'A place where art can be art'

Selling the Porsche to Promote Iranian Art

The Argo Factory, a former Tehran brewery converted into a space to exhibit work by Iranian and foreign artists. The art in the exhibition on view in this and all the photos is by Slavs and Tatars, an art collective. Credit Arash Khamooshi. Courtesy The New York Times.

by Thomas Erdbrink, The New York Times

The old brewery was a cockroach-infested ruin, a makeshift shelter for drug addicts in Tehran’s bustling downtown. Most people walked straight past it, a festering eyesore in a city dominated by high rises and building cranes.

But when Hamidreza Pejman, a sweatpants-wearing art lover with a mission to bring Iranian art to a global level, stumbled across the building he saw something else: a space to exhibit international art and build bridges between Iranian and foreign artists. “A place where art can be art,” he said, “no matter the costs.”

Mr. Pejman, 36, who once scrubbed toilets in London but got rich in construction in Iran, took out his checkbook and bought the brewery last year.

In the two years that his nonprofit Pejman Foundation has been active, he has not only bought loads of Iranian art, but also supported dozens of Iranian and foreign artists.

In fact, he says his love of art has become so pricey that he has been forced to cut back on other things. “I had to move in with my parents three months ago to save costs. I’m selling my Porsche,” he said, adding: “My goal is not to make any money from art. My goal is to free our art scene from the iron grip of money and get as many people to interact with art as possible.”

The Iranian Artists Picturing Their Cities

A gallery exhibit explores the urban public spaces of the Islamic Republic.

Behnam Sadighi's images show stark landscapes of a neighborhood in west Tehran. Courtesy of Hillyer Art Space/Behnam Sadighi and CityLab.

by Mimi Kirk, CityLab

Iran has experienced extraordinary political and economic transformation over the past four decades. From the 1979 Islamic Revolution to the democratic aspirations of the 2009 Green Movement to the 2016 nuclear deal with the U.S., the country has seen profound change, including in its cities.

“These developments have affected urban life, both for individuals and the collective,” says Gohar Dashti, a photographer who splits her time between Boston and Tehran. “These changes have also inspired artists.”

Dashti is the curator of an exhibition that provides a platform for this inspiration. Dubbed “Urban Mapping: Public Space Through the Lens of Contemporary Iranian Artists,” the show, hosted by the Washington, D.C., gallery Hillyer Art Space, features the photographs and videos of 10 artists whose work focuses on the urban.

Rana Javadi’s images of the revolution, for instance, show the commotion and dynamism of central Tehran during that period. In one photograph, a group of young women gather, arms raised in protest, on what is now known as Enghelab, or “Revolution,” Street. Pre-1979, it was named after Reza Shah, the shah of Iran from 1925 to 1941.

It’s Hard to Kill

Student uses photography to connect with her past 

Fatemeh Baigmoradi, It’s Hard to Kill #13. Courtesy the artist.

by Hannah Eisenberg, DailyLobo

When trying to move on from painful experiences, it can be tempting to imagine that old memories can simply burn, fall away into a harmless ash that leaves nothing more than a temporary residue on our minds.

This is not how memories work, though. Rather, they simmer through us. Our thoughts, patterns, actions, beliefs, our cultures and our histories exist not in an entirely progressive vacuum but in our connection to what was and who we have been.

It is this idea of the durability of memory, of living an authentic history, that UNM Master of Fine Arts candidate and photographer Fatemeh Baigmoradi explores in her thesis show, “It’s Hard to Kill.”

From late September to early October, “It’s Hard to Kill” was housed in the College of Fine Arts downtown gallery.

A large, painted red stripe flowed through the venue, and shelves lined the walls holding roughly 130 photographs of people living in the era before the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The frames showed women socializing around a car, couples vacationing, family meals, religious figures — a menagerie of early 1970s Iranian life.

These photographs, though, have all been burned. They are warped into new shapes with blackened edges and smoky holes, missing pieces of information.

A question of politics

Dubai-based Iranian artist Ramin Haerizadeh uses a variety of materials to investigate contemporary global issues such as identity, gender, intolerance and political power games

Ramin Haerizadeh, First Rain's Always a Surprise, 2012-17. Courtesy Gulf News.

by Jyoti Kalsi, Gulf News

Ramin Haerizadeh’s work is playful, absurd and profound. His latest show, To Be or Not To Be, That is the Question. And Though, it Troubles the Digestion, features collages on paper and canvas that seem to be chaotic, crazy assemblages of images and objects, which have no connection with each other. But there is a method to the madness. By excavating, manipulating and juxtaposing the debris of all the imagery that surrounds us, the Dubai-based Iranian artist wants to investigate contemporary global issues such as identity, gender, cultural intolerance, media manipulation, political power games, migration, displacement, the Western gaze, and hegemonic ethics.

