'Islamic' Chair Cover Gets Iranian Activist In Trouble

Shai Sadr sits on the "Islamic" couch with a wine glass. Courtesy RFE/RL.

by Golnaz Esfandiari, Persian Letters, RFE/RL

A prominent Iranian human rights lawyer and women's rights activist has created a controversy by posting a picture on social media that shows her sitting on a chair with Islamic motifs while holding a glass of wine.

The chair in the photo of Shadi Sadr is covered with a material used in Iran for events marking the Ashura, the martyrdom of Imam Hossein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. It is a work by Iranian artist Parastou Forouhar, whose parents were among intellectuals and political activists killed in the late 1990s by Intelligence Ministry agents.

Hard-line conservative Iranian media, including state-controlled television and the Fars news agency, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), accused Sadr of insulting Islamic sanctities and disrespecting Islamic values.

Sadr, one of many activists and intellectuals who had to flee Iran to escape imprisonment in a crackdown after the 2009 presidential elections, told RFE/RL that the photo was not insulting and that she posted the photo to highlight the plight of nonbelievers in Iran.

"Shadi Sadr, the fugitive feminist and a so-called journalist who supports women's rights, has entered her pro-Western orientation into a new phase: insulting values and the holiest of the holy symbols of the Iranian nation; the symbol of the mourning for [Imam Hossein]," a state television report said.

Fars called Sadr's picture "an excuse to insult religious sanctity," while accusing her of questioning Islamic principles for years.

The news agency posted a statement by "a group of professors and law experts" calling for Sadr's extradition, trial, and punishment over what it said was her "antireligious" move.

In Iran, an Actress, a Bared Arm and a ‘Woman Power’ Tattoo

A photograph of the actress Taraneh Alidoosti at a news conference in Tehran on Monday suggests that she has a tattoo of the symbol for women’s power. Credit Sadegh Chenari.  Courtesy NY Times.

by Thomas Erdbrink, New York Times

A popular Iranian actress whose latest movie won two awards at the recent Cannes Film Festival threw her native country into an uproar on Tuesday after images emerged suggesting that she had a feminist tattoo on her arm.

At a news conference on Monday celebrating the return of the cast of the movie, “The Salesman,” to Tehran, cameras captured what appeared to be a tattoo of the “woman power” symbol of a raised fist sticking out from under the sleeve of the lead actress, Taraneh Alidoosti, 32, known by some as the Natalie Portman of Iran.

On Iran’s vibrant social media scene, hard-liners were quick to criticize Ms. Alidoosti, who is married and has a daughter, saying the symbol meant she supported abortion rights and was against the family.

Her many fans came to her defense on Twitter. “Now that I think about it, I have been feminist from the very beginning,” wrote one woman. Other Twitter users were less flattering. “You are advertising foreigners,” said one.

Ms. Alidoosti and her fellow actors had been in Cannes, France, to promote “The Salesman,” the latest movie by Asghar Farhadi, an Oscar-winning Iranian director. During the festival in May, Mr. Farhadi won an award for best screenplay, and Ms. Alidoosti’s co-star, Shahab Hosseini, was given the award for best actor.

For most of the day Tuesday, social media outlets were captivated by two questions: whether Ms. Alidoosti had such a tattoo, and whether it meant that she was a feminist.

Phobophobia – A Reflection

by Dr Aida Foroutan

If you have seen any of Hamed Sahihi’s previous works, then seeing this exhibition of videos and framed drawings might feel like you are having a déjà vu experience, or recognising an old friend again after a long time. Phobophobia is a new work in a new season, but it is also a continuation of Sahihi’s previous work, and to some extent it is a key to understanding what he was expressing in his previous works. As always, this artist is playful, and thought-provoking, menacing and safe, all at the same time. Hamed Sahihi has entitled this new series as a manifesto to his fears, and to all our fear. The structure of the work is simplicity itself. There are 15 frame boxes, each with a screen displaying a short video; each lasts just a minute or so, but within that minute the sequence loops on itself every 6-10 seconds. Fears repeat themselves and are in essence simple, and each video is an instance of a type of fear. Also, in antique frames the artist has picked up somewhere, there is a series of drawings, on which the videos are based, individually labelled in Persian and English, with the Greek name of the particular phobia referred to in the drawing, and a comment, for example:

‘Metathesiophobia: Change: I fear the change of things I am used to.’

