together, and at the same time, my parents didn't allow me to stay in the same room with my uncle, who was only slightly my elder, out of fear of letting -- as they say in Iran -- fire and cotton brush by each other.

This subculture of lesbianism in Gulf schools has led some female academics to study the issue and they have called it the "boyat" phenomenon. Unsurprisingly, they have lectured against it, calling it an un-Islamic and perverted state of mind, urging psychotherapy as a way of "correcting" this behavior. Has something similar to this happened in Iran?

This has never happened in Iran openly. Feminists and women's movement activists have tried hard to stay away from those openly lesbian figures like myself and made it a point to keep the scene clear of lesbians up to and until the 2009 presidential elections and the aftermath. And although Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Prize winner, openly opposed homosexual rights, no member of the women's movement has asked for the psychological treatment of lesbians.

As an activist for human rights, do you think there is any hope that gay rights are respected in Iran as long as the clerics and sharia law reign?

It depends on how much the longevity of the regime's life depends on it complying with LGBT rights. This regime doesn't want anything and doesn't respect anything besides staying in power. If their future depends on it, yes, they'll oblige, for sure, and they'll say, as Khomeini said, "Alas, I'll drink the cup of hemlock." So it depends then on how the international community deals with the regime. I mean, they don't care much about sharia; only staying in power counts for the group that is ruling Iran.

Islam allows for many different readings and interpretations of its rules. Also, it takes only one religious scholar to announce a fatwa that says: It is not okay to kill homosexuals.

Rasheed Abou-Alsamh is a Saudi American journalist who lives in Brazil and blogs at rasheedsworld.com. He is a regular contributor to Al-Ahram Weekly and O Globo.

Via Tehran Bureau

Parergon

2011-12-01T12:07:00.003Z

Babak Golkar explores shifting meanings through picture frames

Blue Mosque, 2011, by Babak Golkar, who uses echoes of form in picture frames to explore fluidity in meaning. Courtesy the artist / Third Line

by Christopher Lord , The National

When we look at a painting, the ornate frame around it could almost disappear into the wall. It is separate from or subordinate to what we want to see.

But if we then concentrate on the wall around the painting, the frame becomes, in our eyes, part of the artwork. The question arises: what is the frame there for at all?

Conundrums like this are prime fodder for the conceptual kiln that fires Babak Golkar's art. To these questions, the Vancouver-based Iranian artist brings architectural sense and a head for complicated lines of inquiry. Parergon, Golkar's latest exhibition at The Third Line in Dubai, satisfies all these sides of his practice.

Golkar has produced a solo show that focuses entirely on the frame itself. He's created eight hollow wooden frames, painted in a single bold colour using acrylic. The ornate ridges on the surface have been built to evoke the outline of several architectural wonders from around the region. At points, the continuity of the frame breaks, and these ridges cast a perfect silhouette of the building on to the gallery wall.

The idea came from the essay Parergon in the French philosopher Jaques Derrida's 1987 book, The Truth In Painting. In it, Derrida discusses the way that a frame's relationship with the art it surrounds comes and goes, depending on where we focus - the wall or the image. Golkar talks about the frame "melting" between these points, and this process sparked Golkar's imagination.

"From there, I started to look at buildings that have shifted their function over the course of history - places of contested architecture," the artist says. He points out that among the frames on show are silhouettes of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Tehran's Azadi Tower and, most pertinently, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul - first a Byzantine Christian basilica, then a mosque under Ottoman rule and, today, a museum.

The way that buildings and monuments can shift in meaning, depending on their context, fascinates Golkar.

"It's logical. If you have a certain ruling system that's opposed to a monument," he says, taking the example of the Hagia Sophia once it came under Ottoman control, "they would either get rid of it or shift the function." Changes of ideology can be expressed through changing monuments. "These buildings don't, in their physicality, mean anything, but are rather containers of ideas."

In the same way, a frame immediately posits an image as a work of art and, consequently, an object of value. "Framing relates directly to market," Golkar says, but he also acknowledges that there's something similar between a frame and the way we comprehend people different from ourselves. "One culture frames another culture - an "othering" process, in which we separate that culture from everything else so as to make sense of it. I'm not saying that that is a negative thing, it's just how we understand something, very much like how a frame operates in terms of an artwork."

Golkar has been a finalist for two major conceptual art prizes in London this year - the Jameel Prize and Magic of Persia Contemporary Art Prize - for work that is just as cerebral.

This "moment of alchemy", in that case melting a 3D model of a building into a 2D design on a carpet, extends into everything Golkar does and makes his work exciting to be around. In Parergon, the alchemy lies in how a form, be it a frame or a piece of architecture, can shift between meanings and functions.

Parergon continues at The Third Line, Dubai, until January 12

Via The National

Untitled (the Great Mosque of Samarah). Courtesy Third Line Gallery

Forbidden Love Scenes in the Pious Dinosaur Nation

2011-11-26T14:34:00.004Z

Tough rulings against Iranian filmmakers and the harsh treatment of female actors are causing despair in the film industry. But it wasn't always like this. Amir Hassan Cheheltan outlines the history of Iranian cinema, which is richer and more complex than the outside world realises

by Amir Hassan Cheheltan

Courts in Iran recently handed down prison sentences to two Iranian filmmakers, Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof. The court of appeal found them guilty of acting against national security and creating anti-regime propaganda.

A few years ago, a young female actor who appeared alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in a Hollywood film was arrested and maltreated; she felt she had no choice but to leave the country.

Another even more recent case concerns another female actor. She was sentenced to a year in prison and 90 lashes for appearing in a film that had been approved by Iran's cultural authorities. Her colleagues protested against the decision in an open letter, saying that the Iranian film industry was simply not strong enough to bear a punishment such as this.

Contravention of Sharia law

In this film, the female actor in question plays the part of a young woman conducting an extramarital affair with a young man. They attend parties together outside the city. It goes without saying that no love scenes are shown in the film, and the party scenes are set in a dark location so full of cigarette smoke that it's difficult to make anything out clearly. But the main point is this: the woman appears before the camera without a headscarf, as her head is shaved totally bald. Sharia law dictates that the hair on the head must be covered up. A head with no hair, however, does not need to be covered up.

In an interview, the director of the film raises the question as to whether an actor can be held responsible for a crime committed in a film. Other colleagues of the actress point out that the world of film is fictional, not reality.

The renowned Iranian actor Golshifteh Farahani (right), who played opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in the film "Body of Lies", was arrested by the Iranian authorities

To a certain extent, everyone is pretending not to hear, see or know. In Iran, everyone has learned to conceal their disgust, yes even their anger. Everyone is afraid to reveal their innermost thoughts. Over time, everyone has learned to express themselves using the language of the leaders. Everyone asks each other with feigned, incredulous, innocent astonishment: "But why? What's the problem?" Nobody says it, but everyone knows the real reason.

But the hottest piece of news to emerge from this sector in recent times is that a government-appointed director, who produces television series about the lives of the saints, recently described the Iranian film industry as a "bordello". But even in an atmosphere such as this, even mediocre Iranian films do from time to time win important international prizes. So, as you can see, the situation is not totally hopeless.

The films of the Shah era

So what is happening in the Iranian film sector? Does it not reflect a much greater scandal involving all of Iran? There has been a flourishing Iranian film industry for more or less seven decades; around half the cinematic activity took place during the Shah era. The Iranian film industry is, in fact, the biggest film industry in Asia after India.

Before the revolution, going to the movies was the main leisure pastime for broad sections of the Iranian population. According to statistics, some of these films were so popular with audiences that they were seen by pretty much everyone in the towns and cities that had cinemas. This amounted to a fair number of towns and cities and, therefore, a fair number of inhabitants.

Typical protagonists in these films were a man, who was a rascal, and a woman, who worked as a dancer in a café, both living in a run-down part of the city. The dancer is wont to seduce our scoundrel, who devotes most of his time to roguish activities and consuming liquor in a café, thereby threatening his family life. But because the cinematic rascal was true to traditions which trace their origins back to religion, he eventually found his way back to his roots, desisted from his sins, broke off his relationship with the dancer and returned home to the bosom of his family.

The film usually ends at a pilgrimage site, the grave of a saint or a house of worship – a place where our scoundrel goes to light a candle, express regret for his misdeeds and recommit himself to the infinite mercy of the creator. Iranian audiences adored these films.

Booming film industry during the Shah era: despite the fact that the Shah of Iran was generally opposed to the representation of political, social or economic problems in art, film and literature, some films produced during this era contained thinly veiled criticisms of aspects of Iranian life

The Shah of Iran was generally opposed to the representation of political, social or economic problems in art, film and literature. During this era, a film was made about a resistance fighter who seeks refuge from persecution in the house of an old friend. Because someone informs the authorities about the hiding place, the fighter is killed when the house is blown up by a policeman.

In order to obtain official permission to screen the film publicly, the director was forced to turn the pursued guerrilla into a thief on the run, and of course the policeman was no longer required to blow up the house because the hounded partisan – now cast as a fleeing crook – gave himself up, full of regret. There were of course details in the film that made these changes obvious, for example the fact that the main protagonist was a thoughtful, strong character who bore no resemblance to a thief on the run.

During the same era, another film was screened. This film featured a simple farmer who discovers treasure in his village; with the help of the resulting wealth, he begins to commit foolish acts. This needed no explanation; everyone who saw the film knew that the ignorant farmer and the treasure that had fallen into his lap were an allegory of the Shah and Iranian oil. This film disappeared just five days after its movie premiere.

The Shah regime was well-disposed to the film about the rascal and the dancer and underestimated just how influential it could be in maintaining, propagating and promoting traditions. The regime was content with the film's fake modernism, and the Iranian public were content with their film.

The early years of the Islamic Republic

Of course, after the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran, production of these films brimming with sex, dancing, music and copious wine – which was of course the thing that made them so appealing – could no longer be continued, as it was all forbidden under Sharia law.

The women who had revealed parts of their bodies in these films found themselves under semi-house arrest or left the country. And suddenly, Iranian filmmakers and those involved in new efforts to establish theatres in Iran were confronted with a lack of female actors. A young director, a supporter of the Islamic Revolution, surprised everyone with his solution, which he announced with great alacrity: there was no necessity for the presence of women in film, one can make films that work perfectly well without actresses, he said.

This revolutionary director no longer lives in Iran, and of course he continues to produce his astonishing works. All the members of his family are filmmakers, receive international prizes for their work and dedicate them with consummate magnanimity to Iran's detained artists and political prisoners.

The disappearance of the Shah-era film industry suddenly created a large vacuum. And until the regime began to rebuild the sector in a manner that it found acceptable – something it has not quite managed yet – a space for enlightened Iranian cinematic art emerged. Suddenly Tarkovsky was very fashionable. But the new regime did not subscribe to these progressive impulses and immediately silenced any Tarkovsky-style characteristics.

Then some filmmakers made films using ideas based on eastern teachings, which found absolutely no audience at all. Naturally, this genre did not last very long. Propagandist productions, commissioned by the government and described as "valuable films", also formed part of this rather unappealing body of cinematic work.

It wasn't long before foreign videos and old Iranian films moved in to fill the vacuum. These films could not be sold officially, which led to the development of an extensive black market in American, Iranian, Indian and Japanese films, which in turn created a new arena for the game of cat-and-mouse between the residents of Tehran and other large cities, and the government.

Practically all those who wanted to see these films saw them; just as those who wanted to consume alcoholic beverages did so. There's a black market for all forbidden things in Iran, because there are always people who have the necessary connections and people who are unable to resist the temptation of a large, lucrative market.

Given these circumstances, several politicians working in the field of arts and culture came to the conclusion that by giving Iranian filmmakers more creative space, they could lessen the devastation inflicted by consumers' access to illegal goods and films that contradict Sharia law. Obviously, this film production process would remain under the control of cultural authorities, but it was decided that the industry should be stimulated through competition.

As a result, general regulations were amended and producers were no longer obliged to make films that only served to disseminate propaganda and were therefore unpopular with audiences. But what kind of films would these be – without sex and politics?

Iranian film today: colourful and modern

For a while, Iranian filmmakers focused on the issues of divorce and addiction, but it was clear that this couldn't go on indefinitely. Cue beautiful women – naturally under the cover of an Islamic veil – and good-looking young men. A modern, colourful life became the subject of films, which feature people playing tennis, skiing and weekending in seaside villas.

The protagonists wear expensive designer sunglasses, clothes and wristwatches. Sometimes, to enhance the appeal of a film, the location will be moved to Turkey, Bulgaria or Ukraine, with everyone behaving as though they are in Western Europe. And suddenly, Iranian audiences and young people in particular found films that were to their taste.

The influence of the West

The Shah paid no attention to the influence of cinema at the time, but today's rulers are only too well aware of its effect. It is the issues set down by the West, whether these be good or bad, that define contemporary life. The contrast to this represented by the country's rulers is evident on all levels. While you can find millions of Iranians who speak fluent and correct English, it's not been possible to find a single person among all those who govern Iran who would be able to speak in this language on an international stage without obvious mistakes; compare that to Iran's neighbours.

A photograph was recently published on the Internet showing the rooftops of a small number of Tehran houses. The picture has been taken from the air and shows that in this district at least, all rooftops are crowned with satellite dishes. In addition, since the advent of the Internet and the easy, rapid access that Iranians now have to all kinds of foreign films, the issue of how young Iranians may be corrupted by watching Iranian films whose directors have been arrested has lost its significance.

A much greater problem is that the Iranian film has to recognise its limitations, or, to use an Iranian saying, measure its step to match the length of its kelim. But in the end, it is the government that determines the length of the kelim.

Amir Hassan Cheheltan's most recent novel is titled Amerikaner töten in Teheran (Killing Americans in Tehran).
Translated from the German by Nina Coon
Editor: Aingeal Flanagan/Qantara.de

The Art of Stepping Through Time

2011-11-24T11:15:00.005Z

Iranian poet H.E. Sayeh (né Houshang Ebtehaj) was born February 25, 1928 in Rasht, Iran. Unlike many other literary figures during Shah Reza Pahlavi's reign, Sayeh refrained from being involved in politics and left-leaning activities, while staying true to his social and political consciousness. However, after the 1979 Iranian revolution, he did not refrain from expressing the deep sorrow felt by a nation whose social revolution was kidnapped by an Islamic and repressive regime. He was arrested in 1981 and spent a year in jail. Many other poets in his circle were also imprisoned and some were executed. In "Black and White", a poem he wrote in 1991, Sayeh laments:

I don't know who sold our loyalty
What he earned or bought with the money
But I see that black hand above the bar
Pouring poison in the people's wine
In 1987, he moved to Germany.

A slim volume of his selected poems is being published in English translation in November 2011 under the title The Art of Stepping through Time.

***

The Art of Stepping Through Time
by H. E. Sayeh
translated by Chad Sweeney and Mojdeh Marashi

The world does not begin or end today
Sad and happy hide behind one curtain
If you're on the path don't despair of the distance
Arrival is the art of stepping through time
A seasoned traveler on the road to love's door
Your blood leaves its mark on every step
Still water soon sinks into the earth
But the river rolling grows into a sea
Let's hope that one reaches the target
So many arrows have flown from this old bow
Time taught me to fall out of love with your face
That's why these tears are tinted with blood
Pity this long game of decades
Plays the human heart as a toy
A caravan of tulips crossing this meadow
Was crushed under-hoof by the riders of autumn
The day that sets spring's breath in motion
Will birth flowers and grasses from shore to shore
Mountain, you heard my cry today
The pain in this chest was born with the world
All praised brotherhood but did not live it
God, how many miles from tongue to hand?
Blood trickles my eyes in this corner of enduring
The patience I practice is squeezing my life
Come on, Sayeh, don't swerve from the path
A jewel is buried beneath every step

*

House of Ghazal

Tehran, Summer 1975

What love is this love? We don't know what it is.
It's sane and insane, yet neither sanity nor insanity.
How can a madman or sage understand
The drunkenness of this grail increases every day?
When the sea is wild, the moon's reflection is obscured
By this wave of mercury rising up, sinking down
Imagination and feeling hold the intellect captive
Like a deer in whose presence the lion is helpless
Where is the blade that opened the vessel of the soul
And can no longer hide the twilight of the wound?
When you arced your eyebrow I almost lost my mind
Imagine what your whole eye could do, your house of ghazal
What would I make with a lock of that hair?
The strands of such thread are beyond comprehension
Sayeh, we're not talking about delicacy of the body
But she who is all soul inside her clothing
So get up in a frenzy, clasp onto her hair
This is what you've been waiting for
Wearing earth-rags, you're trying to charm the sun
Hold up your face until she is your mirror

*

Red Dawn
Tehran, 1971

O dawn!
The messenger's happy news!
To honor your visit tonight
a rooster is beheaded at the front door.

