Burning Wings

Odile Burluraux on Iranian Women Artists

Samira Eskandarfar, I am here (2012). 5 min 47 sec. Courtesy the artist and Ocula Magazine.

In Conversation with Sherry Paik, Ocula Magazine

As curator at the Musée d'Art moderne de Paris (MAM) since 1990, Odile Burluraux has organised solo and group exhibitions at the museum and beyond to bring compelling and rarely seen examples of contemporary art to France.

The Power of My Hands (19 May–22 August 2021), among Burluraux's latest exhibitions at the MAM, was organised in collaboration with Angola-based independent curator and writer Suzana Sousa to show works by 16 women artists living on the African continent or in the diaspora. Including Stacey Gillian Abe, Gabrielle Goliath, Senzeni Marasela, and Portia Zvavahera, it considered the various explorations of concerns that have long followed women's lives, such as the female body, self-representation, sexuality, motherhood, beliefs, and empowerment.

Exhibition view: The Power of My Hands, Musée d'Art moderne de Paris (19 May–22 August 2021). Courtesy Musée d'Art moderne de Paris. Photo: Pierre Antoine. Courtesy Ocula Magazine.

Burluraux was also behind Hans Hartung's major retrospective exhibition La Fabrique du Geste in 2019, a project with assistant Julie Sissia, that brought together 300 works by the artist for the first time in Paris since 1969.

Manhattan exhibition combats view of Iran as 'hostile anti-American state'

Asia Society group show from Mohammed Akfami collection shows 'great diversity' of Iran’s often unseen arts scene

Untitled from the Rapture series, 1999. © Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of the artist, Noirmontartproduction, Paris, the Mohammed Afkhami Foundation and The Art Newspaper.

by Daniel Cassady, The Art Newspaper

Few other countries are as misunderstood as Iran. But an Iran exists beyond the headlines of authoritarian rule and theocratic Islam. It’s a country full of thriving artists — and they’re now on show in the US. 

Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians — The Mohammed Akfami Collection, on view at the Asia Society in Manhattan until 8 May 2022, aims to broadening one’s idea of what Iran is, or can be, by giving a profound look at the country’s dynamic contemporary arts scene.

Of the 23 mid-career and emerging artists included in the show, all but one was born in Iran and over a third still live and work in the country. Three generations are represented, with the work touching on subjects as diverse as gender identity, politics and spirituality. The work takes multiple forms, from traditional Persian figurative painting to photography and abstract sculpture.

The Unseen Women of Afghanistan

Photographer Fatimah Hossaini spent three years trying to upend Western narratives about women in her country. She didn't get to finish her work.

"Burqa behind the steering wheel," from work-in-progress by photographer Fatima Hossaini. Courtesy Guernica.

by Fatimah Hossaini, Guernica

I was born in Tehran, to parents who fled Afghanistan when the Soviets invaded. For most of my life, I knew everything about Iranian culture and history: I knew its education system, its capital; my friends, my family, everything I knew was in Iran. And I knew very little about Afghanistan — just a few stories, from my parents and grandparents. And I wondered where I belonged. I always looked for a sign.

In 2013, I visited Afghanistan for the first time, to get paperwork I needed for university. I fell in love with it. In 2018, when I was 25, I moved back permanently. I was a professor of visual art at Kabul University, and I worked as an art and documentary photographer.

I poured my heart into my personal project, a book on the unseen women of Afghanistan. I was tired of always showing the war and the poverty, always talking about the murders, the explosions. When I traveled to other countries, capitals of art and culture abroad, people would ask me, “If you’re an Afghan artist, where is your burqa?” The only thing people knew about Afghanistan was terrorism and women’s oppression, the twin sins of the Taliban. Why doesn’t the world know anything about our culture and our beauty? About our carpets, our textiles, our diversity, all of our cultural heritage? Why is it never reflected in the world? This question preoccupied me, and I think it’s why I was so inspired to work on the beautiful side of Afghanistan.

I had only five more portraits to make to finish my book when the Taliban took Kabul and, with it, the country. I had to escape with only what I could carry in two small shoulder bags. Leaving my photo project behind was one of the hardest parts of fleeing. It was everything I worked on for over three years. And what will happen to those pictures? What will happen to the women in the pictures?

