Iranian artist's surreal paintings of women take on a new sense of urgency

 

Courtesy of the artist/Stems Gallery and CNN.

by Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

For Iranian artist Arghavan Khosravi, depicting hair in her paintings has become charged with emotion. She posted a video on Instagram in early October that showed her sweeping a paintbrush across the canvas to create fine strands. "These days when I'm painting hair, I'm filled with anger and hope. More than ever," she wrote in the caption.

She added the hashtag #MahsaAmini to the post, the name of the 22-year-old woman who died in Iran's capital Tehran in September after being arrested by the country's morality police for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly. Amini's death has since catalyzed nationwide protests — many of which have seen young women and girls defiantly cutting their hair — and her name has become a rallying cry on social media.

Khosravi grew up in a secular Tehran household in the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution as a new theocratic regime instated oppressive rules for women, including making the hijab, or headscarf, mandatory in public.

"At a very early age I realized that there is this contrast between your private spaces — your home — and then public spaces. At home you are free to do whatever you want," Khosravi said in a phone call from Stamford, Connecticut. "You learn to navigate this dual life."

Khosravi had her own encounter with the morality police in 2011 and was temporarily detained, she explained. Based in the US since moving in 2015 to study painting, the former graphic designer uses long, flowing hair as a symbol in her metaphor-laden works. Her surreal, dreamlike portraits of women, which appear on multi-paneled surfaces that resemble architectural facades, were influenced by the flattened perspectives and meticulous details of Persian miniature paintings.

The Many Shades of Iran’s Protest Art

In the four decades since the Islamic Revolution, Iranian artists have used clever tactics and unconventional modes of art-making to display disobedience.

Katayoun Karami, Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deed (2013), Azad Art Gallery, Tehran (courtesy the artist and Hyperallergic)

by Pamela Karimi, Hyperallergic 

Recent weeks have seen a surge of protest art in Iran, triggered by the tragic story of Mahsa Amini, a young woman killed on September 16 by the morality police for breaching the Islamic republic’s dress code for women. Since then, civil unrest has grown in more than 80 Iranian cities, with calls for justice as well as personal and political liberties, not to mention hundreds of arrests and violence against protesters, especially young women. Internet access remains limited as the government regulates its usage. 

Amid these protests, artists have played an important role in bringing their message to the fore. Shervin Hajipour’s song (#Baray-e [For the sake of or Because of]), recorded in his room and posted on Instagram for limited followers, was shared more than 40 million times on social media platforms in just two days. Taken from #Baraye protest tweets, Hajipour utters the grievances and hopes of Iranians, with a final emphasis on “For Women, Life, Freedom,” the main slogan of recent protests. 

Art coming out of Iran (or by artists in the diaspora) has a radical and rebellious zeal, also evident in the visual arts. Consider, for example, the work of dozens of Iranian artists — many of whom are women — who have been featured by Hyperallergic and the Guardian. Brave works with layered meanings, they appropriate concepts and imagery from earlier periods, especially those familiar to Iranians. Meysam Azarzad’s posters shared via Instagram seem to have borrowed from revolutionary themes of earlier years — found in both leftist and Islamist factions that helped overthrow the Shah’s regime in 1979. Using red, white, and black, they also seem to align the recent uprising with the visual culture of other global revolutionary movements. A filmmaker with university training in graphic design, Azarzad refutes any link to Iran’s revolutionary posters, especially those with religious iconography. Juxtaposing bold black-and-white silhouettes of fighting and fallen young women with nationalistic poetry, Azarzad instead highlights their bravery in nationalistic terms. The content of the texts appearing above the women strikes a chord with rhyming couplets from the 11th-century epic Shahnameh (“Book of Kings”) by the patriotic poet Abul-Qasem Ferdowsi. One poster shows a defenseless young woman raising her fist — unveiled — to rows of soldiers. The couplet praises a hero, but the typical Shahnameh-style male hero’s name is replaced by “a fighting girl” (dokht-e jangi). The other posters draw our attention to the bravery of two 16-year-old girls. Appearing like saints, Nika Shahkarami and Sarina Esmailzadeh were both beaten to death during protests. The portraits are juxtaposed with poetic lamentations over the death of a heroine, again in the style of Shahnameh.

The Iranian Art Scene

 The Cofounder Of Paris’ First Asian Contemporary Art Fair Speaks About The Iranian Art Scene

Arash Hanaei's works explore the urban issues he has witnessed in Paris since he immigrated to this city. PHOTO COURTESY OF AB-ANBAR GALLERY and Forbes.