The title of the show is extracted from the poem, Children of the Age, by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. The poem says that we are all children of a political age, and there is a political slant to all the things we do and say or abstain from doing and saying. It points out that in this age, even things such as crude oil and protein feed have political meaning. Hence, our existence, and every decision we make is a question of politics.

“Regardless of what we say or don’t say, do or don’t do, we cannot help being political. As an artist working in this region, I feel that the very act of making art is political. My work emerges from my daily activities as I perform different roles and take on different identities. I do not believe in preserving my old artworks. When they come back from exhibitions across the world, I start reworking them. Like human beings, they keep changing and evolving with time, acquiring new layers of experiences, emotions and memories. In my collages, I put unrelated things, people and events together to pose questions about their relationship, and to give information and tell stories, leaving it up to each viewer to process and read it in their individual context,” the artist says.

'Is it art or pain?' Iran's Parastou Forouhar on family, death and the failed revolution

Daughter of high-profile dissidents talks about how their murder nearly 20 years ago continues to inform her work

Parastou Forouhar says she finds ‘healing in repetition’ through her artwork. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and the Guardian.

by Saeed Kamali Dehghan, The Guardian

Every autumn, the Iranian artist Parastou Forouhar returns to Tehran from Germany to hold a memorial service for her murdered parents.

Dariush Forouhar, a secular politician, and his wife, Parvaneh, were two of Iran’s most high-profile political activists when they were stabbed to death in their home on 22 November 1998. The killers placed her father’s body in a chair facing towards the Qibla, the direction of Mecca.

Forouhar, 55, remembers receiving a call from a BBC reporter asking when she had last spoken to her parents.

“I called a close friend of my parents in Paris and he was crying,” Forouhar says. “I thought, it mustn’t be just an arrest. We were used to [arrests]. I said, is Dad killed? He said, it’s not just your dad.”

Every year since, Parastou has gathered with close relatives to light a candle and pay tribute to her parents’ secular democratic values. The public are routinely blocked from attending by security officials.

“They won’t let people in for the ceremony [but] it gets media coverage and it becomes an act of protest,” says Forouhar, whose work was recently exhibited at Pi Artworks in London.

Forouhar says regularly revisiting the suffering she has endured for nearly 20 years has helped to heal the wounds of her past.

Colorful Verses

Ann Marie Fleming and Sandra Oh on Highlighting Iranian Poetry in Window Horses

A scene from Window Horses. Courtesy MovieMaker Magazine.

by Carlos Aguilar, MovieMaker Magazine

Intrinsically shaped by multiculturalism, Canadian director Ann Marie Fleming has amassed a body of work grounded in her curiosity to learn about cultures geographically distant from her own, but directly linked through a similar artistic spirit.

Set largely in Iran, Fleming’s debut animated feature Window Horses—which follows the more than 30 short films she’s made in the last three decades—is a delicately crafted and heartwarming ode to borderless connections between people via creativity, and a love letter to Iranian poetry.

The film had its U.S. premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival back in February, in the midst of the shameful Muslim travel ban, and First Pond Entertainment is releasing it theatrically in Los Angeles today, only five days after the White House announced that it would roll out new discriminatory measures against those traveling to the U.S. from a set of eight countries that includes Iran. In light of these unjust developments, Window Horses’ value as a gorgeous candy-colored piece of magical animation that aims to unite, as well as a subtle and non-political statement for the respect and appreciation of an ancient civilization, has doubled in importance.

This proudly female-centric production follows Rosie Ming, a Canadian girl of Chinese and Persian descent, who is a self-published young poet who has been invited to a poetry festival in Iran. Eager to be among other poets from around and the world, as well as learn about her father and his homeland, Rosie travels to the Middle Eastern nation. Fleming’s recurrent character and avatar, Stickgirl, becomes Rosie Ming in the film. Rosie is voiced by actress Sandra Oh, who serves as Executive Producer, and Academy Award-nominees Ellen Page and Shohreh Aghdashloo also lend their voice-acting skills to Window Horses.