A few more poems from Sayeh's The Art of Stepping through Time, trans. by Chad Sweeney and Mojdeh Marashi.

Migration

A sketch the rain strikes
in dirt, one uncertain runnel
depicting the dark story of a cloud--
a vagrant cloud, driven over mountain and plain
until one day, in whatever stream it finds itself,
it is returned to the sea.

*

A False Dawn

Night still hasn't passed.
Oh, prodigious patience, stay--
without you, I don't have the will to live.
The splendor of a false dawn might dupe us.
The seasoned rooster knows
this is not the time for singing.

*

Sunset on the Green

Tell me under dusk the grieving green of meadows.
This sadness of tousled grasses, tell.

Look to ashen dreams of the arghavaan tree,
Wordlessly confess the thoughts of the burned.

What became of her face leaned on the young tree sprout?
Tell the dirt's embrace. Tell the solitude of the rose.

The joy of first green left the old tree's memory.
Please, spring wind, tell of those days.

Water won't return to a dry creek bed.
Let wet eyes tell of the thirst of the jasmine.

Tell the crowds struck silent with sadness
Of the serving girls' festivals of morning wine.

Tell of the messenger, a hundred flowers on his chest
And this wave of blood that slaps him on the mouth.

The broken pine sketched my heart on the water.
Tell this story to the heart-breaker mirror.

That green and red shadow turned amethyst and bruise.
My dark pine, tell of sunset on the green.

The word "shadow" in the penultimate line is a play on the author's name: Sayeh means "shadow" in Persian.

Feeling

My bed
is the empty shell of loneliness.
You are the pearl
strung from other men's necks.

[1953]

*

Hope

What luster in the pupils of the night
Lit a new glow in my light
O owl, don't croon your ominous lullaby
Behind curtains the sun is still white.

[1953]

*

Loneliness

Morning rose and the dawn bird called
The black sky spread her golden skirts
One of these evenings, you said you would come
The nights keep passing and my arms are empty.

[1953]

*

Stone

Dawn stirred the flower's colors
But when I looked again she was pale
Just playing shy, I thought
I reached out to touch a stone

[1953]

*

Fear

Another storm tonight.
Fright rattles its fist on the pane.
The flame trembles of loneliness.
The wind.

[1956]

*

Danger

A night storm.
Danger raps its knuckles on the glass.
The wick quivers in solitude.
How can the lantern stay lit?

[1956]

*

Song of the Sea

The chest should be open like the sea
To make the music the sea makes
Breath threshed like a wave
Drops a hundred times and wells up
A patient storm-weathered vessel
Not weary from rising and falling
The ballad of an oceanic heart
Not every chest can sing this way

[1963]

*

Cry

Shadows sob under trees in the green sunset.
Branches read the story of clouds,
and like me, the sky is moody with dust.

Wind brings the smell of soil wet with storm.
Leaves agitate in the passing night.

The garden is anxious for rain--
my heart aches for a long green cry...

[1965]

*

Took

If I drank my heart's blood in vain, so I drank it
And counted so many moons and suns that I died
If it was all defeat, yes, my whole life
At least I touched your hair, yes I did

[1967]

*

Design

They cut the morning bird's throat
and yet

in the rolling river of sunset
his crimson voice
still flows...

[1970]

*

Morning Wine

He lifted the sky
in an ebony bowl.
The red dawn
drank it down in one swallow.
In that moment the sun blazed
through his entire being.

[1974]

*

The Bird Knows

Thoughts of flying in cloud light
like opening an eye into sleep
the bird in her cage
is dreaming.

From her cage the bird watches
the painted image of the garden
shimmer.
The bird knows this wind
has no breath--the paradise
an illusion!
From her cage the bird
is dreaming.

[1971]

*

Apple's Cry

Night was falling.
I came inside and closed the windows.

Wind wrestled with branches.
Only me in an empty house.

The world's lament poured into my heart.

Suddenly I felt
someone

beyond the window
in the garden

crying,
morning dew
dropped from the apple blossom.

[1972]

*

From the Dance of Burning

Supple and delicate a sapling
Threads its head through the ice of the earth

Its green eye inclined toward the sun
Long ago dreamed of fire

In its center a sigh has waited
The sun's mane tossed in its breathing

The sun is drawn to this seed as well
A shard of her own heart of light

Through its season in the soil
The seed carries memories of the sun

And reading to the end
Finds the destiny of the tree it will become

Though it sways and flirts in the meadow
The destiny of the tree is to burn...

[1980]

*

From Life

Time stretches without coastlines--
the steps of our lives can't measure it.
This shelter from pain is only a moment.

[1992]

*

Taasian

The house was ailing for the vanishing sun,
as now my heart is sick.

Father told us to light the lamp,
and night filled with night.

I was certain the sun was lost,
but Mother sighed,
Morning will bring it back.

A cloud drifted my young eyes
into sleep.

Who knew this much suffering
crept in ambush toward a child's heart?

Yes, in those days when someone left us
I had faith in his return.

I hadn't swallowed the meaning
of never.

O doomed word,
my heart has not grown accustomed to you.

Why haven't they come back?

After all these years I
still fix my eyes on the road

waiting.

[1996]

Introduction by Sholeh Wolpé

Via Levantine Cultural Center and The Fictional Woods

Canary in a Coal Mine

2011-11-23T09:04:00.002Z

An upcoming exhibition of the works of Farhad Ahrarnia

Rose Issa Projects, London

18 January – 25 February 2012

Until the 1980s, British coal miners would take a caged canary with them underground. Because the bird sings most of the time, if the oxygen level dropped or any dangerous gases were emitted, its death was an early warning system.

The phrase “canary in a coal mine” refers to someone who can detect signs of trouble and danger, whose sensitivity makes them vulnerable. The sentiment is an appropriate title for Farhad Ahrarnia’s work: the idea of the caged canary, singing in the depths of the ground, while shovels unearth treasure, digging into the fabric of life.

This is Ahrarnia’s second solo show with Rose Issa Projects, and has some echoes of the first, Stitched (2008), in that it explores the idea of being “stitched up”. For Canary in a Coal Mine he has created larger-format works that combine embroidery, digital photography, sewing needles, silver-bronze shovels and dustpans.

The work, “Ballet Pars” refers to a period in the 1970s when Iran was exporting dancers to the New York City Ballet. “Beautiful is the Silence of the Ruins” refers to the Hollywood icons whose films were dubbed into Persian, and were therefore intrinsic to Persian cinematic culture and experience. Through the act of appropriation and needlework Ahrarnia examines and explores the various tensions risen when contemporary Iranians attempt to ambivalently place, negotiate and reconcile their own sense of deep rooted traditions with the force and consequences of modernity.

The engravings and reliefs on his silver dustpans refer to the pre-Islamic history of Persepolis, Mesopotamia, and Pharaonic Egypt. Similarly, the pointed tips of his silver shovels, like the needles on his embroidered works, encourage viewers to dig into their own history, and discover the many layers of history and life beneath.

This exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue edited by Rose Issa, with essays by Pippa Oldfield, Sara Raza and Christopher de Bellaigue.

Ballet Pars V, Digital photography on canvas, embroidery and needles, 160x123 cm, 2011, Image courtesy of Rose Issa Projects

Beautiful is the silence of ruins V, Digital photography on canvas, embroidery and needles, 108x128.5 cm, 2011, Image courtesy of Rose Issa Projects

Beautiful is the silence of ruins VI, Digital photography on canvas, embroidery and needles, 83.5x160.5 cm, 2011, Image courtesy of Rose Issa Projects

The dig, Composition no. 8, Silver plated copper, 42x27x3 cm, 2011, Image courtesy of Rose Issa Projects

The dig, Composition no. 9, Silver plated copper, 42x27x3 cm, 2011, Image courtesy of Rose Issa Projects

The dig, Composition no. 10, Silver plated copper, 42x27x3 cm, 2011, Image courtesy of Rose Issa Projects

Via Rose Issa Projects

Maps that defy borders

2011-11-21T15:50:00.002Z

The child-like works of Iranian artist Ghazel have deeper resonances in the issues of identity, displacement and alienation

Ghazel uses ballpoint pens to draw universally understood symbols — such as the sun, trees, houses, hearts and suitcases — on world maps

By Jyoti Kalsi, Special to Weekend Review

Iranian artist Ghazel's work is defined by her nomadic existence. She was 19 years old when she left Iran to study art in France. Since then, she has lived in various cities around the world and at present divides her time between Iran and Europe. She channels her personal experiences of being an exile, who has homes in many places but cannot feel at home anywhere, to explore universal themes of displacement, identity and alienation. Although she deals with serious and complex subjects, Ghazel's style is simple, direct and full of humour.

The artist is well known for her performance videos and installations. But for her first exhibition in Dubai she has chosen to display for the first time a series of drawings along with three videos. Titled Geo-politics of Roots — No Man's Land, the show comments on the human longing and need for roots and the socio-political forces that uproot people from the place where their heart belongs.

Ghazel uses ballpoint pens to create her child-like drawings of universally understood symbols such the sun, trees, houses, hearts and suitcases. But what is really interesting is that each of the drawings has been done on a map of the world. Through these drawings she makes the entire world her own. The roots and branches of her trees spread across countries, unhindered by any borders. And she builds her houses where she pleases, with no worries about immigration rules or discrimination on the basis of race or nationality. The houses are perched on top of the trees or sprout roots of their own in an attempt to find stability, permanence and belonging.

Poignant reminders

The suitcases tell their own story. Sometimes they are pitched like tents at the bottom of the map as a poignant reminder of displaced refugees longing for a homeland, migrants in search of a better life or exiles trying to find roots in an alien environment. The suitcases also reflect our increasingly nomadic contemporary lifestyle and serve as a metaphor for the emotional and cultural baggage we carry with us wherever we go.
In some drawings, the suitcases also grow roots, suggesting the desire and possibility of finding roots in new environments and being comfortable in many different places, just as Ghazel claims to be. The recurring heart motif suggests that home is where the heart is.

"Earlier I used to do very serious, complex pieces filled with typically Iranian symbols, because I was trying to resolve my guilt and sorrow about leaving my family during the Iran-Iraq war and losing friends in that war. But I have now simplified my vocabulary by using these child-like drawings and a dose of humour, because I want to communicate with everybody.

"I have often used maps in my performance videos because they are an easily understood metaphor for boundaries, roots and being uprooted. For example, I used a map as a fan in a video titled Global Warming. So when I decided to go back to drawing after a break of many years, it seemed like a good idea to draw on a map. The map I use is a political map, but I have removed the political aspect by scratching out the flags with my pen or covering them with the roots," Ghazel says.

"My early work was titled Me and was focused on my feelings and experiences. But the story that I am telling now of roots, branches, houses and suitcases is everybody's story. The houses are portraits of the people who live in them. So this series represents a transition from Me to We," Ghazel adds.

Interestingly, most of the 31 drawings are incomplete because Ghazel decided that she would use only one ball-point pen for one drawing and stop when the ink runs out. And that is why every drawing is titled The Lifespan of a Ballpoint Pen.

"In my first piece, the ink ran out when I was halfway through, and I just loved the idea of letting the pen decide when the drawing was done. But gradually I got better at judging how long the ink would last and had more control in terms of the areas I wanted to emphasise," she says. Perhaps this alludes to her problems with immigration authorities, who dictate how long she can stay in any country and how she has now become adept at dealing with them.

Multiple issues

In her videos, Ghazel can be seen drawing the same trees with roots and branches. But she also adds some human figures hanging on the branches. These stick figures, suspended in mid-air perhaps represent those who have died fighting for their right to a homeland or those who are desperately hanging on to their roots; or maybe these are people who have been rendered homeless and stuck in a no man's land by man-made borders and political strife.

Jyoti Kalsi is an art enthusiast based in Dubai.

Geopolitics of Roots — No Man's Land will run at Carbon12 Dubai until January 8, 2012.

Via Gulfnews

Cinema in Iran

2011-11-21T11:56:00.005Z

Circulation, Censorship and Cultural Production

A Conference at ICI Berlin,
Dec 16-17

Iran is undergoing a period of socio-political transformation joined to a cultural space that despite binding censorship regulations, circumnavigates restrictive bans and, in the world of film, generates award winning, critically acclaimed masterpieces.  In the course of this two-day conference, participants will investigate cinema in Iran as part of Iran’s rich media and cultural ecology. The conference brings together international scholars on topics, which explore:

The contemporary political and industrial context in which films are produced, distributed, and consumed in Iran and the ways in which formal and informal censorship structures and practices impact the industry;
Film as both a formal and informal information conduit in closed or censored societies;
Cinematic circulation and flows among and between the Iranian Diaspora and Iranians in Iran;
The role of Iranian cinema as public diplomacy and public debate surrounding film in Iran;
The political economy of film in Iran, including piracy and do-it-yourself (DIY) cinematic production such as YouTube;
The role of cinema vis à vis television: subject migration, professional migration, content regulation

About the conference:

This event is sponsored by the Iran Media Program at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, with support from the Free University of Berlin and George Washington University.  The Iran Media Program is a collaborative network designed to enhance the understanding of Iran's media ecology. Our goal is to strengthen a global network of Iranian media scholars and practitioners (the Iran Media Scholars Network) and to contribute to Iran's civil society and the wider policy-making community by providing a more nuanced understanding of the role of media and the flow of information in Iran.

Supported by the ICI Berlin.

Conference Program

To register for this conference, please send an email to irancinema@asc.upenn.edu

Via ICI Berlin

Al Jazeera Takes on 'Parazit'

2011-11-20T14:45:00.002Z

The Stream interviews the hosts of Parazit, a popular U.S.-funded Persian language satire show.

On Thursday [17 November 2011], Al Jazeera's The Stream grilled Kambiz Hosseini and Saman Arbabi, co-hosts of the satirical television program Parazit, which is broadcast to Iran by the U.S.-funded Voice of America. "Can the VOA help Iran's pro-reform movement," The Stream host Imran Garda wanted to know, "or is it peddling Washington's agenda?" Al Jazeera itself is owned by the state of Qatar.

"Parazit is much, much more popular than any program on BBC Persian," in the words of a blogger popular in Iran. But does the fact that the U.S. government funds it undermine its credibility? Probably as much as the British government's support for BBC Persian, judging from reaction to the show on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. In that regard, Parazit has been able not only to successfully distinguish itself from other programming on VOA Farsi, which is struggling to improve its brand, but it's emerged more influential than anything offered by network rival BBC Persian -- no easy task.

Via AJstream and Tehran Bureau

Reality of illusions

2011-11-19T19:09:00.001Z

Art assumes a new form when artists from across the globe interpret Pablo Neruda’s poem on illusion for a multi-media show, discovers Poonam Goel

Iranian artist Malekeh Nayiny’s homecoming wasn’t an easy one. The revolution in Iran kept her away from home while she was still studying in the US. After a decade and a half, when she did fly back to Tehran to visit her ailing mother, she could never make it in time to hold her dying mother’s hand. What remained were a few personal belongings of her mother, a lonely father and a host of memories. “Two years later, my father died as well. All that was left for me were traces of their lives: Their objects, their letters and abandoned pictures from the past, evidences of their one-time presence in this world. I could not help but feel haunted by these symbols of the past and it became clear to me that they would always remain inside me. And, even though I fought to erase them from my mind, I realise how deeply I still cherish these traces that tangibly connect me to my past, each one telling me a different story of a time gone by,” says Nayiny. And that explains her photographic diptych titled ‘Traces’, with which one comes face to face in an ongoing show aptly titled ‘In You is the Illusion of Each Day’ at Latitude 28 in New Delhi.

