Iranian artist and activist Siah Armajani builds bridges in New York

The artist will recreate one of his best-known works in Brooklyn Bridge Park to coincide with his retrospective at the Met Breuer

Siah Armajani, Bridge Over Tree (1970/2019) installed at Brooklyn Bridge Park. Photo: Timothy Schenck; courtesy of Public Art Fund, NY and The Art Newspaper.

by Victoria Stapley-Brown, The Art Newspaper

The Iranian-born, US-based artist Siah Armajani’s first major retrospective in his adopted county includes paintings, collages, sculptures and maquettes made from the mid-1950s until today. Armajani has “what seems like such a diverse practice at first glance”, says the curator Clare Davies, who has organised the Met Breuer’s leg of the exhibition. “But there is this thread that runs through a lot of it: he’s really interested in how language can transform people, and the different ways that that gets implemented in the physical world,” Davies says.

Armajani arrived in the US in 1960 to go to university in Minnesota. He says he left Iran as he “was in danger of being arrested” for his activism. The collages that Armajani made in the 1950s as a young political activist borrow language from poems, school texts and even spells he procured from a scribe he met outside a post office.

His sculpture Dictionary for Building: The Garden Gate (1982-83), made from wood and books, looks at the relationship between “speech that’s supposed to transform its listeners” and architecture, Davies says. The work combines the form of a minbar (a pulpit in a mosque) with “elements of vernacular American architecture and references to Russian Constructivism”. There will also be a section dedicated to his work made for public spaces and will include a key piece, Sacco and Vanzetti Reading Room #3 (1988).

In Tehran: A Conversation with Iranian Gallerists

This conversation took place in Tehran on June 18 and June 30, 2017. The participants (in Persian alphabetical order) were Rozita Sharafjahan (Azad Art Gallery), Anahita Ghabaian (Silk Road Gallery), Maryam Majd (Assar Art Gallery), Masoumeh Mozaffari (President of the Society of Iranian Painters), Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam, and Keivan Moussavi-Aghdam. The questions, asked by Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam, were formulated by Talinn Grigor (University of California, Davis, and a member of the Art Journal Editorial Board) in conversation with Art Journal‘s editor-in-chief, Rebecca M. Brown.

برای خواندن این اثر به زبان پارسی اینجا کلیک کنید

Rozita Sharafjahan, Maryam Majd, Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam, Masoumeh Mozaffari, and Anahita Ghabaian in conversation, Tehran, June 2017 (photograph by Keivan Moussavi-Aghdam). Courtesy Art Journal.

Interview by Rebecca M. Brown, Art Journal

The Market, the Masterpiece, and Introducing New Artists

Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam: There is no doubt that your role in the realm of contemporary Iranian art has been significant over the past few decades. What’s more, since the era preceding the [Iranian] Revolution, women have had an active role in the domain of gallery ownership. The international art market has changed the direction of Iranian art within the past twenty years. How have artists, gallerists, and collectors taken steps to accommodate or resist the forces of the market? More specifically, what stance have you adopted toward the market? Have you moved in the same direction, or have you mounted resistance? What were your strategies?

Maryam Majd: I have been practicing this profession for eleven years. The issue of market does not go back twenty years; it goes back to 2006—when Christie’s started introducing and selling Iranian works in Dubai; at that moment Iranian art began to receive attention. In addition to modern art, Christie’s exhibits contemporary art and works of younger artists. There is a vast difference between the present and 2006; similarly, 2006 and 2000 are vastly different from one another. As for accommodating or mounting resistance to the market, several concerns come to mind: becoming international, being able to introduce your artists to the world, and making artists who are at different levels visible.

How Iran’s Greatest Director Makes Art of Moral Ambiguity

Asghar Farhadi’s films fill theaters in a country where taking sides can be dangerous. They’ve also captivated Hollywood.

Farhadi in Tehran, near the mountains north of the city. Credit: Newsha Tavakolian/Magnum for The New York Times. Courtesy NY Times.

By Giles Harvey, New York Times

Asghar Farhadi, the most successful director in the history of Iranian cinema, may have little interest in global politics, but global politics are interested in him. On Jan. 27, 2017, less than a week after “The Salesman,” Farhadi’s seventh feature film, was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign-language movie, President Trump signed Executive Order 13769, more commonly known as the Muslim ban. Under its terms, citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, Iran among them, were barred from entering the United States for 90 days — apparently the time it would take the new president to figure out “what the hell is going on.” For Farhadi, a connoisseur of human particularity whose nuanced, open-ended films about the cultural fault lines within Iran have been embraced by audiences around the world, Trump’s order was an offense both moral and intellectual. In a statement released two days later, he announced his decision to boycott the Oscars and also alluded to the history of “reciprocal humiliation” that lay behind present-day American-Iranian hostilities. Given the circumstances (the collective punishment of an entire religious group), that “reciprocal” showed extraordinary equanimity — not that anyone who had seen the film for which Farhadi was nominated, a painstaking psychological inquest into the rival claims of reciprocally humiliated parties, would have been surprised.

Overlooked No More

Forough Farrokhzad, Iranian Poet Who Broke Barriers of Sex and Society

An author unafraid to defy midcentury attitudes about her gender. “What is important is humanity,” she said, “not being a man or a woman.”

Forough Farrokhzad near Tehran circa 1966. She was one of Iran’s pre-eminent mid-20th-century writers, both reviled and revered for her poems. Credit: Ebrahim Golestan. Courtesy NY Times.

By Amir-Hussein Radjy, New York Times

When a radio interviewer suggested to the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad that her verses could be characterized as “feminine,” she rejected the notion.

“What is important is humanity, not being a man or a woman,” she said. “If a poem can get to that point, it is no longer connected with its creator but with a world of poetry.”

Farrokhzad was one of Iran’s pre-eminent mid-20th-century writers, both reviled and revered for her poems, which often dealt with female desire. Throughout her life she struggled with how her gender affected the reception of her work in a culture where women were often confined to traditional roles, but where there are few higher callings than the life of a poet.

In the afterword to “Captive” (1955), her first poetry collection, Farrokhzad wrote, “Perhaps because no woman before me took steps toward breaking the shackles binding women’s hands and feet, and because I am the first to do so, they have made such a controversy out of me.”

Her death in 1967 at 32, in a car crash, was regarded as a national tragedy, making  the front pages of Tehran’s newspapers.

Iran’s leading literary journal, Sokhan, wrote after her funeral, “Forough is perhaps the first female writer in Persian literature to express the emotions and romantic feelings of the feminine gender in her verse with distinctive frankness and elegance, for which reason she has inaugurated a new chapter in Persian poetry.”