She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World

A Show of Strength by Middle Eastern Women Photographers

Nil Nil #19, Shadi Ghadirian, 2008, colour photograph. Ed. of 10, 76 x 115 cm; 29.9 x 45.3 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

by Kerri MacDonald, Lens, New York Times


Despite the cultural limitations many have faced, women have been at the forefront of photography in Iran and the Arab world. In societies dominated by men, female photographers are using images to raise questions and explore issues of identity. They’re telling stories — often their own.

“I was raised with people trying to tell me what to do and think,” said Newsha Tavakolian, who shoots for The New York Times from Iran. “Now I want those looking at my work to have their own opinions. I don’t want to enforce any ideas or views upon them. They are free.”

Ms. Tavakolian‘s work is included in “She Who Tells a Story,” an exhibition showcasing 12 photographers from the Arab world, all women. She was encouraged to tell her story “in a different way” when she lost her permit to work as a photojournalist in Iran in 2009. Her photography, she said last week via e-mail, has been shaped by limitations.

But, she said: “The obstacles I have faced are not so special, nor have they been overall specific to me: my sisters, my friends and even my mother and grandmother all have to deal with limitations written up in laws or demanded by culture.”

“She Who Tells a Story” opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston this week. Four of the artists included are Iranian; three — Ms. Tavakolian, Gohar Dashti and Shadi Ghadirian — live and work in Iran today. The exhibit also highlights work by Jananne Al-Ani, Boushra Almutawakel, Rana El Nemr, Lalla Essaydi, Tanya Habjouqa, Rula Halawani, Nermine Hammam, Rania Matar and Shirin Neshat, the fourth Iranian artist, who lives in New York.

Asia Pacific's art market comes of age

Growing affluence in the region is leading art collectors and dealers to look closer to home

by Roxana Azimi and Florence de Changy, Guardian Weekly

This year the Hong Kong International Art Fair was held under the Art Basel brand name for the first time, sending an important message to the art world. After Basel and Miami, the leading western art show has invested in the former British colony. Art dealers, collectors and the merely curious enjoyed an artistic "fusion" in late May that mixed bankable western artists with Asian stars. But the east-west paradigm is not the only one at play in the contemporary art market; a pan-Asian shift is under way and local identities are being asserted.

The art market, as usually understood by the players in the art world, has moved to Hong Kong to meet Asia, and is being transformed in the process. Unnoticed by the west, the Asia-Pacific region has developed several artistic centres and is now determined to assert its own tastes and preferences, with no regard for what some would call western diktats.

This awakening of contemporary art in Asia is backed by abundant regional cash. According to a 2012 study by consultants Capgemini, there are more millionaires in Asia than in the United States. To lure them to the cause of art, quality art fairs have burgeoned since 2007 in Dubai, New Delhi, Hong Kong and Singapore, with the next one, the Sydney Contemporary, due in September. They share a common characteristic, which is that the Asian component dominates. The stars here are not British (Damien Hirst) or American (Jeff Koons and Richard Prince), but Chinese (Liu Wei), Iranian (Farhad Moshiri) and Indonesian (Eko Nugroho).

Traces

Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Marwan Sahmarani, Selma Gürbüz and Shahpour Pouyan 

19 June - 18 July 2013 

In the physical sense, traces can be visible marks left on a surface. There is also an historical and cultural sense. Our forthcoming exhibition Traces brings together the works of four artists, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Marwan Sahmarani, SelmaGürbüz and Shahpour Pouyan, highlighting their work on paper and explores how the intrinsic and associative qualities of the medium affects their work.

In today’s world when writing can be done on a keyboard and sketches made onscreen, paper can seem like an odd survival from an earlier age. The permanence of a mark of ink on paper sheet, which can only be written on once, seems to contradict the perceived fragility of the medium. Yet the very traits that make paper seem an anachronism in comparison to other media are also its strengths: they bequeath it a timeless and evocative quality. Once a trace is laid on to the paper, it can hardly be erased. Paper works cannot be over-worked or worked over. They tread a careful line between forward planning and spontaneous execution.

Paper is indelibly associated with books and the dissemination of knowledge. From its origins in China more than 2000 years ago, to its westward progression through Middle East and on to medieval Europe, through industrialization, up until the internet revolution of recent decades, paper was the primary medium of record.