Contributor Y-Jean Mun-Delsalle, Forbes

Asia Now, Europe’s first Asian art fair, will return for its 8th edition in Paris from October 20 to 23, 2022, at the same time as Paris+, the first-ever Art Basel fair in the French capital. Welcoming 60 international galleries presenting artists from Asia and its diaspora including Almine Rech, Danysz Gallery, Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, de Sarthe Gallery, The Columns Gallery, Perrotin, Yeo Workshop, Galerie LJ and A2Z Art Gallery, Asia Now is moving from the Right Bank to the Left, to the prestigious Monnaie de Paris, and will continue its exploration of the West and Central Asian art scenes, after its focus on Iran last year. Alexandra Fain, co-founder and director of Asia Now, shares her thoughts on the Iranian art scene.

How would you describe the Iranian contemporary art scene and how has it evolved over the past decade?

I’m not an expert in Iranian art yet the few I know, the more I wanted to discover. Also I can listen to the art market here and what collectors want. And what they were screaming somehow was to learn more about the Iranian art scene. The Iranian contemporary art scene is rich, dense, diverse and, over the past decade, it has certainly moved to become one of the most interesting art scenes in the world. After having challenged themes of revolution and war, it naturally focused on a form of introspection that raises awareness of different issues, such as the environment or gender, through mixed media practices including sound, as we featured this in Tehran Now last year. We naturally gathered some of the most insightful insiders of the Iranian art scene to bring to Paris Tehran Now, a selection of emerging and more established artists coming from Iran.

The Iranian Poet Who Became an American Action Painter

A new book introduces two Manoucher Yektais: the stateless, anti-historical Modernist painter and the poet writing narrative verse exclusively in Farsi [Persian].

Manoucher Yektai, "Tomato Plant" (1959), collection SFMOMA, gift of Louis Honig (© Manoucher Yektai, photo by Katherine Du Tiel). Courtesy Hyperallergic.

by Tim Keane, Hyperallergic

How did the Iranian-born artist Manoucher Yektai — a narrative poet and still-life painter who died in 2019 at the age of 98 — end up lumped in with American Abstract Expressionism and its subspecies, famously termed “action painting”?  

Answers to this question emerge in the biographical and critical essays in Manoucher Yektai (Karma Publications, 2022). Its contributors wrestle awkwardly with these counterproductive art historical labels while setting the record straight about the Iranian-American poet and painter who won critical acclaim among New York’s avant-garde of the 1950s — Harold Rosenberg was a fan, as was Mark Rothko — before Yektai slid out of favor, even as he continued to write poetry and paint well into this century. 

Featuring hundreds of color reproductions of Yektai’s work (he trafficked almost entirely in oil paint on canvas) along with personal photographs from a long life, Karma’s catalogue reveals a painter with a signature style refined across 70 years of disciplined output. Its hallmarks are deeply saturated colors, hyperactive impasto (often applied with a trowel and even a whip), and an all-over picture plane — he routinely painted standing over canvases placed on the floor, producing the illusion of aerial perspectives on the imagery. He applied these strategies to an early phase of pure abstraction and then to buoyant semi-abstract still lifes, developing that repertoire further to include portraiture, interiors, and landscapes. 

Shocking the Bourgeoisie With Iran’s Misunderstood Modernist

The Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat (1903-51). Courtesy New York Times.

by Amir-Hussein Radjy,  New York Times

In April 1951, the police in Paris called on my great-grandfather, Prince Mohamed-Hussein Firouz, to identify a dead body. It was that of Sadeq Hedayat, who is today eulogized as Iran’s great literary modernist. Days before, Hedayat had sealed up the apartment on Rue Championnet where he was staying and opened up the oven’s gas valve before lying down on the kitchen floor.

In Tehran, Firouz had known Hedayat, the son of aristocrats who moved in the same courtly and literary circles. An army officer who was educated in czarist Russia and fastidious about his dress, Firouz carried a trim mustache and tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and read Le Figaro daily. While men like Firouz easily found their place under Iran’s army-led monarchy, Hedayat did not.

In the early 20th century, Iranians of their class proudly appropriated European culture, wore Sulka cravats and sprinkled their Persian with French expressions — as Hedayat did in letters when describing existentialism in France as démodé, or praising Henry Miller and James Joyce for their originalité. Among the last interloping foreign words of his published Persian letters is psychose. “They diagnosed me with psychosis and granted me leave for two months of recovery in France,” he writes, after a visit to the doctor in Tehran.

“As long as Hedayat was alive no one understood him,” the intellectual Jalal Al-e-Ahmad said of his literary mentor months after Hedayat’s death. “Perhaps no one took him seriously.” Today Hedayat is spoken of not only as Iran’s first modern writer but also, as one critic suggests, the first “modern Iranian” tout court. His biography has become almost entirely entwined with his most famous work, BLIND OWL (Penguin Classics, 87 pp., paper, $14), which arrives in a new English translation this year. Posthumous Persian editions carried a cover with an owl wearing Hedayat’s signature round eyeglasses, or the author’s head growing into the form of the nightbird. Two years after the author’s death, Roger Lescot published a French translation that André Breton praised as a masterpiece of surrealism. The novel, its Parisian publisher said, was “the curse of a dream that creeps into reality.”

