Shiva Balaghi in conversation with Stephanie Bailey
Art Dubai 2014: Global Art Forum 8
by Stephanie Bailey, Ibraaz
In March 2014, Ibraaz and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation launched an online media partnership with Art Dubai 2014 for the eighth iteration of the Global Art Forum.
In this exclusive interview from Art Dubai, Ibraaz Managing Editor Stephanie Bailey talks to Shiva Balaghi, a scholar in Iranian cultural history, about Balaghi's work with the collection of Mohammed Afkhami and the practice of collecting Iranian art.
Stephanie Bailey: We are here with Shiva Balaghi, a scholar in Iranian cultural history who has just spoken at the Global Art Forum on her work with the collection of Mohammed Afkhami. Shiva, one thing I wanted to ask you about was the notion that you put forward: the collection as an archive. I wanted to ask you how this then relates to what you said about Mohammed Afkhami’s collection having the potential to show an alternative Iranian history.
Shiva Balaghi: Well, Mohammed has been collecting Iranian art in Dubai now for a decade, and he is particularly interested in Iranian politics and Iranian history, so in his collection he tends to gravitate towards those types of works of art. This book that Venetia Porter and I are writing about his collection – and the talk today was a little preview of that – really takes his collection as an archive of Iranian history, and says: what are the moments that Iranian artists from the 1960s to the contemporary period think are important? How do these artists reflect that history? And how does that history manifest itself in their artwork? So we really think of the art collection as an archive that presents an alternative history of Iran.
SB: This leads on quite nicely to a date that you mentioned in your talk, 1962, which was the year that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acquired – was it two works?
ShB: Yes, two works, and the artists were Pilaram and Zenderoudi. Alfred Barr collected them for MoMA when they were still young and in the early stages of their career; they are now both considered modern masters. The Afkhami collection has several examples from both artists – I chose to show just a couple of them – and so my theory is, why is it that when we go into MoMA and we look at the way they hang the canonical works of modernism these two works aren’t hung, and yet they were acquired? I call it a closeted modernism; it’s nodding to the fact that yes, there was non-western modernism, and yet not inscribing it into MoMA’s hanging of the canonical works of modern art.
Art Dubai 2014: Global Art Forum 8
by Stephanie Bailey, Ibraaz
In March 2014, Ibraaz and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation launched an online media partnership with Art Dubai 2014 for the eighth iteration of the Global Art Forum.
In this exclusive interview from Art Dubai, Ibraaz Managing Editor Stephanie Bailey talks to Shiva Balaghi, a scholar in Iranian cultural history, about Balaghi's work with the collection of Mohammed Afkhami and the practice of collecting Iranian art.
Stephanie Bailey: We are here with Shiva Balaghi, a scholar in Iranian cultural history who has just spoken at the Global Art Forum on her work with the collection of Mohammed Afkhami. Shiva, one thing I wanted to ask you about was the notion that you put forward: the collection as an archive. I wanted to ask you how this then relates to what you said about Mohammed Afkhami’s collection having the potential to show an alternative Iranian history.
Shiva Balaghi: Well, Mohammed has been collecting Iranian art in Dubai now for a decade, and he is particularly interested in Iranian politics and Iranian history, so in his collection he tends to gravitate towards those types of works of art. This book that Venetia Porter and I are writing about his collection – and the talk today was a little preview of that – really takes his collection as an archive of Iranian history, and says: what are the moments that Iranian artists from the 1960s to the contemporary period think are important? How do these artists reflect that history? And how does that history manifest itself in their artwork? So we really think of the art collection as an archive that presents an alternative history of Iran.
SB: This leads on quite nicely to a date that you mentioned in your talk, 1962, which was the year that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acquired – was it two works?
ShB: Yes, two works, and the artists were Pilaram and Zenderoudi. Alfred Barr collected them for MoMA when they were still young and in the early stages of their career; they are now both considered modern masters. The Afkhami collection has several examples from both artists – I chose to show just a couple of them – and so my theory is, why is it that when we go into MoMA and we look at the way they hang the canonical works of modernism these two works aren’t hung, and yet they were acquired? I call it a closeted modernism; it’s nodding to the fact that yes, there was non-western modernism, and yet not inscribing it into MoMA’s hanging of the canonical works of modern art.
SB: Yes, because you did say these were the first works to be acquired?
ShB: I believe them to
be the first works; they also acquired a Marcos Grigorian – he’s an
Iranian Armenian. That work was acquired in 1965. I need to do more
thorough research to see if there were any earlier works purchased, but I
believe them to be if not the first then certainly amongst the first.