Curated by Maya Kóvskaya, the show draws its title and thematics from the lines of the poem, Your Breast Is Enough, by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who understood our deep human need to feel intimately and inextricably connected to the world outside each of us. In an evocative essay to the show, Kóvskaya writes: “No longer were Malekeh’s illusions of self and family in sync with the world she had left behind. The rain of old family photos and the pile at her feet in the work came to represent the passage of time as well as lost time and lost people. The presence of the absent in the traces they left behind serves to underscore the ways in which the world can become a different place through the reordering of the dominant principles that gave coherence and meaning to what would otherwise simply be a mountain of meaningless matter. It is the power of illusion that enables us to tie these disparate things together into something called life.”

Hence, in each of the works in the exhibition, presented by some of the most cutting-edge artists from across the globe, illusions and their place and function in our lives serve as the dominant concept.

In Dilip Chobisa’s two untitled mixed media works that make a fine demarcation between the inside and the outside, one can find three-dimensional visual language being used to create an illusory effect. “In both works, a room in our foreground is separated from the outside by an archway that is fenced off with a length of barbed wire. In one work, a tumultuous cloudscape broods on the horizon, in the other a walkway leads to a tree that is growing in the shape of a man’s head. Inside and outside interpenetrate and bleed over the symbolically policed boundaries, placed at the gateway between worlds,” explains the curator.

At first glance, Neha Choksi’s vertical work, titled ‘Queen of the Night’, which holds the ubiquitous sapling of a raat-ki-rani tree against a dark green background, seems like a painting. Get a little closer, and it looks like a photograph. She has taken a live plant and painted it in black and white, later photographed it against a theatrical backdrop, and finally embellished it with handwritten text. Like many other works in the show that present illusions in varied ways, Choksi’s method is to ‘superimpose upon and smother the real’.

Illusory
In a complete contrast to Choksi’s dramatic yet simple imagery is Delhi-based artist Pooja Iranna’s complex sculptural installation made of ordinary staple pins. Titled ‘Everything is Not Straight’, the installation creates the illusion of an urban skyline that is inundated with shining surfaces of steel and glass high-rise buildings. Pooja has been talking of these structures ever since she started her art practice almost two decades back and has remained grounded to architectural spaces in this show as well. She says, “There is no stone unturned as the human race has successfully managed to use their cultural as well as technical knowledge along with positive energies, to construct the unthinkable.”

But here she goes beyond the human genius and beauty of spaces created by man. Everything is not to be seen at the surface level. There is both fragility and strength in her work, just as there is human creativity. The not so straight partitions and the visible curvatures all denote the concealed part of life which could be beautiful for some or even ugly for others. She says, “The crux of the matter here is that life, surfaces, spaces do have twists and turns but it depends on the human mind and its strength of how one responds to them.”

Adds Kóvskaya, “Similarly, in Pooja’s digital print, the unfinished façade of an urban mega-building dominates the frame. What is striking is the way in which this could be a scene from anywhere — it could be China just as easily as India.”

Ethereal images
The same gleaming, high rise urban structures find place in Chinese artist Han Bing’s photographs titled ‘Coiled Dragon Pillars’, ‘Sun in the East’ and ‘Withered Lotus’ from his ‘Urban Amber’ series. Han Bing grew up in an impoverished village in rural China, labouring in the fields as what he describes as a bona fide “peasant”. At three, he began drawing in the dirt with pieces of broken glass, because his family could not afford art supplies. When he moved to Beijing to study at the Chinese Central Academy of Art, he was moved by the harsh contrast between the urbanised “Chinese dream” propelling the nation’s struggle to become “modern”, and the cruel realities of those left behind or trodden underfoot in this stampede. Exploring the struggles and desires of ordinary Chinese people, he photographs ordinary scenes and architectural structures from everyday life along the banks of urban China’s polluted and garbage-infested rivers that are full of industrial waste, human and animal faeces and captures both the “detritus and the dream in a single image.”

Says the curator, “In this series of startlingly ethereal, yet foreboding images, we see at once China’s dreams of becoming a modernised, urbanised, propertied new nation, and simultaneously, the fictive, illusory nature of these dreams. Floating in the ‘skies’ of these inverted images are the filthy refuse and toxic by-products of our own excesses and myopic desires.”

And these are the illusions that also find place in Raqs Media Collective’s projected video loop titled ‘Shore Leave’. Describing the visit of a sailor to a prostitute, ‘Shore Leave’ is a short story in words and images, about words and the unsaid, about desire and longing, creating a fleeting illusion of warmth even in this so-called deviant intimacy. A more tangible illusion finds place in Sonia Khurana’s zoetrope (a rotating device that produces an optical illusion of movement from a set of static images), which shows several images of the artist dressed up as legendary Egyptian opera singer Aum Koulsum. When the zoetrope is rotated by a viewer, the images merge with each other to create the impression of an operatic performance.

New media certainly has a host of possibilities for young artists today. The site-specific installation, titled ‘Moist Fear’ by Kartik Sood, is inspired by an imaginary situation — a dying man sitting in a room, waiting for a magical moment that will remove all fear from his mind. Using found objects like lantern, quilt, wooden horse sculpture and old photographs, Sood creates an eerie atmosphere in a room that reeks of both reality and illusion of death.

What this show finally does is to make us ask ourselves a question — how to fold the world into ourselves and ourselves into the world. And how will we face this challenge? As Kóvskaya sums up beautifully, “Perhaps by marshalling our illusions of the best that we can be, and holding them up as a standard by which we judge ourselves, our histories and future generations.”

Via Deccan Herald

How I Learned to Stop Fearing and Love Exotic Art

2011-11-17T16:59:00.004Z

JAMM, an independent art advisory, will host its inaugural exhibition in Kuwait of 40 artworks by Contemporary Arab and Iranian artists at the Contemporary Art Platform (CAP) warehouse located next door to the Life Center in industrial Shuwaikh (block 2, street 28). Curated by Ali Bakhtiari, the exhibition, entitled How I Learned to Stop Fearing and Love Exotic Art, will open on 20th November 2011. The show will end on 10^th December 2011.

Highlighting the use of writing in the field of contemporary Arab and Iranian art, JAMM”s exhibition will feature artworks that incorporate text in its various forms- calligraphy, graffiti, quotations, poems and sometimes just a single letter. Featuring works by both emerging and established Middle Eastern artists, the participating artists include Parviz Tanavoli, Hassan Hajjaj, Farideh Lashai, Katya Traboulsi, Fareed Abdal, Amira Behbehani, Shezad Dawood, Nargess Hashemi, Susan Hefuna and Farhad Moshiri.

'This is a wonderful opportunity to present the works of contemporary Arab and Iranian artists and to showcase works in various artistic media that incorporate text. The use of writing is familiar theme in the field of contemporary Arab and Iranian art. We want to highlight and celebrate that. Nevertheless, the use of the Arabic language renders the art from this region as ‘exotic’ to outsiders. In highlighting these so-called ‘exotic’ elements, we hope that viewers will question the nature of exoticism and appreciate the works, which are among the best examples from each of the artists selected. As a research-based exhibition, the selection was dependent on the works’ relevance to the theme of the show rather than the time that the works were produced;' says Sheikha Lulu Al-Sabah, co-founder of JAMM.

'Exoticism is the charm of the unfamiliar. It is a relative characteristic, a way of perceiving the world. Anything can be viewed as exotic, depending on what is being perceived, by whom, where and when. There exists a lingual communication between an artwork and the observer as the observer has her own interpretation of the concept that she confronts. There is no absolute interpretation of an artwork. In changing the viewpoint in any which way, be it sociological, political, aesthetically or otherwise, it brings a new meaning to the artwork. ... Due to sociopolitical and economic changes in recent decades, there has been a new focus on Asian and Middle Eastern art and particularly, the stereotypical elements of the art from these regions, which differentiates it from the art that is being produced in other parts of the world. This new focus on these so-called exotic elements has raised a wave of pseudo intellectual criticism questioning the concept of exoticism as a whole. ...More recent trends use writing in the same vein as it was used in the Dada activities of the 1920s and beyond. Sometimes the script acts as an audio mise-en-scène for the art piece. Regardless, text makes the art appear exotic because its ambiguity;' writes the curator Ali Bakhtiari in the exhibition catalogue.

Nargess Hashemi, Untitled from «Aceton Qajar» series, 2007, Mixed media on paper, 100 x 70 cm, Courtesy of the artist

Farideh Lashai, Leyli Va Majnoon, 2008 - 2011, Mixed media and video projection on canvas, 180 x 160 cm, Courtesy of the artist

Iman Raad, Our cow doesn't milk, but pisses plenty!, Embroidery on velvet (dark crimson), 120 x 162 cm, Courtesy of the Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde

Amira Behbehani, Detail of work: The Journey, 2011, Mixed media on board, 367 x 243 cm, Courtesy of the artist

Shahrzad Changalvaee, Body #1 from “Body Composition Remaining Within Limited Domain” Series, 2010, C-print, 60 x 90 cm, Edition 4 of 5, Courtesy of the artist

Shirin Fakhim, Prostitute in Love, 2011, Mixed media assemblage, 100 x 40 x 50 cm, Courtesy of the artist

About JAMM:
JAMM was founded by Kuwait based art-journalist and former Middle East Director for Philips de Pury, Lulu M. Al-Sabah and former head of Christie’s, Middle East, Lydia Limerick. Their mission is to create cultural projects without geographical boundary.
Projects range from large-scale exhibitions and events to small-scale activities focuses on the development of the art market in the Middle East and other key regional markets. For more information on JAMM, please visit www.jamm-art.com
For more information on JAMM, please contact: Lulu Al Sabah: lasabah@jamm-art.com, Gazala Shaikh: gazalashaikh@jamm-art.com

Via JAMM

Scarlet Stone

2011-11-15T19:15:00.006Z

Who are we to blame?! Being scattered is the fruit of the bitter seeds which we planted on this land, and now they have bloomed. Whoever has had an ideal in mind and a desire in heart, now grapples with the self in the dark black cave of separation. But the key to this big black cave ...?!

-- Siavash Kasrai

Scarlet Stone is a new multidisciplinary and collaborative music/dance/video work told in the language of dance-theatre to be performed in: San Diego Mandel Weiss Forum, UCSD, November 19, 2011; and Los Angeles Freud Playhouse, UCLA, December 10 and 11, 2011.

This epic piece is based on the last work of Siavash Kasrai, Mohre-ye Sorkh (Scarlet Stone) which re-tells the most famous tragedy of Iranian mythology, namely Rostam and Sohrab. The production uses the modern rendition of Ferdowsi's ancient mythology to portray the current struggle of the people of Iran, especially those of the youth and women, in their brave quest for freedom and democracy. The goal is to make this project directly relevant to the current political and social climate of Iran and the Middle East in general. Scarlet Stone emphasizes the value of wisdom over infatuation and brings to our attention the need for all Iranians to take responsibility for the cultural, social, and political development of the country in the past 60 years.

UCSD's professor, director/composer- Shahrokh Yadegari in collaboration with French-Iranian choreographer/dancer Shahrokh Moshkin-Ghalam (also starring as Sohrab) have gathered some of the best performing talents of the Iranian diaspora to include Afshin Mofid - former NY ballet star (as Rostam), Ida Saki - young rising star dancer (Gordafarid -Sohrab's lover), Mariam Peretz - Bay Area-based acclaimed dancer (Tahmineh-Sohrab's mother) and Fatemeh Habibizad, the first female Iranian Naqqal - (Epic Story Teller, Ferdowsi) for this production. Advanced interactive video designed by Ian Wallace, and stunning lighting by Omar Ramos and Kristin Hayes define the world of the story.

Similar to the artistic form of Kasrai's poem, Scarlet Stone is staged with modern aesthetics and a deep commitment to the traditional and ancient values of Persian arts. Advanced interactive technology is used for production and projection/diffusion of video and sound, which will help the integration of the multiple disciplines used in this project. With a critical view, Scarlet Stone offers strength as well as hope. One can argue that much of what is addressed in Scarlet Stone, both in terms of societal problems and solutions are alive in the current social and political movements in Iran. For many years, the only option for defining a structural basis for a social or political movement was either leaning towards the left or the right. Kasrai, having come from the leftist tradition and having been the victim of the disillusionments which followed the left movement in Iran, proudly writes a hopeful poem for facing the problems which have plagued our times. We feel the current movements in Iran (and the Middle East in general), where all sections of people have come together to voice their desire for peaceful reform and freedom, are a living example of this approach.

Yadegari says: our goal is to produce Scarlet Stone in a way for it to become a catalyst for communication among Iranians, Iranian diaspora, and all those interested and invested in the evolution of the political and social life in the region. The production employs artists of highest caliber and uses exquisite interactive design technology to tell the touching and sobering story of Siavash Kasrai, in which he praises wise and passionate commitment to global human values as a beckon of hope for the current sociopolitical climate of Iran. We believe that the recent movements in Iran and later around the world, are fundamentally new forms of peaceful approach to political dissent, where actions are not fed by partisan politics, but by grass root social necessities. Moshkin-Ghalam believes today's generation of the youth and women in Iran are the generation of the `Shorab's and 'Tahmineh's, who bravely, passionately, and peacefully have been struggling against oppression. The non-violent resistances of Iranian people after the 2009 election in Iran is an excellent example of the committed, thoughtful, and intelligent political activism which Kasrai has depicted for us.

About the poem:

Based on the "Shahnameh", the poem "Scarlet Stone", by Siavash Kasrai, is set at the last moment of the life of Sohrab. Kasrai was one of the most important and eloquent contemporary poets of Iran. Kasrai was persecuted before the 1979 revolution by the Shah's regime, and after the revolution by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Kasrai's life work has been a hopeful message for Iran and the proud Persian culture. He has written a number of works based on the mythology found in Shahnameh. In "Scarlet Stone", Sohrab (the mythological character) confronts the author of "Shahnameh", Ferdowsi, for the reason of his tragic death and the meaning (or meaninglessness) of his futile quest for peace and justice. Kasrai finished this work in 1990 in exile, when the Islamic government had already established its successful autocratic and oppressive rule over the people of Iran by mass terrors of intellectuals, artists, and nationalists. One finds one of the most hopeful and meaningful messages regarding the recent struggles of people of Iran in the answer that Ferdowsi gives to Sohrab in "Scarlet Stone", that: "Your fight is not only local, but a global struggle against injustice"; "when you began your road to be a hero, you should not expect the path to be easy"; "you may think you are dying in the book, but your name will forever be the light and the symbol for those fighting for justice and freedom."

Click here to read Segments of Scarlet Stone in Persian

Excerpts of Scarlet Stone (Mohre-ye Sorkh)
by Siavash Kasrai
Translated by Haleh Hatami.

Many tales reach their end and yet
"the old sorrowful crow has not flown toward the nest"
but still flies in this lone night.
Twinkling, the bleeding North Star
drips in the cloud.
The phoenix of clouds
went to die in the nest of the night.
Nearby, split open,
Sohrab
in the dirt
burned, dissolved,
in the flames of fever.
But the attack of fever
Brought Sohrab to speak in the bloody bed
I am burning and
in no need of water
No, water cannot quench my thirst
Oh, the misery of this craving,
what a frightful mirage
Mother,
Where is this place?
what will be come of me?

Sohrab

Did the wind carry it off
In the garden, whatever there was?
Alone in the open spaces
this unripe fruit of termination
Rubies of blood
lone scarlet drops
Who bequeathed this stone,
this red rose, tell me tell me, who lay it near me?

Tahmineh (mother)

My only son
My sole fruit of youth, my love, where have you gone?
What happened to you?
O, young forest of hope,
what happened that this tree, brimming with branches of wishes,
became so untimely severed?
I told you, didn't I?
That the scent of your joy
Afrasiab must never sense.
But you, proud in your "good thoughts"
But you, in haste to see Tahamtan
shut wisdom's eyes.
The enemy reached out
his hand in expedience,
but you, unknowing,
were wrongly sitting with these hypocrisies.

I thought in raising a son
skilled and handsome
Tahamtan's heated temper
would become serene
That the sitting of this son with that father
in our homeland
would burn the root of enmity's fruit
and shelter this realm
within the wings of love

Rostam (father)

Father and son face to face and estrangement
Strange
with one hundred clues of visage and stature
I didn't recognize you
You didn't recognize me
Who is this concealing eye-closing sorcerer?
Wherefore this blindness?
The heart was saying: Rostam,
Turn and look – doesn't he have your scent?
Say it, seek it
Alas, the vain intellect rendered the judgment lame:
No!
"There goes the enemy".