I’d worked hard to find special locations — interesting places, forgotten streets — and to show off our cultural heritage. I did everything I could in these photos to show some beauty in a corner of Afghanistan. I can’t imagine I can’t go back and finish this work.

Words like fire

 Book review: Shida Bazyar's novel "Drei Kameradinnen"

Shida Bazyar's new novel is the literary surprise of the year. It tackles the pressing issues of our time, and yet it is timeless. This is a story of friendship, marginalisation and society's blindness to its own deep-seated problems. 

"'Drei Kameradinnen' demonstrates that all the talk about the lack of social relevance of art and literature is a fatal mistake. The great literary prizes, above all the German Book Prize, are meant for books like this," writes Gerrit Wustmann.  Courtesy Qantara.de.

by Gerrit Wustmann, Qantara.de

Let's get straight down to brass tacks: Shida Bazyar's second novel, "Drei Kameradinnen" (Sisters in Arms), published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in April, is the best and also the most important German-language book of 2021 – no matter what else comes out between now and December.

Bazyar has already proven that she is a brilliant narrator and an outstanding figure in contemporary German literature with her impressive debut novel "Nachts ist es leise in Teheran" (Tehran Is Peaceful at Night, 2016). Her new book is a triumph. It has all the makings of great literature, literature that will endure, that will become part of the canon.

But first things first ... The title raises a question that needs to be answered directly: Yes, the book's German title pays homage to Erich Maria Remarque's novel "Drei Kamaraden". Not only the title but also the story. This is a book about friendship, a novel about trauma. While Remarque wrote of the trauma of the First World War, Bazyar reflects on the trauma of the NSU and the series of murders it committed. But in addition to the core themes, the two novels also display further parallels: the setting for both is Berlin and, like Remarque, Bazyar never explicitly mentions the city's name. The characters in both books drink and smoke a lot, and both stories are about friends standing together firmly against the evils of the world.

A Poetic Monument to Folly

Abbas Akhavan review

The Isis-destroyed ancient ruins of Palmyra rise again in precarious straw and London clay, shaped by the hands of this deeply allusive Iranian artist

Curtain Call, Variations on a Folly, 2021 by Abbas Akhavan at Chisenhale Gallery. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Andy Keate. Courtesy The Observer.

by Laura Cumming, The Observer

The scent reaches you before the sight – an exhilarating combination of evergreen and fresh sap emitting from the gallery entrance. It seems to presage woods in deep summer. And sure enough, the spectacle inside is like a glade of high trees, their dark trunks rising to crowns of leaves, scatterings of soil on the floor. But at exactly the same moment, what you are looking at is also something quite else, immediately distinct and recognisable – the colonnade of a magnificent classical temple.

The trees are both trunks and columns; the leaves might be acanthus on a Corinthian capital. The whole structure is formed out of what seems to be organic matter, possibly straw-strewn black earth.

That is the one-two surprise on arrival: what you see is entirely archaeological – a Greco-Roman colonnade – and at the same time wholly botanical, even arboreal. How can it be both at once? That is the opening wonder.

Each column is in fact a sculpture, formed by the hands of Abbas Akhavan. Born in Tehran in 1977, Akhavan moved to Canada with his family during the Iran-Iraq war and is now based in Montreal. He is an extremely subtle thinker. Anyone who saw his Delfina exhibition in 2013 (he has scarcely shown here since then, alas) may remember the way he brought the outside indoors, letting nature take over a townhouse with high hedges, leaking waterfalls and sprouting floors. With his unhurried cast of mind, Akhavan is constantly pondering our place on earth as contemporary beings living among old buildings, quite often ruins, and the strange relations between people, archaeology and nature.

‘I Felt in Between Places’:

Iranian Artist Arghavan Khosravi on Studying Art in the U.S., and Why She Paints Preoccupied Women

Khosravi recently debuted her first solo show at Rachel Uffner gallery.

Arghavan Khosravi, "On Being a Woman" (2021). Photo courtesy Rachel Uffner Gallery and Artnet News.

by Noor Brara, Artnet News

The U.S.-based Iranian painter Arghavan Khosravi’s sculptural, multi-paneled paintings capture the claustrophobia and disorientation of being split between worlds. In her critically acclaimed recent show, “In Between Places” at New York’s Rachel Uffner gallery—which was extended past its original end date several times, and finally closed in mid-June—women assume agency as they move through their daily lives, all the while preoccupied with looming concerns, represented by depictions such as a ball and chain, puppet strings, prayer rugs and other religious objects that seem to hang, quite literally, over their heads.