In the Middle East until modern times paper was also a main medium for representation, with miniatures and diagrams, their strong graphic quality quite unlike easel painting on canvas. This abstract quality lends itself well to a contemporary context, as Marwan Sahramani’s paintings of comical militaristic figures on an almost translucent paper and Selma Gürbüz’s whimsical paintings on a coarser surface attest. Both recall miniatures but in quite different ways- Sahmarani with his finely wrought details embellishing gestural washes of colour, while Gürbüz works appear almost as illustrations emancipated from some giant apocryphal manuscript.

Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s Baruther Strasse, an imprint on paper taken from the surface of a wall, is from her ongoing project that highlights historically or symbolically significant walls in Berlin and Tunis. Linking recent history to a more distant past, the wall in question is from a 19th century unplanned graveyard in Berlin which gradually developed into fully fledged cemetery when wealthier families began to build tombs and crypts, which eventually formed an imposing wall around the compound, which reminds Kaabi-Linke of how empty spaces around Berlin were occupied by squatters during the 1980s and 1990s.

State of the Art

Recent auctions of Middle Eastern art by renowned London houses Sotheby's and Christie's are only the latest triumph in the Iranian and Arab world's resurgent art scenes.

Detail of “Sada” (From the Graphèmes Series) by Nja Mahdaoui. “Sada” is one of the 47 works. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s and Asharq Al Awsat.

by Juliet Highet, Asharq Al Awsat

Million-dollar art sales are happening at the moment. You might ask what is so new about that, even in a time of recession. This is contemporary Arab art, and the location is the Gulf. Christie’s held two auctions in Dubai on April 16 and 17 totaling USD 6.4 million, and Sotheby’s had another yesterday, April 22, that was expected to raise a total in excess of USD 11 million, and achieved the strong total of USD 15,199,750.

Lina Lazaar Jameel, Sotheby’s international contemporary art specialist, said of yesterday’s auction: “Doha is a hugely exciting art hub of the MENA region, and the sale presents exemplary works by extremely important artists.”

In Dubai, where another highly successful Art Dubai fair has just ended, Michael Jeha, managing director of Christie’s in the Middle East, said that their auction proved that “the market responds extremely well to carefully curated sales with great works by artists of high caliber.” He also noted “the increasing interest of international buyers and the maturing of an ever-increasing group of informed and committed local collectors.”

This is fascinating. Not only are international buyers—museums, collectors and investors—swooping like hawks, but there has been a significant increase in the number of buyers from the region. Furthermore, neither group will accept anything but first-class art, of which there is so much, covering such a wide area: not only the Middle East, but also North Africa, Iran and Turkey.

Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian and Turkish Artists

April 20, 2013 – September 15, 2013 | Public Opening April 20 7:00-9:00 pm Audain & O'Brian Galleries

Safar/Voyage will be the first major exhibition of contemporary art from these regions to be shown in Vancouver.  It is constructed as a journey in the company of 16 artists, each of whom is neither fixed inside the territories of the Middle East nor permanently diasporic. These artists define themselves and the world according to their own creative representations, often informed by culturally specific conditions.

Wrapping the globe, their diverse artworks speak to the universal theme of voyage (a translation of the Persian safar), from the external and geographical to the internal, emotional, and existential. They acknowledge the realities of political turmoil and revolution, and how politics frames both trauma and desire, whether individual or collective. Voyage is seen to take many forms.

Expressed in media ranging from painting, sculpture, and video installation to performance and a carpet, it is as innocuous as tourism (with a twist), as disturbing as war—the violent crossing of borders—and as philosophical as the transience of life. The artists of Safar/Voyage are positioned as our guides, their visions mined for reflections on some of the most urgent issues of our time.

The artists featured are Adel Abidin, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Nazgol Ansarinia, Kutlug Ataman, Ayman Baalbaki, Ali Banisadr, Taysir Batniji, Mona Hatoum, Susan Hefuna, Raafat Ishak, Y.Z. Kami, Farhad Moshiri, Youssef Nabil, Hamed Sahihi, Mitra Tabrizian, and Parviz Tanavoli.

The exhibition is curated by Dr. Fereshteh Daftari, former curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. MOA Coordinating Curator Dr. Jill Baird, Curator, Education & Public Programs.  The exhibit will be accompanied by a publication.The exhibition will feature a wide range of public programs including curator and artist talks, musical performances, as well as the Hassan and Nezhat Khosrowshahi Distinguished Lecture Series featuring talks by noted architects and scholars Nader Ardalan, Daniel Roehr, Hossein Amanat, and Abbas Amanat.