When your hand draws the dagger of deceit
even in the name of justice
be warned
In the end
that dagger will dig in your own heart.
Once again
I repeat 'ere I finish this account that this is how it is.
It is our bond and love
the envy of others
But sorrow and separation of that dear pair
are cause for comfort for this tribe of mean deeds.

Sohrab

Where is that moonlight cresting above the ancient tower
Where is that bird - where -
What happened to that irascible flower?

Gordafarid

Oh, impatient soul
-Sohrab -
night is leaving the halfway mark
dawn is approaching sleep
Our meeting
in this story
was far too hurried and ill-timed.
Apart from sorrow, what was the point?
Like the fast fleeting of a meteor by a meteor
Or a fistful of roses fallen on water
Pass as a phantom (or shadow) in this sinister night
With heartache
I leave you
With love
I entrust you
to God.

Sohrab

Sohrab said: No
Stay with me a moment
In the narrow passage of that meeting,
at the peak of this wicked deed,
a hand devilishly seized our judgment.
Together, our hearts opened a door with love
Our meeting was essential to this story
Yes,
If we didn't drink from love,
we witnessed it as a fistful of roses
floating with the current.
Behold, the path through the Valley of Darkness
is in my sight
I am dying
in love

Sohrab to Ferdowsi

Oh sage orator poet,
with a point of blood
you concluded
this story that love
had prefaced from the start.
You fostered me so lovingly
and set me free so soon,
through words.
Oh, hero-weaver.
This was not your way.
With the circling of the quill, your hefty book
renders my father - old warrior - immortal.
But me - young
yes, young - you killed me at the hands of this very man,
disgraced Rostam-e Dastaan, through the story
and set Tahmineh down in a bottomless grief.
I came
to the path
so pure
such a seeker
like a drop of water,
toward the sea.
I came
to set justice and brotherhood
on the thrown
and then serve my father
Let liberty be
our wholesome custom.
Let us open wide the doors of treasures and wealth,
let no one sleep hungry in our lands.
I said that my war
is the end of wars.
From here on, all the world is love and brotherhood,
and the stems of roses the emblem
on the quivers and shields of heroes.
In the dark, in our dispute with death,
father and son
and those faces, worthy of enmity,
hidden in the corners -
peering at us
As if, when I arrived there
the world turned on end -
dishonesty visible,
unities concealed.
Closed-lipped mutes,
those tame submissives, from which creator born?
Or, from which creation, those poorly-molded figures?
Are they not, silently,
kindle to the flame?

Ferdowsi

Calm!
Oh hope of the heatbroken
drawn from
the peak of Rostam's legacy.
Calm.
Having tread in treacherous paths
and others of grandeur and grief -
Hero rich in origin,
bring this story to its close
heroically.

In my quest to build this palace for people
and this arduous poem
I am a wise poet
mirror holder
to the nature and face of the age.
The moment you accepted your father's stone
world renowned ruby
fastened to your arm
you opened wide the gate to self calamity, and from the start
seek disaster's secret in the scarlet stone.
Sohrab, that ornament on your arm,
that stone
is the stone of world heroism.
Know that a man come forth from this,
even within our own borders, inevitably
plays a universal role.
That stone, in your hands,
renders every mean and dubious thing -
indigence and ignorance, injustice and fear -
as visible as an image.
And, in this way,
it awakens
your eyes
to the pain of the age.
And thus, good thoughts and self-belief
fall short in achieving
the grand task
Happy are those who in the heart of the dark halls of ignorance,
in their burning anguish, find wisdom's light within reach

Shameful he who turns his back on comrade and homeland
Turning - with one hundred excuses - toward the foreigner
Yes, it is possible for the path to the sea be near
and for years
to stay safely beyond the reach of the deadly depths.
But one cannot
know the ocean and steal the pearl from the shell
without immersing in water.
Sohrab
Oh, wounded by ignorance in the dark,
the cure is in the king's treasury.
But not for you or for your wounds.
Yes, you thirst not for water, for water
lies beneath your feet.
Hear from me that your cure lies in the light of being
in the rocky springs of knowing,
Sohrab, that is your place.
Allow me to tell you a secret - out of kindness - openly
This wonderful stone
is an infusion of poison and antidote.
Dying and eternal blooming are contained in it.
It is poison its red wine, poison.
Apart from lovers, may no one lay eyes upon this spirit.
It slays, unexpectedly
and raises you up every dawn like the sun.
Beware, oh auspicious one
Oh eternal youth.
You go showing
your wounded flank
to anyone carrying a dagger.
You go disclosing
your wounded side
before the eyes of the nigh-struck, distraught exhausted.
Before those who unaware of how things work
and who use their arms to battle
the ornamental collar of valor.
Let not the lovers take the wrong path
and advance on the known road with this scarlet torch
In a book, thus,
I have battled much.
Not with the sword
- with the pen!
Good or bad,
whether heartbreaking or heart warming
your cradle, your fate
your book of sorrow, of oppression and anthem
your golden book of wisdom, testament to love,
it is your Book of Kings and your book of origins

Via Scarlet Stone

The Others

2011-11-14T11:22:00.003Z

In the November edition of the magazine Guernica Porochista Khakpour explores the protean category of “Iranian-American” and its assorted manifestations.

Photograph via Flickr by Iman Khalili

By Porochista Khakpour

There was a time, not long ago, when I was downright allergic to journal issues devoted to ethnic and/or racial grouping—about as aesthetically relevant as clusterings based on eye color or mole placement, I insisted. To be put in a box based on something you did not choose seemed uninspired, reductive, and even dangerous. Plus, I had personal reasons: categorization and its many cons had haunted me since I came to this country as a wee preschooler. With looks described as exotic at best and a hyperethnic multisyllabic name regarded as unattemptable at worst, I was coronated an ambassador of my particular brand of other just by virtue of being someone else’s first. When I was four, I decided to be a writer precisely because the realm of the imagination freed me from confinement regarding how and to whom I was born. But by the time the writing touched any remote professionalization (college workshops, for instance) I was again asked to “write what I know” by wide-eyed, smiling professors—whose “knowing better” was nestled somewhere between an oily did and flaky didn’t—and sheltered students who seemed torn between “coo” and “ew” when it came to me. By a combination of dead-end fatalism and pure accident, I went there (or at least I attempted to), merging the writing of the many whats that I knew with my interests in art, language, and slightly experimental forms (outcome: my first novel). It was only through doing it that I found I actually did have some genuine interest in who and what I was (outcome: years of personal-essay writing on Iranian-American issues).

The seesaw between Iranian and American appeared to have arrived at a miraculous balance. “Iranian-American” was not a label I could necessarily nest in, but at least one I could take a breath at. Even with its pigeonholes and pitfalls, traps and hurdles, stereotypes and caricatures and clichés, it was something I could live with, and this was more than I had ever had. So my disregard for ethnicity-focused anything was ultimately tempered by some authentic self-discovery, some admitted abnegation, and a consequential phobia of hypocrisy—and only really intensely inflamed by those starless lows of overwhelming suspicion and cynicism at everything and everyone American.

When was the last time you saw a book by an Iranian author that did not feature on its cover a Persian carpet, pomegranates, faux Middle Eastern arabesque fonts, or a woman in some sort of headscarf?

But I never lost my skepticism altogether thanks to fixtures of the identity-brand curse, from classic Orientalism 101 to auto-exoticization. As the “Iranian-American” ascended as an entity in the ’00s, the discourse churned out by seemingly intelligent American outlets often had the cultural cachet and anthropological depth of a slightly browner Not Without My Daughter. When was the last time you saw a book by an Iranian author that did not feature on its cover a Persian carpet, pomegranates, faux Middle Eastern arabesque fonts, or a woman in some sort of headscarf? Big publishing and mainstream media in the U.S. seemed just as eager as the Islamic Republic to cast highly photogenic women in veils-and-lashings tearjerkers; they relegated their writers, particularly women, to victim ingénues. Yes, these are true stories, but only one type of story, which is particularly frustrating when so many others remain untold.

Just thirty years after the Iranian Revolution sent many Iranians, like my family members, fleeing en masse, Iranian Americans are finally approaching some visibility, thanks to sheer numbers and inevitable assimilation—and, of course, the Islamic Republic’s penchant for newsworthiness. As a result, there emerges the problem of how to “come out” here. Perhaps no milestone heralds arrival like last summer’s announcement that Ryan Seacrest Productions will follow up its Kardashian franchise with the first-ever reality TV show about Tehrangelenos, L.A.’s sizable Iranian diaspora, called The Shahs of Sunset, set to premiere in 2012—interestingly press-released in the same season as a CNN poll that declared half the American public sees Iran as an enemy. Indeed, who can blame a public that possesses the capacity only to stomach us as villains or “reality karachters” when the media so seamlessly abandoned Green Revolution hopes for the shadow of that eminently more spectacular, never-ending menace, our greatest nightmare—mine and yours, I’d wager—war with Iran?

I wanted to capture the extraordinary scope that defines this young-diaspora-with-an-ancient-culture’s literature.

What’s a people to do? My only hope is that we Iranian-Americans, in all our separate parts, will prove not only unpalatable but indigestible. If I could have it my way, I’d freeze the world at this moment, where we hover between semi-obscurity and total visibility. I wish that no one had the concept Iranian-American—which might sound pessimistic, but just ask any of your local neighborhood Others what identification has done for them lately.

Given these qualms and reservations, you might wonder: could Guernica have made a worse choice for the curator and editor of their first Iranian-American issue? But in putting this issue together, I found that the contrarian instinct in me was useful for soliciting a broad spectrum of writers and writings for a reader unfamiliar with the work of diasporic Iranians. Instead of showcasing commonalities in crude clumps and bulging brands, I wanted to present a collection that’s testament to the fact that ethnic origin is where oneness ends. In this way, the grouping is intentionally unsettling. It reaches way past my personal tastes and preferences—and hopefully the tastes and preferences of any one person—as any good anthology should.

I wanted geographic diversity (West and East coasts, plus the Southwest, with writers submitting from Tehran to London), an array of generations (our youngest writer is thirty; our oldest, sixty-five), and a range of experience, from lesser-known up-and-comers to heavily championed veterans (from zero books to six books). I wanted the recognition of legacy (Nahid Rachlin, our first Iranian-American published fiction writer who held Stanford’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship in fiction before the Revolution) and a subversion of expectations (Hooman Majd, a celebrated nonfiction writer whose excellent reportage and commentary have deservedly landed him many talk-show-pundit stints, here writes in a genre he has rarely published in, which agents and editors originally steered him away from: his first love, fiction). I wanted aesthetic eclecticism, from Amir Parsa’s genre-defying, acrobatic prose to Azadeh Moaveni’s intensely observant narrative nonfiction. I wanted comedy (Iraj Isaac Rahmim’s rollicking fantasies in modern-day Tehran) and tragedy (Sholeh Wolpé’s poignant coming-of-age fairy tale gone awry). I wanted a range in their very Iranianness and Americanness: Sayrafiezadeh’s and Fathi’s pieces show no traces of their Iranian roots, while over a third of the others go back entirely to Iran. I wanted the mythic Iran of Roger Sedarat’s ghost horses set against the more familiar, gritty realism of life in the country today. I wanted to capture the extraordinary scope that defines this young-diaspora-with-an-ancient-culture’s literature.

“Every time you write,” I tell my students, “you reinvent the universe. No two worlds are identical to any two writers.”

And of course, if I dare pigeonhole/stereotype/caricature myself for a moment, there is something so Iranian in trying to evade identification, something I was reminded of when I emailed my participants asking them to share their thoughts on the label “Iranian-American.” As I suspected, only about a third of the writers felt okay with it. Sayrafiezadeh wrote, “It was very liberating for me to finally cease referring to myself as Iranian-American. In other words, to stop defining myself by how others see me. I am an American writer and America is my subject.” Majd: “I most definitely do not feel, nor believe myself to be, hyphenated. I am American sometimes, Iranian others, but always just (hopefully) human. I suppose my work reflects who I am—Iranian sometimes, American others—but not always married to either.” Fathi: “I do see myself as an Iranian-American, totally shaped by the mixing of both cultures, but it’s harder for me to see my poems, the poems themselves, as reflecting a distinctly Iranian-American heritage.” Moaveni admits that if she were awakened in the middle of the night and asked this question, she “would say that I consider myself an Iranian writer working in English,” while her work belongs to “a fairly specifically American genre of memoir-as-reportage, which hasn’t really developed with such verve in other countries.” Rahmim jokes about his Jewish-Iranian-Texan-American status, saying, “I am generally not a fan of the hyper-categorization that we come across these days, which seems, often, used to separate us rather than draw others in and allow them to experience our experiences—an act of generosity that, I think, all writers should aspire to.” And it took Amir Parsa no fewer than 951 words to articulate and even begin to dissect his own French/German/English/Spanish/Farsi-writing Iranian/Parisian/Brooklynite existence.

I often think of the great Jean Rhys quote “reading makes immigrants of us all,” and the many temporary homes I’ve found in all the books from around the world that I’ve loved. In that way, we writers are the creators of entirely unique homes. “Every time you write,” I tell my students, “you reinvent the universe. No two worlds are identical to any two writers.” As long as we have books, there will be multitudes of homelands, multiplying at the rate of writers writing. Although operating under the same hyphenated label here might suggest too many relatives talking over each other in one stuffy living room, I hope you can appreciate this as an invitation to many different homes with different ambiances and temperatures and furniture and architecture, with different families and different gods, whether in the heavens or simply behind the pen.

“My Mother and the Prisoner,” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh , “Dog Days in Tehran,” by Azadeh Moaveni , “In Search of Dalí in Tehran,” by Iraj Isaac Rahmim , “Bijan,” by Nahid Rachlin , “Pairidaeza” by Hooman Majd , “Fardaha (The General on the Roof),” by Amir Parsa , “[One night, opening in foil]” and “Sonnet,” by Farnoosh Fathi , “Ghost Horse Prelude,” by Roger Sedarat , “The Prince,” by Sholeh Wolpé

Via Guernica Magazine

Paris Photo 2011 - Silk Road Gallery (Iran)

2011-11-13T11:24:00.005Z

La Lettre de la Photographie, Festival Archive,13.11.2011

The Silk Road, Iran’s first gallery exclusively devoted to photography, opened in December 2001. Akin to its namesake, the ancient roadway through which both goods and cultures were exchanged, the Silk Road Gallery’s mission is to present to the world the photography of a new generation of Iranian artists.

A medium that communicates its message directly, photography is an art form that is accessible to everyone, at once. Moreover, in a country with such an iconic cultural history, it is truly exciting to find an art form with virtually no traditional pulls or traps on its performers. In fact, one could argue that photography is the most contemporary art form in Iran.

It is our belief that Iranian photographers have now found their own distinct style of communication, and they do transmit their vision with commitment and subtlety. One will notice that Iranian photographers always find an engaging and passionate frame of reference to tell the story of their society and political environment. Photography can and will accompany Iranian public and artists all the way to modernity.

These are the reasons that we, at Silk Road Gallery, chose to specialize in Iranian contemporary photography. Forerunner in our field, the gallery has actively helped in the development of this new artistic movement. Since its opening, many celebrated Iranian photographers, such as Bahman Jalali and Shadi Ghadirian, have started a collaboration with the Gallery that continues to this day (Bahman Jalali, passed in January 2010, is still represented by the Silk Road Gallery). Meanwhile, a younger generation of photographers work actively with us. Far from being just a commercial institution, the gallery acts as a sort of laboratory in which new ideas and experiences are exchanged, discussed and congealed.

Through the Silk Road Gallery, the works of Iranian photographers are regularly presented to museums and other institutions everywhere. As recently as in 2010 Arash Fayez’s work was sold to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and in 2007 Shokoufeh Alidousti’s photographs to the Musée Quai Branly.

The Silk Road Gallery also participates in the best international art fairs such as “Paris Photo” (2010, 2009, 2004 and 2011) “Arco” (2009 and 2007) and “Art Dubai” (2009 and 2008). It takes part in major cultural events, such as Photoquai in 2007 and 2009. The artistic direction of Photoquai 2009 was entrusted to Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, director of the Silk Road Gallery.