Each work is, Khosravi said, a visual representation of how she feels as an Iranian woman artist living in the U.S. who worries for her family, friends, and women more generally back home.

Khosravi sat down with Artnet News to discuss her incredibly successful exhibition, how she came to be a painter, and much more.

To start, I would love to know about your background. Where did you grow up? And when did you first have an inkling that art would be something you’d want to pursue?

I was born in Iran and I spent almost my whole life there. I grew up in Tehran. I think most kids are inclined toward art, to drawing and things like that. My parents were very supportive of me, in part because my father is an architect, so he already had that artistic gene. But in Iran, we need to decide at an early age what our majors will be, in high school. I thought my future career should be something more practical and art could be something beside it. I decided to study mathematics.

Shirazeh Houshiary: Pneuma

Iranian Painter Shirazeh Houshiary Explains the Benefits of Painting on the Floor, and Why Nothing Is More Abstract Than Nature

Artnet News caught up with the artist at her West London studio.

Shirazeh Houshiary. ©Shirazeh Houshiary, courtesy Lisson Gallery and Artnet News.

by Naomi Rea, Artnet News 

For Shirazeh Houshiary, being close with nature is key. Even her West London studio is located right by the woods so she can listen to birds and keep in tune with nature’s ebbs and flows.

Houshiary moved to London in 1973, leaving her native Iran to study art. Her installations, paintings, and sculptures often take inspiration from Eastern culture, poetry, and mythology.

Her profile rose alongside some of the U.K.’s most prominent sculptors—such as Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg, and Richard Deacon—in the 1980s, and she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994.

To create the five works in her latest solo exhibition, “Pneuma,” now on view at Lisson Gallery in London, she placed her supports flat on the floor and poured water mixed with pure pigment onto canvas, before meditatively layering inscriptions on top of the forms.

We spoke to the artist about connecting with nature, the joys of ambiguity, and what taking long walks along the river can do for her practice.

Iran's Afghan Michelangelo

In 1989, Alikhan Abdollahi arrived in Tehran from Afghanistan after fleeing the conflict in his homeland. He has since established a reputation as a sculptor, whose work has been exhibited internationally

Courtesy Middle East Eye.

by Mohammad Hashemi, Middle East Eye

Alikhan Abdollahi has lived in Iran since 1989, after fleeing war in neighbouring Afghanistan. After arriving in the country, he began working as a caretaker in central Tehran. But Abdollahi also has another life, one which has won him the moniker the “Michelangelo of Afghanistan”, for the Afghan refugee has earned renown as an artist without attending art school (All pictures: Mohammad Esmaeilizadeh)

“When I was in Afghanistan and even early on when I was here [in Iran], I hadn’t seen a sculpture up close before,” says Abdollahi, who was 25 when he left Afghanistan. His journey to becoming a sculptor started with an encounter with an elderly street painter who sold his works on a sidewalk outside Abdollahi’s workplace in 1994. Fascinated by the paintings, he brought the artist a cup of tea and the pair struck up a conversation. The resulting friendship that developed with the man, who was known as Usta Hassan [Master Hassan], would have life-changing consequences for Abdollahi.

The one lesson Usta Hassan had to offer Abdollahi was to not give up on his dreams, irrespective of whatever hardships came his way. One day, out of the blue, an idea struck the young Afghan during one of his regular meetings with the artist - that he and his friend should use the time they were spending chatting together to make statues instead.

Why ‘The Empress and I’ is the most controversial book in the art world right now

An exiled Empress, a score-settling curator, and $3 billion worth of modern art - need we say more?

Empress Farah Pahlavi with Salvador Dali in Paris, 1967. Courtesy of Assouline Publishing and Tatler.

by Maya Asha McDonald, Tatler

The legacy of Iran’s last Empress, Farah Pahlavi (née Diba) - wife of the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi- is unquestionably her patronage of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA). With 1970s Iran flush with oil money, the modern Empress set off with a nearly unlimited budget to amass an art collection that represented a fusion of Western and Eastern art.