Turn our dark night into bright dawn

Reem Kelani's "The Singer Said: Bird of Dawn"

Singer-songwriter Reem Kelani's latest release – "The Singer Said: Bird of Dawn" – pays tribute to Mohammad Reza Shajarian. The two-song EP features Kelani's unique take on a famous Shajarian anthem and a second track symbolic of the iconic Iranian singer's life. 

Palestinian-British singer-songwriter Reem Kelani pays tribute to the great Iranian vocal virtuoso Mohammad-Reza Shajarian (1940-2020): included with her latest release is a detailed and comprehensive trilingual booklet (Arabic, English & Farsi) featuring musicological notes, literary translations and a detailed glossary. The EP forms part of Kelani's ongoing project "This Land is Your Land", focusing on the music of the various communities with whom she lived in Kuwait, and with whom she now lives in the UK. Reem and her international band recorded their parts separately – in the UK and the U.S. – during lockdown in 2021. Courtesy Qantara

by Richard Marcus, Qantara

Outside the Persian diaspora, Mohammad Reza Shajarian is little known. Yet, to Iranians around the world, Shajarian remains one of the most beloved and popular voices ever to have graced their country's music scene. He also carries the distinction of having actively protested against both the Shah of Iran's government and the new post-Islamic Revolution state. He didn't wait for them to ban his songs, either; he simply refused to allow either regime to play recordings of his music on state radio.

The voice of "dust and trash"

As a star of Iran's popular music scene, this was no small matter. A supporter of the Green Movement – a popular uprising that followed the 2009 election, triggered by the conviction that hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole victory from reform candidates for the presidency Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi – he found it hard to stomach what the mullah regime was doing to his people. When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad subsequently referred to the people protesting against the stolen election as "dust and trash", Shajarian proudly referred to himself as the voice of dust and trash.

"The Singer Said" (Qala al-Mughanni), the opening song, features lyrics penned by Mahmoud Darwish, whom Reem Kelani refers to as the national poet of Palestine. It was chosen for its thematic connection to the life and ethics of Shajarian. The song addresses the struggles of an anonymous singer, making it a fitting choice to represent Kelani's subject.

Graphic design in Iran:

 A journey of evolution and practices shaping the future

A review of the outstanding graphic design studios in Iran whose works are enriched by the country's long visual history and diverse contemporary life.

Morteza Momayez poster designs, right: 1976/ left: 1991. Image: Courtesy of Momayez Foundation and STIRworld.  

by Afra Safa, STIRworld

Delving into contemporary Iranian graphic design is impossible without studying its context first. A civilisation at the crossroads of the East and the West, where cultures collide, Iran has been culturally enriched by both; each ethnicity adding something to this cultural melting pot. Through centuries, this diverse cultural unit has delivered an outstanding visual legacy. Crafts, miniatures and illustrations have left an everlasting impact on the Iranian visual culture, one that is still strongly present today.

Illustrations for the Wonders of Creation by Zakariya al-Qazwini, 1750/ Image: Courtesy of Afra Safa and STIRworld.

Although illustrations and design have always been a part of Persian art and crafts, the dawn of the contemporary Iranian graphic design genius goes back to the 1960s, when in the rapidly reforming country, modern graphic design programmes were offered in the cutting-edge University of Tehran by key figures such as Morteza Momayez, the prodigy whose creations are forever printed on the national memory of Iranians.

As the cultural sphere rapidly developed in the 1970s by the direct support of the monarchy state, Momayez along with Ghobad Shiva, Sadegh Barirani, Behzad Hatam and Farshid Mesghali constituted the pioneers of graphic design in Iran. Though the impact of western artistic discourses is apparent in the general practice of most of these graphic designers, an ever-present search for an Iranian identity in graphic design was already prominent in their works. These graphists would come to impact the entire graphic design practice of Iran in the following decades.

“To Know No Nation Will Be Home”:

 A Conversation with Solmaz Sharif

by Natasha Hakimi Zapata, LARB

“I HAD / TO. I / learned it.” So begins “America,” the opening poem of Solmaz Sharif’s breathtaking second collection, Customs. The fragmented confessional poem prepares the Iranian American poet’s readers for a shift from her first book, Look — which redeployed US military language to highlight the country’s crimes in the post-9/11 era — to a more intimate exploration of exile in a deeply broken America. Customs, as the title suggests, also examines poetic traditions (often showing us the customs only to break them) at the same time that it introduces readers to aggressive customs officers at the US border. The collection considers the cost of making a life as a woman of color in a country founded on white supremacy.