The tenth anniversary of the gallery will be marked by the publication of a book on contemporary Iranian photography.

What is your point of view on the financial side of the photographic market today?

Photography is a contemporary medium that has found its place in the international art. The success of events such as Paris Photo is a proof.

However, photography in Iran has not found its place and there is no private or public collector of photography. But, lots of photographers work in Iran and their work is exceptional.

Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, Director Silk Road Gallery

Artists: Jalali Bahman, Gohar Dashti, Arash Fayez, Shadi Ghadirian, Rana Javadi, Mehrdad Naraghi

Gohar Dashti. Slow decay, 2010, 2. Courtesy Silk Road Gallery

Katayoun Karami, Resurrected, 2009, 2. Courtesy Silk Road Gallery

Arash Fayez, Ramblings of a Flâneur, 2011, 1. Courtesy Silk Road Gallery

Arash Fayez, Ramblings of a Flâneur, 2011, 8. Courtesy Silk Road Gallery

Arash Fayez, Ramblings of a Flâneur, 2011, 10. Courtesy Silk Road Gallery

Bahman Jalali. Courtesy Silk Road Gallery

Rana Javadi. Courtesy Silk Road Gallery

Shadi Ghadirian, 2011, 1. Courtesy Silk Road Gallery

Shadi Ghadirian, Miss butterfly, 2011, 2. Courtesy Silk Road Gallery

Via La Lettre de la Photographie

Capturing the Imagination's Uprising

2011-11-12T17:47:00.001Z

Artist Shirin Neshat Explores the Essence of Revolution With a New Play Set in Iran and a Coming Photo Exhibition

Artist Shirin Neshat in her Greene Street studio with a work for an upcoming photo exhibit of young revolutionaries. Photo courtesy of The Wall Street Journal by Ramin Talaie

By Lana Bortolot

When the Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat receives Brooklyn Museum's annual Women in the Arts award next week, she will have hardly recovered from being in another spotlight.

On Saturday, Ms. Neshat's new work, "OverRuled," will conclude its two-day run at Performa 11, the West Chelsea visual-art performance space. It marks the artist's first foray into live performance, but its theme—confrontation between "people of imagination" and oppressive governments—is a staple of Ms. Neshat's creative stock.

"'OverRuled' is coming from an earlier, almost surrealistic video I made of my own personal experience of interrogation at Tehran's airport, which later departed from being about me, but about every artist—every woman or man of imagination whose work or imagination became a point of crime," Ms. Neshat said.

Inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings, Ms. Neshat refreshed the concept. This March, while in Cairo conducting research for her next film, about Egyptian singer Oum Kolthum, she attended protests in Tahrir Square and said she was moved by how people worked together.

"It was a peaceful revolution that should have been the model for everything else that followed," she said.

"OverRuled," a mock court that's taken over peaceably by poets, artists and musicians, seeks to be that model. Though performed by Iranians, the artist says the piece transcends that country's boundaries. "The play we're doing can be just as much about Wall Street as it is about the government of Iran," she said.

That cross-cultural dialogue is but one reason she'll be honored next week, said Catherine Morris, curator at Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

"Her ability to hone those very broad things makes her work remarkable," Ms. Morris said.

Ms. Neshat, 54 years old, is best known for her 1997 work "Women of Allah," a series of black-and-white photographs of women masked not by veils, but by Farsi calligraphy. She will return to that theme early next year with an installation at the Gladstone Gallery of large-scale images of young revolutionaries, men included, from around the Middle East, overlaid with handwritten poems and peaceful messages.

Throughout her career, Ms. Neshat, who has lived in the U.S. since she was 17 and makes her home in SoHo, has migrated from photography to video installation to film.

"She has evolved because she's constantly concerned with contemporary issues," said cultural critic Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University.

Last week, between rehearsals for "OverRuled," Ms. Neshat invited The Wall Street Journal into her Greene Street studio.

What does the award mean to you?

It's a form of acknowledgment that I appreciate coming from a major American museum. Because my work has more been international, I never had a big museum behind me in America. So, for a museum to give recognition to an artist who is not purely devoted to arts within a gallery or a museum, it says something about them—that they're also opening the parameters of the art practice.

What do you think is the artist's particular responsibility during times of revolution?

I think it's a personal choice. I don't see that generically all artists should be revolutionaries or activists. I just think there's a notion of urgency that comes when, for example, if you're an artist living in Cairo. I was there and I can't imagine as a young artist you're in this environment and could make work that doesn't even remotely relate to that. It's not really a responsibility—it's the way an artist responds to the life that they're living, to their situation.

I cherish so much being an Iranian and being someone who has agreed to be in the middle of the social, political discourse through my work. I think that, especially today in this kind of moment of political crisis, people of imagination actually play a great role. And I'm not just talking about me, but a number of other artists who have put their lives at risk like [Chinese artist] Ai Weiwei. We're able to go under the skin of people, both the people looking at the subject and the narrative, and also under the skin of the people who are really experiencing it.

If you didn't choose to document these events, what's the missed opportunity?

I don't do it because I'm an Iranian artist and therefore I must make work that reflects on the time. In fact, I find it very problematic because it's so easy for me to make something that is didactic—"These are the bad guys and these are the good guys." I refuse to fall into that reductive place, so it makes me think about the responsibility we want, to make great works of art that have a resonance above and beyond time and place, that we want to make work that really affects people in the more profound way—not only on a time-based [situation].

Where were the women during the uprisings?

When I was in Tahrir Square, there were a million people and I was among equal amounts of women and men. I really think that one of the things that is consistent about this pattern of the revolution and uprising that is spreading, the Arab Spring, is that a) there is no leadership and b) there is all youth organizing it and, c) that is not about gender differences.

There is a very fascinating phenomena that women are very active, and this why I'm making [the new revolutionary photographs] where the men and women are represented equally in these images. The women today are highly intelligent, highly educated and they're not oppressed. It's really amazing how education is such a huge part of this new form of feminism that is not just unique to Iran but all over the Middle East and the Internet.

Is your work an easy gateway into Middle Eastern art and culture?

I'm very Iranian in many ways even though I've lived outside for longer than I lived in my own culture. All my people who work with me are Iranian, and yet my career is very much based in the West; my career is very much Western. I work with galleries and museums, and the majority of my audience is Western, so I'm having to navigate between a way of communication to the world that doesn't really know the level of the Iranian or Middle East, but I have a responsibility not to wash it out, to really make sure I don't compromise the authenticity just to make it easy for people to understand.

Via The Wall Street Journal

The Dangerous Art of Moviemaking in Iran

2011-11-11T21:56:00.003Z

Dog Sweat

By Hossein Keshavarz

“Dog Sweat” is a fictional film about young people fighting to be free in Iran. We shot the film in Tehran illegally and at great personal risk to the cast and crew because we wanted to make an authentic film that shows the surprising fun, drama and irrepressible energy of a rebellious generation.

During film school, I developed a script called “This Modern Love” about Iranians who travel to the Philippines for vacation, that explored how Iranians act on their holidays in foreign countries that have fewer social limitations.

When I was selecting cast and crew for “This Modern Love,” I became friends with a lot of the recent graduates of the film and theater programs. I watched the projects they were making – short, underground films about their lives and their relationships. They weren’t bothering to censor their scripts to get approval from the film board. They did this because they wanted to make films that reflected their lives, even if they knew their films wouldn’t have an audience. Inside Iran, the films wouldn’t be shown because of their un-Islamic content; outside of Iran the festivals were only looking for very particular types of films from Iranian filmmakers.

As we were in pre-production for “This Modern Love,” which would have been filmed with the proper permissions and permits and would have featured well-known Iranian actors, my mother was in a nearly fatal car accident. I dropped everything I was doing and focused on nursing her back to health, first in Iran, then in the United States when she was strong enough to travel.

Once I got back to Iran almost a year later, things had changed – both in the country and in terms of my own feelings. My previous script was written at the tail end of reformist President Khatami’s term. Now it was well into Ahmadinejad’s time in office and he had already started a crackdown on artists and dissidents. While I was aiding my mother in Tehran, there were protests at the local university about the recent firings of professors for their supposed ideological leanings. At night, when I would go back to my apartment, I would see the riot police come in. And in the morning I would see students in the emergency room who were severely beaten. They would receive medical treatment, but then flee from the hospital to avoid being questioned by the police. None of it was reported on the news inside or even outside the country. This experience stayed with me for a long time. I felt like the times had changed and the script that I had spent so long on was no longer truthful to reality.

At the same time I was inspired by this unseen generation of Iranian filmmakers that I had met. I decided to write a new script (“Dog Sweat”) that encompassed the things that my friends and I had seen and felt, even if it would have to be shot underground, with the fear of being harassed or arrested.

There is a new wave of artists who sincerely care about being truthful, and who turn down a lot of lucrative work because their conscience won’t allow them to do it. I wanted to help bring this new wave of artists and filmmakers beyond short films that were only seen in the living rooms of fellow filmmakers. Making a film illegally limited us in many ways, but it also gives the movie an immediacy and energy.

We shot all of “Dog Sweat” underground in often very risky situations. I formed a team, and we had to depend on each other and learn how to trust each other in the face of a lot of crazy circumstances. Things would change constantly and a lot of times we could only shoot what we could get. This taught me to truly collaborate with the actors and our DP (director of photography). Often, our plans would fall apart because of something out of our control and I would ask the actors – what do you think? And then we would have to change and re-adjust. Those type of situations made us bond even more.

We had to be careful whom we trusted. We didn’t have the control over production that you’d normally have doing a film. A small example of the challenges we faced happened when we shot the last scene of the movie. It was supposed to be something totally different, which we were going to film over several days by the Caspian Sea. But the actress came and said that her father found out that she was doing the film and forbid her from continuing. She could maybe stick around for a couple hours, but would have to be home by noon. We had two or three hours to shoot something that could wrap up her storyline in the film. I sat down with the DP and the actors and discussed what the characters themselves might do. Then I sat down for a half hour and wrote the scene and we shot it before she had to leave. That scene worked out and I think it’s one of the better scenes of the film.

Unfortunately, a lot of times when something out of control occurred it wouldn’t work and we’d be left with only bits and pieces of footage. Often, for example, we would have two good scenes, but not the critical middle scene to connect them. It made the edit a challenge.

Releasing the movie theatrically is the culmination of a long and difficult film-making process that taught me that amidst all the chaos you have to remember to stay focused on the story you want to tell and how you want to tell it.

Hossein Keshavarz is the director of “Dog Sweat.”

Via Speakeasy - Wall Street Journal

Written Images

2011-11-11T12:55:00.003Z

Contemporary Calligraphy from the Middle East

November 10 - December 3, 2011

Sundaram Tagore Gallery , New York

The work of more than a dozen influential artists from the Middle East offers a rare glimpse into the contemporary Arab and Iranian art worlds. Written Images: Contemporary Calligraphy from the Middle East, curated by noted art historian Karin von Roques, explores the role of traditional Islamic calligraphy and symbols in the contemporary Middle Eastern consciousness.

Arabic calligraphy in all its aesthetic and linguistic complexity is little understood in the West and often regarded as an art form belonging to the classic Islamic arts and, therefore, to the past. In fact, it plays an important role in contemporary Arab and Iranian art. For centuries, the written word has been at the center of Islamic visual culture— a legacy that persists even today.

Artists including Iraqi Hassan Massoudy, and Tunisian Nja Mahdaoui were among the first to look at writing from an entirely new perspective and reposition calligraphy in the contemporary context. They have deftly expanded its potential so it is image as well as language. For them and the other artists in this show, writing is more than the legible word; they use it as a pictorial, formal element, referencing a multitude of issues—religious, social, political and personal.

Working with different media, including paint on canvas, collage, ink on paper, gold leaf and silkscreen, these artists take traditional Arabic script and symbols as their point of departure. Qatari artist Yousef Ahmad distills Arabic letters into abstract shapes and gestural marks that sweep across dreamlike mixed-media surfaces. Syrian artist Khaled Al-Saa’i is inspired by poetry and Sufi philosophy, and paints spacious landscapes in which words float, overlap and follow their own particular rhythm. Offering a nuanced view of the culture of the Middle East, these innovative artists create complex contemporary works that draw on the spiritual depth of ancient Islamic art.

Rather than singling out Arab culture as “other,” this exhibition aims to further intercultural dialogue between the Arab world and the West. It follows on the success of Signs: Contemporary Arab Art, also curated by Karin von Roques, mounted at Sundaram Tagore New York in 2009 and Sundaram Tagore Beverly Hills in 2010. Both shows offer a view of the culture of the Islamic world apart from the usual subjects of politics and religion. Having studied and lived in the Middle East over the past decade, Karin von Roques has an intimate and unique understanding of the region and its artists. With this show, she throws into relief the wide range of work emerging from the contemporary Middle East, bringing its seminal artists to an international audience.

The full roster of artists is as follows: Yousef Ahmad (Qatar), Lulwah Al-Homoud (Saudi Arabia), Khaled Al-Saa’i (Syria), Chaouki Chamoun (Lebanon), Golnaz Fathi (Iran), Hakim Ghazali (Morocco), Ali Hassan (Qatar), Rachid Koraïchi (Algeria), Nja Mahdaoui (Tunisia), Hassan Massoudy (Iraq/France), Ahmed Mater (Saudia Arabia), Ahmad Moualla (Syria), Ahmed Moustafa (Egypt).

Hassan Massoudy, Untitled, 2011, ink and pigments on paper, 29.5 x 21.7 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Ahmad Moualla, Untitled, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 23.6 x 78.7 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Ali Hassan, Untitled, mixed media on canvas, 70.9 x 70.9 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Hassan Massoudy, Untitled, 1990, Ink and pigments on paper, 29.5 x 21.7 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Chaouki Chamoun, The Apocolypse III, acrylic on canvas, 55 x 55 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Ali Hassan, Untitled, mixed media on canvas, 70.9 x 70.9 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Ahmad Moualla, Untitled, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 19.7 x 70.9 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Golnaz Fathi, Untitled, 2011, pen on canvas, satin varnish, 47.2 x 47.2 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Ahmad Moualla, Untitled, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 37.4 x 37.4 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Lulwah Al Homoud, The Infinite Cube (Blue), 32.3 x 32.3 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Hassan Massoudy, Untitled, 2005, ink and pigments on paper, 29.5 x 21.7 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Golnaz Fathi, Untitled, 2011, pen on canvas, satin varnish, 47.2 x 47.2 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Golnaz Fathi, Untitled, 2006, acrylic and pen on canvas, 39.4 x 70.9 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Hassan Massoudy, Untitled, 2011, ink and pigments on paper, 29.5 x 21.7 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Yousef Ahmad, Untitled, 2009, thread, varnish, paint and paper laid on canvas, 71 x 71 inches, , Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Chaouki Chamoun, In the Beginning was the Search for Word, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 63 x 59 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Hakim Ghazali, Untitled, 2005, mixed media on canvas, 59.1 x 59.1 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Hassan Massoudy, Untitled, 2009, ink and pigments on paper, 29.5 x 21.7 inches, , Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Nja Mahdaoui, Jorf, 2009, India ink and acrylic on linen, 78.7 x 39.4 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Hakim Ghazali, Untitled, 2004, mixed media on canvas, 39.4 x 39.4 inches, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Nja Mahdaoui, Astrolabe, 2009, India ink and acrylic on linen, 68.1 x 78.3 inches, , Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Lulwah Al Homoud, The Infinite Cube, 2011, sikscreen on gold leaf, Image Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

GALLERY MISSION
Established in 2000, Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures. We focus on developing exhibitions and hosting not-for-profit events that encourage spiritual, social and aesthetic dialogues. In a world where communication is instant and cultures are colliding and melding as never before, our goal is to provide venues for art that transcend boundaries of all sorts. With galleries in New York, Beverly Hills, and Hong Kong, our interest in cross-cultural exchange extends beyond the visual arts into many other disciplines, including poetry, literature, performance art, film and music.