It’s in said context that the 78-year-old former Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) curator Donna Stein writes her highly controversial 2021 memoir, The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected, and Rediscovered Modern Art. Stein’s disputed account - which has faced equal parts praise and criticism - chronicles her time working for Her Imperial Majesty’s Private Secretariat between 1975–77.

‘Iranian culture has huge depths and continues to be relevant today’

Five thousand years of Iranian art goes on show at the V&A this month. A private collector who lent many of the works reveals what light these treasures cast on the country

A detail from Shirin Aliabadi’s Miss Hybrid #3, 2008. Photograph: © Estate of Shirin Aliabadi. Courtesy The Guardian. 

by Rachel Cooke, The Guardian

The drive from London to a certain nameless valley in rural Oxfordshire - a preposterously pretty realm of flint cottages, quaint pubs, willow trees and gentle hills - is always slightly unnerving. This part of the country is so close to London and yet the feeling is of stepping back in time, a remoteness that is sudden and unexpected. But today the experience is all the stranger, for I’m on my way to visit an institution I did not even know existed until a few days ago. Housed in a private museum whose location, hidden beneath farmland, I cannot reveal, the Sarikhani Collection is one of the most extraordinary and significant assemblies of art in Britain, if not the world. It comprises, in all its magnificence, some 1,000 items: ceramics, metalwork, textiles and manuscripts that together tell the long and wondrous story of Iran and its culture from 3000BC until the 18th century.

The driving force behind this collection is Ina Sarikhani Sandmann, the warm and curious person who greets me when I finally arrive (there is no mobile signal and I twice get lost). Her passion for Iranian art is, as I’m about to discover, disconcertingly infectious. Talk to her about an object for only two minutes and you will quickly be overcome by the feeling that you cannot possibly sit still until you’ve seen this inlaid candlestick or that turquoise ewer; an exquisite 11th-century fragment of the Qur’an written in a script called Eastern Kufic; a magnificent 400-year-old carpet on which, if you look carefully, you can see a bixie (a leonine animal) locked in combat with a qilin (in this case a type of deer with a dragon’s face). She knows a lot, but she makes her expertise so accessible you hardly notice the learning involved, let alone the fact that you left home without having eaten any breakfast.

Such a gift has its roots, perhaps, in the collection’s beginnings. “We went from being bumbling amateurs to initiating a full programme of education and exhibitions,” she says. “But I like to think that we’re still bumbling amateurs in a way, because then everything is possible, right?”

Censorship of Literature in Post-Revolutionary Iran

Iranian literature – the censor’s mindset The Islamic Republic has a strict and often arbitrary system of censoring artistic and journalistic works. An in-depth investigation by writer Alireza Abiz uncovers the details and their impact on the book trade. 

 Courtesy Qantara.de.

by Gerrit Wustmann, Qantara.de

Mahmoud Doulatabadi’s novel “The Colonel”, Amir Hassan Cheheltan’s novel “Revolution Street” and Shahriar Mandanipour’s “The Courage of Love”: three novels with much in common. Their authors come from Iran, they are viewed as important works of Iranian contemporary literature and they are highly political. All three works have thus far been published in numerous nations – but not in Iran.

None of these books stood a chance of receiving publication clearance from Iranian government censors. Every year, innumerable literary works share the same fate – of which only a modest number make it into German translation. The Islamic Republic has a rigid system of censorship affecting books, films, music, media reports and all other artistic and journalistic works. Anyone intending to publish a book must present it in advance to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. This decides whether the work receives a publication clearance or ban – or whether it can be published with revisions ordered by the ministry.

Numerous essays have been written and statements made on the censor’s code of practice, most of them in interviews with Iranian authors in exile, but these do not delineate any clear strategy, in fact the accounts are sometimes even contradictory. This indicates the censor’s arbitrary methods. Now, London-based Iranian writer Alireza Abiz has conducted a thorough investigation of the censorship system. Abiz has published several volumes of poetry and translated poets such as Ted Hughes, Allen Ginsberg and William Butler Yeats into Persian. As a result, he has had to deal with the ministry several times himself. Translations of foreign-language works are also appraised and often censored.