SB: I wanted to stay
with this idea of closeted modernism given that this year is the first
time Art Dubai has presented a modern section, and I just wanted to
think about this notion of closeted modernism in relation to Dubai as a
gathering place which you talked about as well. I wonder if we could
find a connection between the two.
ShB: Well it’s
fascinating, we have here in Dubai for the first time, as you said,
galleries showing modern Middle Eastern art and also South Asian art.
Included in that is a gallery that is showing works by Ardashir
Muhassis, who is an Iranian modern artist, and there are several key
modern artists in the Afkhami collection as well. What we’re finding is
that as interest in contemporary Iranian art grows, people are going
back and seeing who the pioneers were who were making Iranian modern art
in the fifties, sixties and seventies.
So Dubai is now starting to take note of
modern Iranian art as well, and this is important. As I said in my talk
I really feel that Dubai is a key capital of the Iranian art world; if
we think about the Iranian art world as where the people who care about
Iranian art, who collect Iranian art, who make Iranian art, live, it’s
beyond the borders of the nation-state of Iran at this point, and Dubai
is a very key place for two reasons:
a) It has some of the main galleries that deal in contemporary Iranian art and modern Iranian art;
b) Some of the main collectors are based in Dubai.
When there are these events like Art
Dubai and the Global Art Forum we all come together; it’s like our
annual convention. You will see the gallerists and the curators and the
scholars and the collectors who work on Iranian art all coming together
in Dubai and some of us can’t go to Iran, some of us who are in Iran
can’t go to Europe or America, but we can all come to Dubai. Because
really what you need to be part of the Dubai art world is an interest
in, and a passion for, art, and Dubai provides a safe and exciting place
for us all to come together and experience our appreciation for art.
SB: Do you have a context for this? Why Dubai specifically; how did that come about?
ShB: It’s interesting, I
was speaking to Maryam Massoudi yesterday who divides her time between
Dubai and Tehran, and she started coming to Dubai in the sixties and
seventies, and her father was involved in creating relations between the
Iranian and the Arab world. She was telling me that there’s actually a
very long history of Iranians coming to Dubai. Part of it is obviously
the proximity, but a great deal of it is also to do with the attitude of
the Dubai government, which is very much one of embracing a pluralistic
cultural atmosphere and one in which a lot of Iranians feel they can
flourish and be themselves.
But there’s also a political economy to
the art world here in Dubai. Sometimes I’ll speak to artists who live
and work in Iran and they’ll say: look, I can go into my studio, I can
make art for three months, and then I can have a show in Dubai and that
show will be enough money for me to live on for four or five years.
So Dubai creates a space in which the
political economy of the Iranian art market can function, but it’s also
aspirational. Sometimes I’ll hear artists who are living and working in
Iran say: I’m going to try and be the next Farhad Moshiri. So it also
sustains the imagination of this generation of Iranian artists.
SB: I’m going to ask
you one more question because you brought up Farhad Moshiri. In your
talk you made a point about quite a well-known discussion around artists
working inside Iran and artists working outside Iran and the relevance
of this, and I was just wondering if you could give us your take on
that.
ShB: This is
interesting, I mean I myself live and work in the USA, and sometimes
when I speak about Iranian art I speak exclusively about artists who are
immigrants or in exile, who live outside of Iran, and sometimes I work
on artists who exclusively live and work in Iran. In fact, two of the
artists that I work on – who I’ve Skyped and called and emailed – I met
them for the first time here at the Global Art Forum, which is something
that happens often. But one thing that I’ve found is that regardless of
where Iranian artists live and make their art they keep in touch with
each other, they follow each other’s work.
There’s one artist I know, Nicky
Nodjoumi, who lives and works in Brooklyn; he is on his mobile phone to
artists who live and work in Iran all the time. Sometimes artists in
exile show their work in Iran but there’s always the Internet where keep
up with each other. I had one artist, Simin Keramati, who, when I
started working on her, lived and worked in Iran. She has since moved to
Canada – this happens often – but when she living and working in Iran I
asked her, do you follow the works of Shirin Neshat and Farhad Moshiri
and Nicky Nodjoumi, these people who we mostly think of as focused on
the western art market? And she said we absolutely keep up with their
work, whether we like or not, we keep up with their work. She said you
have to realize that those of us who live and work in Iran are in our
own kind of exile; by virtue of being an artist and being an Iranian
artist you’re in a kind of internal exile. So a lot of the artists I
work with do see themselves, obviously in different ways, as part of
this larger Iranian art world.
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