CURATOR’S PROFILE
Karin von Roques is a noted German curator and art historian who, having studied Islamic art, specializes in contemporary Arab and Iranian art. She is an authority on the Arabic region and its culture and has garnered much praise for exhibitions on modern calligraphy of the Arab world. From 1997 to 2000 she was the director for the Hermann Hesse Museum in Lugano, Switzerland. Von Roques has curated exhibitions for numerous institutions, including the Museum of Applied Arts, Frankfurt; Kunstmuseum, Bonn; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; and the Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi. She has had extensive experience developing Arab art collections, and currently oversees Deutsche Bank’s collection program focused on contemporary Arab art. Most recently, von Roques served as a consultant to Sotheby’s, London, advising their Modern and Contemporary Arab and Iranian Art Department.

SUNDARAM TAGORE’S PROFILE
Sundaram Tagore is a New York-based art historian and gallerist. He was the first gallerist to focus exclusively on globalization, assembling a roster of artists from around the world. A descendant of the influential Indian poet and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, he promotes East-West dialogues through his contributions to numerous exhibitions as well as his eponymous galleries and their multicultural and multidisciplinary events. Having done his doctoral work at The University of Oxford, Tagore writes for many art publications. He was previously a director at Pace Wildenstein Gallery in New York. He has worked with many international organizations including The Peggy Guggenheim Foundation, Venice, Italy, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He has also served as an advisor for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the United Nations. In addition to running three galleries, Mr. Tagore is also a filmmaker. His award-wining documentary The Poetics of Color: Natvar Bhavsar, An Artist’s Journey premiered at New York’s MIAAC Film Festival in 2010.

Via Sundaram Tagore Gallery

The Corruption of Language

2011-11-10T13:26:00.003Z

Interview with Shariar Mandanipour on dissidence, censorship, and the freedom to write in Iran

By Elsa Kania , The Harvard Political Review (HPR)

HPR: Given that your work was at one point banned in Iran, how would you characterize your experience as a writer in a politically repressive country?

Shariar Mandanipour: I’m not a political man. I studied Political Science, and maybe because I know something about politics, I hate politics. I’m a writer, but, unfortunately, in a country like Iran, being a writer, not a governmental writer…being a sort of dissident or a writer that you write for the freedom of writing, that you want to write beautiful stories. At first…they look at you as a political or as an opposition person, opposition of the regime. There are times that Iranian writers, we announce that we are not…a political party, we just need freedom of expression, and, because of it, some Iranian good writers, some Iranian good translators were assassinated. They didn’t involve [themselves] in any politic[al] matter, and a few of them [were] sentenced to prison. So the way that a dictatorial regime looks at you as a writer, they see you as an opposition [figure]. And you have no choice…even if you announce it, if you declare it, that I’m not involved in politics, they can’t believe it, and I think they are right. Because when you write against censorship, and you write about freedom and freedom of writing, freedom of expression, it is something against the dictator.

HPR: As a writer, in that sort of environment, what sort of authority or responsibility do you have to convey stories that might not otherwise be told?

SM: You know, the history of literature…engaged literature or even socialist realism literature. And I’m sure that these kind of stories, they will kill stories, they will [be] against art. You are a writer, and your job is to write a beautiful sory. You shouldn’t say to yourself that you’re going to write about the suffering that a good man is taking in a prison…If I decide to write this story…that the regime imprisons our good students…it wouldn’t be a good story. You just want to write a good story. If you are living there, if you are a human being in a country like Iran, at last it comes to your story, if you want to write a love story. The suffer[ing] of people will come into your story somehow. I’m talking about the art, not any political engagement..or any sort of socialist realism that you will feel. In Russia, before the revolution, they had great writers. After the revolution, because there were purely socialist realism stories, you don’t see any good writers. [They] were censored and [had] to publish their work underground…I know that my engagement is to write a good story. If I suffer with my people..their happiness, the beauties, or the evils that they make will all be reflected in my story.

HPR: Many of your stories address major events in Iranian history, such as the Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Is there any context or background that you would want or expect readers to bring to your work?

SM: Of course, you know that I was at the war, for my armed service. For ten months, I was at the front lines in such an absurd, maybe foolish war between Iran and Iraq—two dictators, it was a war between two dictators. I went there to experience the war, and, as a writer, it was so dark and bitter, as a human being, being in war was so dark and bitter for me, but, as a writer, it was good for me because I could write about it…I think it’s so natural. It was so painful, being there, seeing your best soldiers killed, it comes to my nightmares here, even after many years, and it comes into my stories. Right now my story, the novel that I’m writing, it is just about the war, so I can’t get rid of it.

HPR: Would you describe your work as rooted in distinctly Iranian themes and experiences, or do you intend for it to have a certain universality that appeals to all readers, regardless of their backgrounds?

SM: Each writer is standing on his or her culture, is standing on his or her country, and there are writers that are looking maybe to the sky or their head over the clouds. It depends on how they write, it depends on how much artsier they are, or how much better writers they are. So no matter if, for instance, a writer is writing about a small village in his country, his novel is a universal novel. For instance, let’s look at Faulkner. He’s an American writer, he made a sort of imaginary state…so he’s writing about maybe southwest Americans or somewhere there, but he’s everywhere. For instance in Iran, in an Arabian country, people understand him. So no matter [whether] a writer wants to write for the world or just for his or for her people, it depends on his art of writing. If he writes well, if the story works well, everybody could be his or her reader.

HPR: What elements of your work do you think were seen as objectionable or as challenging the authority of the regime by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance? To what extent would you consider yourself a political activist?

SM: I am a member of Iranian writers association, but it [was] banned after the Revolution. We didn’t have an office, the regime [said] that this association [was] dead, they denied it. We believe that, as much as we are writing, our association or organization is alive, even if we don’t have any publishing or magazine or even a room where we can get together to choose, for instance, our editors. Because of it and because of my talks here and there, against censorship, of course they picture me as a poitical writer. Although I don’t believe in any ideology, I’m not a religious writer, but this is the way that censors look at you. There were times that I couldn’t publish my book because censorship [became] worse and worse in that era. There were times when the censorship machine was a little bit better—then someone like me could publish his books. They didn’t even let me continue my studies in the university. I wasn’t somehow…at their standards. But it was wonderful that there were times when Iranian students could have a sort of NGO, and they invited somebody like me. And 700 students were sitting in the cellar listening to someone like me. After Ahmadinejad…came to power…or [was] elected in a fake election, they banned 99% of students or NGOs. They banned independent magazines. I was chief editor of one of them [and] they banned it. Right now in Iran, Iranian writers hardly could publish their books. But someone like me, I’m here. Of course it’s my job to maybe shout against censorship, write about censorship in my essays. If I get a good idea for a story, like what I got in my last novel, I write about it. Censoring an Iranian Love story…I’m a writer in this novel, or the writer would be a sort of alter ego of me. He wants just to write a love story, and he starts to say [why] he can’t write just a small, simple love story in Iran…and he writes about censorship, how much it corrupts the language even. If you write a beautiful sentence, it would be against censorship, it would be against censorship. You know how dictators use language, to fool people, to fool their followers. Iran is a religious regime…the clerics [and] the supreme leader of Iran—they fool people with language..They use language in a way that I call corruption of language. They use the best words. For instance, Ahmadinejad …claims that Iran is the freest country in] the world. Imagine it—he is using the word of freedom. Someone like him. Thousands of students were arrested. Two of them were sentenced to [be] lashed. One of them just wrote a light [criticism] against Ahmadinejad. People [were in] the streets because they asked “Where is my vote?” in a peaceful protest…When somebody like him talks about freedom, it is the corruption of language. So, for writers, maybe it is their best job to make the language clean.

HPR: Identity and its mutability seems to be a prevalent theme in your writing. You are from Iran but have been living in the U.S. How has this change of setting impacted your sense of yourself as a writer and the focus of your work?

SM: Because of my style of writing, my stories, as the critics call it, it is complicated, and my problem of censorship in Iran was less tham my friends, because censorship couldn’t understand what I was writing about. Although there were stories, …that they didn’t let me publish in my books. For four or five years, I couldn’t publish any books in Iran. There were stories that at last you can get permission to publish. I tried not to make a sort of self-censorship…like a sort of virus that it lives in your body, in your mind, and you think that you are writing freely. Censorship controls your mind at last. That was my situation in Iran, to try not to self-censor, although I cannot claim that I was not under the influence of censors. I was born in a country [with a tradition of] censorship. I grew up with censorship, many kinds of censorship. When I came to the United States, I knew that …there aren’t any censors here. The first months, I was looking, ‘Who am I here?’ In Iran, it is a pleasure…it is just like fighting with dictatorship…you are on the front line when you are writing. They when I came to the U.S., I said ‘okay, who am I here?’ …For six or seven months, I was looking for what I could] write to find the passion of writing.. Then I found out that I was going to lie here, so I can write whatever I want to write, so I started to write Censoring an Iranian Love Story…Just reading fifty pages of it, a publisher accepted the book. Then I felt [that] yes, I can be a writer here as well. If I try to write well, it will help my culture. Although I couldn’t publish the Persian version of this novel in Iran—it is impossible—but it is published in eleven countries and in fourteen or fifteen languages—it is a message of literature. There are people who are reading about the the message of Iranian literature and about censorship…so I found my way here to write [and] I found the way that I can write. Alhough I miss my country so much…I can go [back], but there is no guarantee [that I wouldn’t] be arrested at the airport. Some scholars and reporters…they arrest them at the airport, just when they arrive in Iran…And right now, they ban people to leave Iran—filmmakers, writeirs, reporters, journalists—it is a new kind of way to make dissidents suffer.

HPR: Where do you want to go next with your writing?

SM: Right now…I’m writing about the war. It is a man who lost his left hand at the war and even his memory. And he is going back after the war is finished, after many years, he is trying to get back to that place where he lost his hand…And it comes to me…I started to write this novel two times before, when I was in Iran. I started writing it. The first time I wrote about 100 pages, and then I found it doesn’t work…Two years later, I tried again…At last I found the form of narrating this story in America. Of course I found that it is from my experience in the war. It comes from me.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Via The Harvard Political Review.

''Humanity Is What Art Is All About''

2011-11-09T12:16:00.004Z

Interview with Mohammad Reza Shajarian

For Iranians around the world Mohammad Reza Shajarian is the embodiment of classical Persian culture. In the summer of 2009 his support of the Iranian reform movement made him vastly popular among the young generation.

An interview by Marian Brehmer, Qantara.de

You're touring Europe at the moment. Can Europeans actually understand the depth of Persian music?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: The Iranians in Europe can understand the music and its meaning. Europeans without Iranian roots can get a feel for the music, but not for the words. My music is based on poetry. All it does is to express the poem. Without knowledge of Persian literature you cannot understand the connection between music and words.

What comes to your mind when you think of Germany?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: To me, Germany is about being hard working and tidy. Since 1987, I have been performing in Germany about every second year.

In Germany, Iran's public image is shaped by politics and by the nuclear issue. Do you see yourself as an ambassador for your country when performing abroad?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: I don't know if Iranians would consider me as their ambassador or not. But our Iran is not what the government claims it is. Our people are entirely different from our government. They have nothing to do with terror and killing or nuclear power. Actually, this difference is really striking. That's why we can observe a big conflict between people and government at the moment.

In the strict sense of Islamic jurisdiction string instruments are haram, forbidden. On the other hand, Iran has a rich tradition of classical music. Although there are many gifted singers, Iranian women are not allowed to sing in public. Their voices are considered arousing by the mullah regime. How to cope with these contradictions?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: This contradiction was created 1400 years ago. The Islamic fractions will not give up trampling on our culture, nor will Iranians give up their culture. This contradiction will continue to exist. The government is opposed to the very Persian identity of Iranians and wants to impose its Islamic identity on us. But while accepting Islam, Iranians have never lost their culture.

Were you able to perform more freely in the Shah's time?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: In these days, no one needed to ask for permission. But since the revolution we need to obtain permissions from different departments, such as the ministry of culture and Islamic guidance, from the police department in charge of the concert venue and from the local Friday Imam. If only one of them objects, the permission is not granted. The authorities create all these obstacles in order to make the artists give up. They only leave us one tiny possible way, which complies with their rules. They are not only in total dispeace with our culture; they also want to eliminate it.

Do you think any reconciliation with the culture can happen within the current system?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: No, there is no way.

So would you prefer to turn back the clock?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: No, there's no use in going back. We should build the future.

You are one of the few musicians who were still allowed to perform regularly in Iran after the revolution of 1979. Why?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: After the revolution I was not active for a few years. Only four years after the revolution I started singing on stage again. Every now and then they allowed me to release new albums. Those musicians who are now living in exile used to perform in bars before the revolution.

After the revolution, all bars were closed. As I have never played in bars, the government wanted to use me as an example of a compliant musician. In that way, they wanted to show that there are not completely opposed to music.

How did you experience the time of revolution?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: Iranians have been fighting for their freedom for 100 years. Their last try was in 1979. Initially, the revolution was not Islamic at all. Then clerics entered the scene and suggested their Islamic Republic. There was a referendum. Trusting the clergymen, most people voted for an Islamic Republic. I didn't trust them from the very beginning. I didn't vote for them and I will never do.

But you also fuelled the revolution with your music. What did you intend to express at that time?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: Songs sung in a revolutionary mood have a great impact on people. My song "Iran, ey saraye omid" (Iran, Land of Hope) was very popular among the audience. People didn't want the Shah regime anymore. That song expressed the resurrection of people, moving towards democracy. After the revolution, the Islamic Republic continued to play it on the radio. After the 2009 protests I finally forbid it and told them: I didn't perform it for you, it was meant for another time. This was the first time my music ever gained an explicitly political meaning.

Your ban caused a great stir. What incited you to take this step?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: The reason was the behaviour of the government towards people. It was unbearable. No one can be silent. I am not a political activist, I am just an artist who knows his society and who serves it. When I heard them play my song on state TV, I sued them.

Two months after the contested presidential elections and in the midst of the 2009 protests you sang "Zabane Atash" (Language of Fire). With this song you turned into a supporter of the green movement and became very popular among young Iranians in a short time. What was the message of that song?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: There were so many people on the streets, beaten and arrested. All that prompted me to sing "put the guns down". I considered it my duty to voice this statement. You cannot discuss with guns, only with reason. The "Language of Fire" will lead to nothing; it will only make the path more dangerous.

What was the government's reaction?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: In that summer I was touring around Europe. I released the song overnight on "Youtube".

Only when I gave an interview to the BBC, I received a warning from the secret service. My response: You do what you have to do, and I will do what I have to do. Since then I was not allowed to release new songs. They withdrew my permission.

Why didn't they arrest you?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: The government is afraid due to my authority among people. They try all they can in order to cut my connection with people by spreading rumours. For instance, they have claimed I had left Iran forever.

Do you think that the rulers are listening to your music in private?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: Yes, of course. They have also been raised in this culture; it's not strange to them. They listened to it in the past and they are still listening to it. But they are trapped in their own ideas. They have conflicts among themselves. Some advocate a total ban on music, others don't.

The five decades of your career in Iran were shaped by political change and turmoil. What role did your music play for Iranians in all these years?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: My music was always fully related to events in Iran. My choice of poems actually mirrors our social history. They reflect politics, while not directly pointing at it. My songs deal with people's lives. I must be with people and I receive inspiration from them. Otherwise, I would not be able to sing.

Music played a role in the current changes of the Arab world, in Tunisia and Egypt for instance. Can music be a means of real change?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: Music has always elevated and stirred societies. This is the same in the Arab movements. It is good what is happening in these countries, but only as long as the people's will prevails. Democracy does not come by means of slogans and revolutions. It must start in the family. Societies, in which families are not functioning in a democratic way will not reach democracy.

How do you see your country in ten years?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: There lies a very sensitive, crucial, and dangerous path ahead of us. This path is inevitable, people have no other choice. (Pausing for a while) If it stays as it is, I don't see any future for Iran. The situation is getting worse day by day. For people, it's a constant downfall. Yes, it is a very dangerous and hard path. We should delete these thirty years from our history. They have no relation to our culture.

What is running through your head when you perform on stage?

Mohammad Reza Shajarian: I think about the inner desires of human beings. Humanity should rule the world, not religion, not nationalism, not ideology. When people are valued, everything is in balance. The purpose of religion is to connect people. We should not put it in the centre and sacrifice people for religion's sake. Humanity is what art is all about. I look at everything with this idea in mind.