Unapologetically political and deeply lyrical, Sharif’s second book illustrates why her voice is one of the most illuminating in poetry today. I recently caught up with Sharif to talk about her poetic journey, as well as why she couldn’t write much in the Trump years, and whether poetry can ever become a home to the displaced.

Women living "life without a life"

Iranian artist Farzaneh Khademian's "Peephole"

In her latest exhibition in Japan, Farzaneh Khademian depicts figures who seem detached from their surroundings. In interview with Qantara.de, the Iranian photographer and painter explains the impact of photography, migration and gender-based inequality on her paintings.

Painting from the "Peephole" series by Farzaneh Khademian (photo: Farzaneh Khademian. Courtesy Qantara).
In November 2021, Khademian's second exhibition in Japan, called "Peephole", opened in Tokyo, displaying naked, faceless figures. In the introduction to her exhibition, she wrote: "Peephole is a small opening through a door allowing the viewer to look from the inside to the outside in the same way that a camera lens does. In this series, I tried to look at my surroundings through this lens".

 

by Changiz M. Varzi, Qantara

In 2016, acclaimed Iranian photojournalist and painter Farzaneh Khademian emigrated to Japan and entered a world fundamentally different from her home country, Iran. Khademian was born and raised in the capital Tehran; she was seven years old when the Islamic Revolution changed all aspects of life in Iran. She belongs to a generation of photographers who graduated from art universities, but decided to use their cameras to document social and political themes.

In 1995, she entered Azad University Art School, where she studied photography. Immediately after her graduation, at the height of the late 1990s reform movement in Iran, she was one of the pioneering photographers who covered the 1999 students uprising, the assassination of senior reformist theorist Saeed Hajjarian, and many protests in support of the then-president Mohammad Khatami.

At the same time, she focused on documenting women’s life in Iran. One widely acclaimed project was about female passengers on the women-only section of public city buses in Tehran. In another, she took photos of women athletes when covering women sportspersons was still a taboo in Iran. She also covered various topics in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Pakistan for international outlets.

How Oscar-tipped Iranian drama A Hero nails social media fallout

The film by Asghar Farhadi is a rare example of capturing how social media influences our postures offline, while barely engaging with the internet itself

Sahar Goldoust and Amir Jadidi in A Hero. Photograph: AP. Courtesy The Guardian. 

by Adrian Horton, The Guardian

A Hero, a tense, mazy drama from the Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi, centers on a figure familiar to anyone who’s attuned to the ebbs and flows of internet celebrity: the social media Main Character, the subject of an internet backlash. Rahim (Amir Jadidi, endearing yet inscrutable), is a man imprisoned for debts in the city of Shiraz, who becomes a local hero for an act of charity of ambiguous motivation. His girlfriend, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldoust), found 17 gold coins who she says were left in a purse at a bus stop, but instead of paying toward his freedom, Rahim contacts a bank and arranges a return to their owner. Within days, on furlough from jail, he’s the feelgood story of the moment.

I’ve written before about how there are few films which successfully capture the internet and/or social media without tipping into flat moralism, obsolescence or laughable facsimiles. (Social media and the internet are of course not the same thing, though in today’s climate of platform consolidation, to refer to one is basically to refer to the other, especially in the context of film and television.) This is partly because text phrasing, online references and digital interfaces change so quickly – at a much faster pace than the production of a film, let alone its distribution – that including it in text messages or social media references can jarringly distract from the story at hand; timestamped phone and computer screen risk locking the story into a tight, hyper-specific timeline that can constrain narrative, filming location or cultural references.

A new home for digital scholarship in Iranian poetry and cinema

Whether contemporary or classical, Iranian artists regularly command the world’s attention. Courtsey  A&S News.

by Cynthia Macdonald, A&S News

Iran is home to some of the world’s oldest and richest artistic traditions. Painting, literature, film and music all continue to play important roles not only as sources of pleasure, but of social and political influence in both the country and its worldwide diaspora.

Recently, an innovative multiyear partnership was signed between the University of Toronto and the Encylopedia Iranica Foundation. The latter was established in 1990 with the ultimate aim of publishing a reference work that covers all aspects of Iranian history and culture. Under the partnership, researchers will gather and share a wealth of information on projects exploring two important artistic topics: Iranian women poets and Iranian cinema.

The principal investigator on both projects is Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, a U of T professor of Historical Studies & Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations. Tavakoli-Targhi is also the inaugural director of U of T’s Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies, which opened last year.

“In the past decade, the University of Toronto has emerged as the most important site for the study of Iran,” he says. “The new institute has over 20 faculty with twice as many graduate students, and there is a vibrant Iranian community in Toronto and Canada, all linked to sources of intellectual and artistic creativity. So it has been rather timely for the University to initiate a project like this.”

The Encyclopedia Iranica will publish the digital research compendia on both subjects via its website, and the material will be freely accessible to anyone — not just academics, but those who may wish, for example, to organize readings or film festivals.