Interview: Marian Brehmer

Via Qantara.de

Art that's fit to print:

2011-11-01T13:19:00.002Z

posters, lithographs in Dubai exhibitions

Recovery Plan by Thierry Guetta (aka Mr Brainwash), who featured in the British graffiti artist Banksy's film Exit Through The Gift Shop. Courtesy Pro Art Gallery

by Christopher Lord, The National

For the majority of us, picking up a print is the closest we’ll ever get to hanging work by a modern master in our homes. They may lack the glow of a true original, but signed editions are an affordable and accessible way to pack the walls with big names without stumping up big bucks for the privilege.

It is in this spirit that two Dubai galleries have assembled a collection of signed prints, lithographs and select unique pieces by some of the defining names in art from the past 100 years.

Currently at Pro Art Gallery, tucked away in Palm Strip Mall opposite Jumeirah Mosque, is Editions: Prints and Multiples, which throws together signed prints by modern masters such as Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso with street-art luminaries such as the stencillers Banksy and Blak Le Rat, the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and several key figures in contemporary Chinese art.

“Prints and multiples are not only finding their true value but are also democratising the art market,” says Tatiana Faure, the director of Pro Art Gallery.

Faure refers to the strength of prints and lithograph works at auctions internationally: “Entry-level buyers and collectors have been rushing in recent years to this more affordable side of the art market. Prints and multiples offer investors with as little as a few hundred to hundreds of thousands of dollars the chance to get into art and buy a big name.”

Highlights of the print selection include the now very familiar frozen grin of Yue Minjun, who was among the leading lights in the Chinese art boom of a few years ago and works in oil to represent his cynicism about China’s transition from communist revolution to economic giant with a bitter, strained smile.

Meanwhile, on the urban art side of this vast collection, there are a number of originals and prints by Mr Brainwash, the “star” of Banksy’s documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop. Many still speculate that Banksy, who keeps his identity secret, invented Mr Brainwash, the pseudonym of Thierry Guetta, as an elaborate hoax and a pointed criticism of how the art world can invent anyone as an artist.

From November 13, Total Arts at The Courtyard in Al Quoz will be showing a selection of signed posters that were first exhibited in Tehran in the 1980s, soon after the Iranian revolution.

Posters of work by the American artists Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, including Johns’s famous recreation of the US flag, were brought to 13 Vanak Street, a gallery in Tehran, at a time when it was impossible to get original art in and out of the country. They were images from a world that became ever farther away as Iran looked inward in those early, unstable years of the republic. To make these reproductions more personal, Fereydoun Ave, the founder of the gallery and an artist himself, contacted each artist and asked him to sign his posters.

The pieces from that historic exhibition are joined by prints by the likes of Christo and Jean-Claude, including an image of their planned sculpture of barrels that would have been enacted in the UAE, as well as Andy Warhol and an original by Twombly, who died earlier this year.

Editions: Prints and Multiples continues at Pro Art Gallery until November 30. The Total Arts at Courtyard exhibition of prints runs from November 13 to 28.

Via The National

The Lioness of Iran

2011-10-31T12:45:00.004Z

Shiva Rahbaran interviews Simin Behbahāni October 2011

Guernica Magazine
Iran’s most prominent poet, a two-time Nobel nominee, on the greatest epic in history, the nightmare of censorship, and why her country will eventually achieve democracy.

Simin Behbahāni is optimistic about where Persian thought and literature are headed despite Iranian society’s many post-revolution disillusionments. She speaks of the ruinous itinerary of the “literature of censorship” and the phenomenon of self-censorship, but she believes that exceptional knowledge has been stored up given Iranian social and cultural resistance to the consequences of the 1979 revolution. This knowledge creates fertile ground for the growth of contemporary Persian literature. From this perspective, the importance of poets and writers for the survival of Iranian civil society is undeniable. Behbahāni points out that this role has been inherited today after a thousand years of attacks on Iran’s writers and thinkers.

Behbahāni views her poetry in its historical context. She sees herself as an iconoclast, but has never severed her link with Iran’s past literature. On this same basis, far from attaching any importance, as a poet, to ‘being a woman,’ she considers any reference to it an insult. In other words, her poetry is part of Persian poetry as a whole, whether produced by men or by women. Behbahāni’s poetry is varied and, as she puts it, “multi-vocal,” because her poetry is the poetry of the “moments” of her life— whether the moments of “convoys of war martyrs on their way to the cemeteries” and “lorries carrying the bodies of executed prisoners, dripping with blood” or the moments of happiness. For Behbahāni, a good poem is one in which “today’s language, today’s events, and today’s needs” are poured into the mold of rhyme and meter.

Born in Tehran in 1927, Behbahāni, often referred to as “the lioness of Iran,” has been nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was also awarded a Human Rights Watch-Hellman/Hammet grant in 1998, and similarly, in 1999, the Carl von Ossietzky Medal, for her struggle for freedom of expression in Iran. Her many poetry books include Tār-e Shekasteh (The Broken Lute), Jāy-e Pā, Chelcherāgh, and Marmar.

Shiva Rahbaran: What impression do people in Iran have of democracy? Do they think that democracy always produces the desired outcomes? Have Iranian thinkers done anything to inform people about the dangers of democracy or not? Also, many people are of the view that democracy is not suited to Iranians.

Simin Behbahāni: Iranians have more or less the same impression of democracy as do the other nations of the world. Democracy means rule by the people. As long as it doesn’t make an about-face and turn into a dictatorship, it’s very desirable. Why, really, should democracy be suited to other nations but unsuited to Iranians? Western nations have experienced dictatorships in the past, too, and no Western nation has had a democratic state at the beginning of its history. Democracy is the product of human thought and reasoning. It’s true that philosophers and thinkers have always imagined a utopia in which everything is as it ought to be and the people live in freedom and comfort. But this was not achieved until recent centuries. And it can even be said that, even in the freest and most developed countries, the bounds of democracy are overstepped from time to time. Or, a country that wants democracy for itself sometimes disregards other countries’ rights to freedom. So the Iranian nation, too, wants democracy. But I think that it hasn’t, in its experience, reached the necessary conclusions in its reasoning for this kind of government. The Constitutional Revolution and the Islamic Revolution were carried out within a short space of time in the hope of gaining freedom. But, from the start, the people’s dream of freedom turned into a nightmare of tyranny. But I believe that these kinds of experiences and setbacks are necessary to attaining freedom and real rule by the people.

Today, another Hitler can’t come to power and turn Germany into a hellish dictatorship and set the world ablaze. Having had this experience, the German nation will be forever immune to the risk of this kind of government.

Our thinkers, too, are changing in the light of the experiences that they have had under an Islamic state. They will no longer consent to any old kind of tyranny as they would have done twenty years ago. We can see that killing people and imprisoning them no longer has the desired effect! Although proponents of freedom are still sent to prison, the future is bright and we will gradually acquire the knowledge that we need to achieve democracy.

Shiva Rahbaran: In the West, some analysts call the Iranian revolution “the Iranian experiment.” What they mean by this expression is the synthesis of modernity and religion. Do you think this synthesis is feasible?

The nightmare of censorship has always cast a shadow over my thoughts.

Simin Behbahāni: I think that the lapse of 1,400 years can never be discounted. Under the Islamic state, punishments are being carried out that are totally inappropriate in this day and age, such as cutting off thieves’ hands, stoning adulterous women and men, or flogging offenders.

It is obvious that the modern world views the cutting-off of hands or feet, stoning, or flogging as a contravention of human rights, and if a solution is not found for bringing these laws into line with the modern world, the success of these kinds of nations will be doubted and require a miracle.

Shiva Rahbaran: As a writer, what is your sense of your role in Iranian society? Bearing in mind that, even including the previous state’s policies, artistic activity has been difficult in Iran, how prolific has literature been and what progress has it made?

Simin Behbahāni: Despite my age, I can almost say that I have never put pen to paper without worrying about censorship. The nightmare of censorship has always cast a shadow over my thoughts. Both under the previous state and under the Islamic state, I have said again and again that, when there is an apparatus for censorship that filters all writing, an apparatus comes into being in every writer’s mind that says: “Don’t write this, they won’t allow it to be published.” But the true writer must ignore these murmurings. The true writer must write. In the end, it will be published one day, on the condition that the writer writes the truth and does not dissemble. Of course, whenever censorship is stringent, most writers resort to metaphor and figurative and symbolic language. And this can help stimulate the imagination. But taking comfort from this fact doesn’t lessen the writer’s dream of attaining freedom.

Shiva Rahbaran: So does it become necessary for art to be political?

Simin Behbahāni: Politics is the impact of the prevailing atmosphere on the people and, naturally, on any artist, especially the writer. Regardless of how far removed a writer may be from a knowledge of politics, it is impossible to rid their mind of the influence of the prevailing atmosphere. Politics becomes a part of a writer’s working life. The writer’s protagonists are born in the context of the feelings that this atmosphere evokes. How can writers separate themselves from these feelings and create protagonists that come from Mars? Even writers who only write about psychological or internal issues or about love are writing under their prevailing atmosphere, and their writings will take on the hue of the time, place, and mood of their environment.

In any age, writers have produced works which were in keeping with their society’s needs and which helped and guided the nation.

Shiva Rahbaran: Has literature reacted to the anomalies that nations, past and present, have engendered? Has it played a constructive role in changing the mood and creating normalcy?

Simin Behbahāni: Of course. Our literature has always been a reflection of contemporary events. The Shāhnāmeh is the greatest epic in history. It is a treasure trove of ideas, wisdom, advice, help, guidance, and rites. With this immense work, Ferdowsi revived the spirit of serenity, magnanimity, and pride in the Iranian nation, which had lost itself under the weight of the Arab conquest of Iran. It empowered divided Iranian peoples to unite. Most of our poets, even those who worked as tyrannical kings’ eulogists, have used their poems to remind rulers of the right way to run the state, practice justice, and uphold the welfare of the people. At the time of the Mongol invasion of Iran and the horrific massacres, writers and poets belonging to the mystical school of thought set out to soothe the people’s pain and sorrow, to teach them to be patient and ascetic, because there was no other alternative at the time. In any age, writers have produced works which were in keeping with their society’s needs and which helped and guided the nation.

Shiva Rahbaran: Some writers in the West are envious of Third World countries, and countries that have less freedom. They think that the restriction of freedom forces writers to be more creative in order to say what they’re not allowed to say. According to this viewpoint (based on the American-British novelist Henry James’s idea that every story is a window in the house of fiction), the bigger the wall of tyranny, the bigger the opportunity to put in windows. Do you agree?

I have been iconoclastic, but I’ve never broken my ties with Iran’s past literature.

Simin Behbahāni: I have experienced this as a neoclassical poet and as a writer who is committed to literary rules. The more stringent the rules and the more limiting they are, the more the poet and writer is forced to resort to special techniques and intricacies to escape them. And these techniques and intricacies adorn the writing and make it more beautiful. But, in the modern world, linguistic intricacies and embellishments do not attract much attention anymore, and the more sincere and intimate the relationship between a work and its reader, the better. So the countries that don’t have walls don’t need windows either, because the entire world is their field of vision and they can establish an unmediated relationship with their readers. I, in turn, envy them their free world.

Shiva Rahbaran: Do you consider yourself an iconoclastic poet and, consequently, not widely accepted by the public, or the other way around?

Simin Behbahāni: Being iconoclastic is only acceptable and desirable if the public—or at least a specific segment of society—is open to it. A literature that the public cannot relate to in any form will not endure. I have been iconoclastic, but I’ve never broken my ties with Iran’s past literature. No one can create a noteworthy work without knowing the tenets of their own language and literature. Language is renewed but it never changes its essence, because the contracts that have come about over time for communication cannot be rescinded so easily. It takes a thousand years before a word, among the thousands of words, dies away in a language or changes its meaning.

Literature rests on language. It is a linguistic art. So it cannot sever its relationship with the past. But it can create new methods and styles that differ in structure, form, and content from the past.

Shiva Rahbaran: Is the fact that you’re a woman important to your art and, if so, does it help you in your artistic work or not?

Simin Behbahāni: The fact that I’m a woman is as important to my work as a poet as the fact that Ahmad Shāmlu was a man was important to his work as a poet. Basically, gender shouldn’t be viewed as an advantage in art. If a poem or a piece of writing is good, what difference does it make whether it’s by a woman or a man? And, if it’s bad, why should its writer’s gender make it good? Of course, in the past, we had very few women poets and writers because the environment didn’t allow women to become educated and to learn to read and write. Illiterate women couldn’t write anything. So if, occasionally, there was a woman who was a poet or a writer, a particular value was attached to this because it was a skill that was rarely seen among women. And any weakness in her work would be overlooked. But, today, when men and women have equal access to education, why should the fact that I am a woman be seen as a plus? I consider this view an insult and I always want to be compared with men.

I’ve stood in long lines, in the rain and under the sun, just to buy a pack of butter or a box of paper napkins.

Shiva Rahbaran: Your new poems that were published in the London edition of Kayhan newspaper revealed a new passion that distinguished them from your other poems, which often carry references to blood, war, and injustice. Is this the beginning of a new path for you?

Simin Behbahāni: I have said again and again that my poetry is the poetry of the moments of my life. I’ve experienced years when the sky over me was blackened with the smoke of missiles and the ground on which I walked turned into ruins under exploding bombs. I’ve seen convoys of war martyrs on their way to the cemeteries. I’ve seen lorries carrying the bodies of executed prisoners, dripping with blood, that were being taken for burial in Behesht-e Zahra.

I’ve stood in long lines, in the rain and under the sun, just to buy a pack of butter or a box of paper napkins. I’ve seen mothers running after the corpses of their martyred sons, oblivious to whether their headscarves or their chadors or their stockings and shoes were slipping off or not. I won’t say any more. In the light of all this, how did you expect my poetry to be joyful or, as in my recent poem, to speak of love? Even so, more than half of my poetry is joyful and these are the products of the moments when I’ve felt happy. As a matter of fact, my poetry is multi-vocal. I’ve spoken about everything. I’ve written poems that consist of a story in minimized form. I’ve used surreal subjects. I’ve produced ‘dialogic’ poems. I’ve produced descriptive poems. I had one working period which was totally devoted to transforming the foundations of the ghazal. I have used about seventy new or disused meters, and this is something that can give the ghazal a totally new potential and a new mold in which to pour today’s language, today’s events, and today’s needs. You can find any type of poem that you like in my works and anyone, with any taste, can find something to their liking in them. On the whole, there’s a great deal of variety in my works. I can’t predict how my poetry will be in the future. It will depend on the state of things and how I’m feeling.

Interview from Iranian Writers Uncensored: Freedom, Democracy and the Word in Contemporary Iran (translated from Persian by Nilou Mobasser), to be published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2012. © 2012 by Shiva Rahbaran.

Via Guernica Magazine

Contemporary Art in the Middle East

2011-10-30T11:58:00.003Z

Farhad Moshiri (Iran, b. 1963), Eshgh (Love), Swarovski crystals and glitter on canvas with acrylic, mounted on mdf, signed and dated 2007, 170 x 155 x 8 cm, sold for over $1 Million.

by jessylarson, arts, ink.

As far back as art historians seem to be able to go, art has always existed as a means of resistance, a catalyst to revolution, and a construct for exposing societal and political flaws. With the continual privatization of the art market all over the world, guiding it out of the hands of restricting state and religious direction and patronage, artists are freer than ever to combine their own dissatisfactions with the existing power structure, stereotypes, preconceptions, etc. with forms of art that are more experimental and avant-garde. Increasingly, the once European and U.S. dominated art market has shifted considerably. Though cities like London and New York are still the major sellers of art, and Paris may always be the prime location for exhibition, some of the highest selling and most talked about art is coming out of places like Beijing and Dubai. Themes that are common are usually similar to the same values coming out of Western contemporary art like feminism, war, and consumerism. Aesthetically, the two hemispheres have been producing vey similar looking art as well. Some point to this as an achievement in the universality and pervasiveness of art, though the point has also been made by some scholars that European art has had its own form of ‘colonialism,’ and Middle Eastern art (and for that matter, African and Asian) has been overly influenced by Eurocentrism, to the point where the unique Middle Eastern artistic tradition has been overshadowed and replaced with art that is a product of European art history. If this is the case, the Middle East seems to be beating the West at their own game. In 2008, Farhad Moshiri became the first Middle Eastern artist to sell an artwork at auction for over $1 million (specifically $1.05 million), and the numbers have only been growing since, with the Dubai Art Faire attracting some of the most elite in the art world, to the point where they have been the ones donating to the Louvre.

In a post-9/11 world, it seems as though anything related to the Middle East is translated through the lens of terrorism, whether it is pro or anti war. It is not uncommon for news stories or interviews with Middle Easterners to solely focus on how the war has affected them, their opinions on it, the racism that has been engendered by the event, etc. Though these things can’t be undermined, it is important to realize that there are other issues at stake in the Middle East, and there is a lot of art that reflects this. They also have their genres of landscape painting, illustration, political cartoons, splatter painting, and so forth.

Though European and American connoisseurs of art seem to be receptive to contemporary art coming out of the Middle East, for many this is still fairly new territory. U.S. museums usually have much less Middle Eastern art in comparison to their European collections, and after the controversy over the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad there was a considerable backlash in some prominent museums (most notably the Met), where many ancient works of Middle Eastern art were put into storage out of fear of reprisal. Even U of M, as progressive as it may be, added for this Fall its first course on Middle Eastern art in years. However, it does seem as though there has been a significant integration in the recent past of the Middle East into the global art market, and it only shows signs of increasing popularity.

Via arts, ink. — Arts at Michigan

Farhad Moshiri (B. 1963), SCREAM, Hand embroidered beads and glaze on canvas on board, in four parts Each: 39 3/8 x 39 3/8 in. (100 x 100 cm.), Overall: 78 ¾ x 78 ¾ in. (200 x 200 cm.), Executed in 2011, The Bidoun Auction

Islamic Galleries at the Met Have a Grand Reopening

2011-10-29T10:10:00.004+01:00

by Carolyn Weaver, VOA

It was eight years in the making. Now, New York’s Metropolitan Museum is reopening its enormous collection of Islamic art in a grand new setting. The objects span nearly 13 centuries and many cultures - and include items ranging from paintings to architectural works to medieval Korans.

The Metropolitan Museum has some of the richest holdings of Islamic art anywhere - but the collection has been largely out of sight for the last eight years, as the museum renovated. Now, the 15 new galleries have greatly expanded the museum's display space for Islamic art. The rooms are grouped by regions and period, from the 7th century to the end of the 19th century.

“Our galleries are named the Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and later South Asia," said Sheila Canby, the Met’s chief curator for Islamic art. "We have done that because that is the geographical region, area, that we cover."

The reopening of the Met's Islamic galleries comes at a time of heightened interest in Islam around the world, and many visitors are expected.

They will see intricately woven carpets so large they had to be carried by a team and unfolded in palatial spaces. And a tiled prayer niche from Iran that was installed facing East, toward Mecca.

Craftsmen from the Moroccan city of Fez built one of the new galleries. They spent eight months creating a traditional Moroccan courtyard inside the museum - with a fountain, columns and lacy archways and ceramic tiles on the walls.

The Damascus Room, a huge, wood-paneled chamber from a wealthy 18th century household is also new. The room was disassembled in Syria, shipped to New York, and rebuilt inside the museum. Conservators repaired and restored each element of the carved and painted wood and the decorative tiles.

Sheila Canby says the room features floral patterns derived from Europe as well as geometric patterns and inscriptions.

“And inscriptions that are poetical inscriptions, that praise the house, praise the owner, and praise the prophet Mohammed," she said.

There are sculptures - like a pair of palace guards from medieval Iran and paintings of courtly scenes, or lovers embracing. There are household items, some extravagant, such as an enormous bronze incense burner in the shape of a lion. Others are simple.
but decorative - featuring the intricate geometric patterns, calligraphy and arabesques that dominate Islamic art because of Islam's taboo on depicting humans and animals.

One of Canby’s favorite pieces is a 10th century white bowl with black calligraphy that reads, “Planning before work saves you from regret.”

“That’s a very charming statement, but the fact is the object itself, I think, is sublimely beautiful because of that purity of design," she said.

And there are, of course, Koranic manuscripts with refined calligraphy.

Although the new setting is huge, the 1,200 pieces on display represent only one-tenth of the museum’s holdings of Islamic art.

Via VOA

Related Link: New York's Met Museum showcases a world of Islamic treasures

Iranian puppet theatre: Where humans fear to tread

2011-10-28T15:55:00.004+01:00

by Nuala Calvi, The Stage

In a society where people and particularly women are constrained by a code of conduct set out by an oppressive government, puppetry has evolved as an art form because the dolls are free to act out scenarios that are forbidden to people. Nuala Calvi investigates the creative world of Iranian puppetry

A scene from Yas-e-Tamam's The House of Bernarda Alba

The last few years have seen an explosion of interest in puppetry for adults in the UK, with the monumental success of War Horse and the founding of Suspense, London’s first puppetry festival for grown-ups. But that’s nothing, it turns out, compared to what has been underway in Iran - where increased censorship in theatre has led more and more artists to turn to the art form.

“One of the most noticeable things about Iranian theatre at the moment is the huge outpouring of puppetry,” says Anousheh Adams, a British- Iranian expert on international arts. “It’s a massively popular art form there now, on a scale that I haven’t seen in any other country.”

At the annual Fadjr Theatre Festival in Tehran earlier this year, puppetry shows were everywhere and tickets so sought after that audiences squeezed into the aisles and even on to the edges of stages in order to see the most popular productions. The city also has its own thriving International Puppet Festival that has been going for more than a decade.

This September an Iranian puppet opera was one of the hot tickets at the world’s biggest puppetry event, the Charleville-Mezieres festival in France, and now another Iranian puppet company is one of the highlights of this year’s Suspense programme.

Ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran has been reconnecting with its Persian puppetry traditions, which date back hundreds of years to a time when puppetry was an official profession. Artists such as Behrooz Gharibpour began to work with puppetry as a serious art form again, spurning a whole generation of puppet artists. But now, since the ushering in of a more conservative era under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and particularly since violent suppression of opposition protests in 2009, puppetry is being harnessed more than ever as a medium.

“Why? Because a puppet can do and say a lot more than a human can on stage in Iran,” says Adams. “The way human performance is censored in Iran is not the same as the way puppetry is, so it’s become a very popular means of expression.”

She means that as much in terms of the physical things a puppet can legally do, as what it can ‘say’, either literally or metaphorically. In Iran it is illegal for a man and a woman who are not married to touch, which makes things very difficult in terms of casting - unless you find an actor and actress who are husband and wife.

Theatre companies have found their own, inventive ways around the rules, developing a symbolic language that audiences have come to understand. To represent a man holding his wife’s hand, for example, he will hold her scarf up to his cheek. But with puppets, such moments can be portrayed directly, since there is no law prohibiting them from touching.

“Even though actors are representing human experience, and ultimately puppets are too, it is deemed okay for puppets to touch because they are essentially not human,” explains Adams. “We all know puppets can’t really have sex, so that’s not considered provocative.”

Rules around women covering their hair do not apply to puppets - nor are they prohibited from dancing in public, a restriction that has also proved prohibitive for physical theatre companies in Iran. But with strict censorship, and official approval required for every script before it goes into production - not to mention ongoing monitoring throughout rehearsals and runs - many puppet companies are turning to traditional stories and classic plays, both Persian and European.

Shakespeare is hugely popular, as are Chekhov and Ibsen. Not to mention Brecht - “That era of dark social theatre says a lot about their ‘moment’,” says Adams. Iran’s traditional religious Ta’ziyeh plays are being reinterpreted, as are the works of the 13th century Persian poet Rumi. Many of them are being used as a ‘safe’ prism through which to explore themes pertinent to modern-day life in Iran.

Yas-e-Tamam, a leading Iranian puppet theatre troupe, mounted a show based on the Rumi story The Parrot and the Merchant, about an imprisoned bird who feigns death to be free. The company, which is led by female director Zahra Sabri, also got a licence to put on a production of The House of Bernarda Alba in Iran, which is coming to the New Diorama Theatre in London from November 2 for Suspense.

To a westerner, the parallels between Lorca’s play about the suffocating lives of an isolated widow and her daughters, and the image we often get of women in Iran, may seem obvious. But theatre companies have to be extremely careful about how they sell themselves to the press, in a country where a production of Hedda Gabler was suspended in January and the actors and director arrested for promoting hedonism.

Peter Glanville, artistic director of Islington’s Little Angel puppet theatre, and director of Suspense, is more explicit. “I think all the political parallels are there to be read,” he says. “I saw the company perform at the Fadjr Theatre Festival a few years ago and I felt that there was something very powerful about the fact that they were lead by Zahra, in a country where there are different levels of oppression towards women.”

Glanville himself learnt the tricky line directors have to walk in Iran, when he gave a talk about the work of the Little Angel. “I had some photos of our previous production of Venus and Adonis, and I wasn’t allowed to show them because they were perceived as being too erotic,” he recalls.

“You can’t make work in Iran without it being political,” adds Adams. “Making a piece of theatre about any human experience in Iran, which is so defined by the political atmosphere, it’s impossible not to reference the pressures that make that experience what it is.”

• Suspense London Puppetry Festival runs from 28 Oct till 06 Nov 2011 in venues across London. Visit www.suspensefestival.com

Via The Stage

Mapping Tehranto: Queen Gallery

2011-10-28T10:51:00.001+01:00

by Sima Sahar Zerehi, Shahrvand

It’s a small narrow gallery space nestled in a refurbished brownstone, a typical building for Toronto’s east end.

The interior is a combination of brick walls and picturesque narrow wooden stairways – a relatively high ceiling and large storefront windows give the boutique space a sense of airiness.

At night, when the street is dark, the space glows – distinguishing itself from its neighbouring shops – coming to life with the presence of patrons and visitors poised to see the works of emerging artists.

Just a few short blocks away from Toronto’s Distillery District, Queen Gallery is a tell-tale sign of the expansion of the city’s art scene into the east end.

Having just celebrated its second anniversary, the boutique gallery is no longer simply the new kid on the block of the Iranian-Canadian art scene.

During its two short years, Queen Gallery has made its mark as a destination for those interested in contemporary art produced by Iranian artists residing in all corners of the world.

Gallery Director Mahrokh Ahankhah, an architect by trade, is the woman behind the up-and-coming arts destination.

Ahankhah explains her vision behind the project, “The main focus was to have an international art gallery.” She adds, “The first thing to do was to go around the world, collect art by emerging artists and put the energy and time on them to introduce them to new audiences.”

With the help of a jury, which has included, Ahankhah’s former professors Gholamhossein Nami and Valerie Kaelin, Queen Gallery has been able to introduce Toronto art lovers to many artists who would not have otherwise been able to showcase their work in Toronto.

This past week, the gallery hosted its 38^th exhibition titled Degenerate Art featuring the work of photographer Oscar Wolfman, a regular contributor.

Although since opening its door, Queen Gallery has enjoyed relative success; the venue has also faced its share of obstacles.

Ahankah recounts the story of the gallery opening, “We were suppose to open in May 2009 but we were not done with remodeling so our opening had to be postponed to July – this was in the aftermath of the Iranian election.”

“I didn’t know how to have a grand opening with all the situation In Iran unfolding and people dying,” confesses Ahankhah.

After consulting with Shahrvand’s Managing Editor Nasrin Almasi, Ahankhah learned about Fly with the Cage Toronto.

She explains, “Fly with the Cage was a call for submission for artists from all over the world in response to the Green Movement in Iran. The Theme was inspired by the Sufi proverb ‘If you can ‘t fly out of the cage, Fly with the Cage.’”

“I was able to get in contact with Peyman Soheili one of the organizers and on August 13, 2009 we had our grand opening featuring this show.”

Speaking about the accomplishments of the gallery in its first two years, Ahankhah notes that to date Queen Gallery has featured the work of over 120 artists. She explains that approximately 70% of the artists featured have been of Iranian descent either living in Iran or residing in the Diaspora. The remaining 30% include a combination of Canadian and international artists.

Since August 2009 Queen Gallery has been able to participate in a number of major arts festivals in Toronto including Scotiabank’s Nuit Blanche 2010 and CONTACT Photography Festival 2010 and 2011.

First Films, which was featured as part of Scotiabank’s Nuit Blanche 2010, was the debut of three short films by emerging Iranian filmmakers. The show included Arash Raeisian’s Wondering Lonely Seed, Safandyar Torkaman Rad’s Fortune Without Drugs, and Hassan Ghahremani’s Mohabbat Sarbaz Iran (The kindness of Iran’s Soldier).

For CONTACT 2010, Queen Gallery presented Nobody Will Walk on the Forbidden Fruit, a group photography exhibit featuring Ali Kamran, Kamelia Pezeshki, Afra Poordad, and Lida Shanechian. The show, inspired by the poem Cold Season by Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, focused on the experience of diverse women from various vantage points.

For CONTACT 2011, the gallery mounted two shows Landscape, Revolution, People featuring the works of Ali Kamran, Gohar Dashti, and Aydin Matlabi and West by East by Shadi Ghadirian. Both shows focused on socio-political issues in Iran.

“We never had any problems with finding artists for the gallery,” explains Ahankhah, “we always had many submissions to consider. So far we only had two to three shows where we went after the artists. Including a painting exhibition by Iranian artist Bahram Dabiri and The Art Explorer another painting exhibition by Ali Soltani”.

Other feature shows at the gallery have been the annual Nowruz and 50/50 exhibitions that have attracted diverse group of artists as well as media attention.

Ahankhah states, “The plan is to have more international artists at the gallery in the next year.”

“Most of the works featured in our gallery in the past two years have been paintings and photography. I would say we had 70% paintings and 20% photography,” notes Ahankhah.

She explains, “Since our gallery is small, we don’t have any room for installations, we have had some sculpture but because of the space limitations we haven’t featured larger pieces.”

Plans are currently underway to move Queen Gallery to a larger space across the street.

One of the reasons for the move is financial. “The gallery has not been able to financially sustain itself in the past two years,” states Ahankhah.

“There are so many artists who can’t show their work because they can’t afford the cost of framing and printing,” she adds.

In the past, the gallery relied solely on the contribution of sponsors to finance their shows.

“People can’t understand why it’s important to support the arts,” laments Ahankhah.

She notes, “We have some friends who only work with real-estate agents who support the artists.”

“Contributions from sponsorships can be minimum such as helping with the opening reception and advertising. Or it can be more substantial to include framing, printing of photographs – all the components that are the responsibility of the artists,” explains Ahankhah.

Ahankhah hopes that revenue from renting the new expanded space will assist in offsetting the costs of future projects.

She explains, “The new place will have two stories with a third one to be completed in the near future. The first floor will be used as an exhibition space to be rented to artists selected by our jury. The second floor will house our permanent collection and the basement will be used for workshops, classes, and video art installations. For the third floor we have another goal for the future – to have an arts auction.”

Via Shahrvand

Art Aware

Rumi’s ‘The Elephant in the Dark’

Magical Gallows Humour in Tehran

Missing

Iran Onscreen: Truth through the Prism

One Born

Possibilities, Paradoxes, and Our Moment of Painting

Art Embargo: IRANIAN ART & THE SANCTIONS

Iranian film industry thrives amid continuing censorship

Nostalgia for the Past I Have Never Had

Iran via Video Current

Flying Fingers

Clandestine Trade

Poet, Activist Remembers Life in Iran Pre-Revolution

Parergon

Forbidden Love Scenes in the Pious Dinosaur Nation

More on this topic: Qantara dossier: Iranian cinema

The Art of Stepping Through Time

Canary in a Coal Mine

Maps that defy borders

Cinema in Iran

Al Jazeera Takes on 'Parazit'

Reality of illusions

How I Learned to Stop Fearing and Love Exotic Art

Scarlet Stone

The Others

Paris Photo 2011 - Silk Road Gallery (Iran)

La Lettre de la Photographie, Festival Archive,13.11.2011

Capturing the Imagination's Uprising

The Dangerous Art of Moviemaking in Iran

Written Images

The Corruption of Language

''Humanity Is What Art Is All About''

Art that's fit to print:

The Lioness of Iran

Contemporary Art in the Middle East

Islamic Galleries at the Met Have a Grand Reopening

Iranian puppet theatre: Where humans fear to tread

Mapping Tehranto: Queen Gallery