But it is not just a collection of ‘fears’ in sequence – it is a presentation that has a hidden depth, with many layers to it: it confronts the viewer with fears and simultaneously challenges the idea of fear itself by turning it back on itself. ‘Phobophobia’ means ‘Fear of Fear’. In the first place, by giving classical Greek names to his personal fears he objectifies them and shows them for what they are, namely universals, which everyone can suffer from. By putting them into boxes he contains them, and perhaps even tames them. To take two examples of videos, randomly chosen (4, 7):

Love Is Something Heavy

An interview with mixed media artist Sara Rahbar

Photograph by Arash Yaghmaian. Courtesy Autre Magazine.

Intro text by Keely Shinners; Interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper, Autre Magazine

Sara Rahbar is an artist who bravely transverses borders and permeates boundaries. Though often labeled an “Iranian American artist” (her family fled Iran in 1982 during the beginning of the Revolution), she prefers to relocate herself in a collective humanity. Transcending genre, her work ranges from photography and paint to textiles and sculpture. Rahbar’s work reflects this permeability, combining seemingly antithetical ideas – American flags sewn together with traditional Middle Eastern fabrics, hearts made out of military backpacks – in a beautiful and generative juxtaposition.

At the same time that Rahbar moves fluidly between varying geographies and ideations, she maintains immovable strength in herself and her work. She says, “I love strong things.” Here, she’s talking about working with bronze in sculpture. But this statement speaks to the artist’s attitude towards art, selfhood, and humanity at large. In a world where pervasive pain and violence can feel crippling, Rahbar is able to find peace – by going vegan, by thinking critically, and namely, by concretizing our anxieties through art.

Sara Rahbar will be showing new work from now until May 6th at NADA in New York City for Carbon 12 Dubai Gallery. We got to talk to the artist before the opening about exploring identity, documenting history through art, and communicating emotion in the age of superficiality.

OLIVER KUPPER: Your work deals a lot with conflict and identity loss. This sense of tumult has really seeped into your upbringing. Do you have really clear memories of leaving Iran during the revolution?

SARA RAHBAR: No, I really don’t. I have blacked out a lot. I left Iran when I was like four and a half or five. And I can barely remember anything from that whole time period. In the beginning people just assumed that my work was about identity because my first body of work was the flag series, but I wasn’t thinking about identity  at all when I made them, it was always about so much more than that for me.

Pinning our hopes...

....on a murderer″

A report by Iranian artist Parastou Forouhar

Parastou Forouhar came to Germany from Iran to study art. Her world fell apart as she learnt of the death of her parents, political activists Daryoush Forouhar und Parvaneh Eskandari. It took ten years for her to get her own life back. Yet traces of the terrible events that unfolded in her homeland at the end of the nineties can still be found today in her art and in her actions. Courtesy Qantara.

When the news of repeated break-ins at her parents′ house reached Parastou Forouhar in January, the artist, who lives in Germany, travelled to Iran to deal with the situation in person. The house that had belonged to her parents, political activists Daryoush Forouhar and Parvaneh Eskandari, before they were murdered by the secret service, had been completely vandalised. 

by Parastou Forouhar, Qantara.de

There was a huge padlock on the front gate, put there just recently by my aunt to prevent the house from being broken into again. The gate was damaged. The chipped paint showed where the burglars had struck it with a hammer.

"When we came here after the break-in, a lot of things were lying around in the garden," my aunt told me. "Clothes, bags, a radio and the rug with your mother′s bloodstains on it – which they had thrown into the corner of the flower bed." The house had obviously been looted. The emptiness left by stolen objects leapt out at me.

″You have to feel the hardness of the fist to really understand where you live″

An old party comrade of my parents told me an anecdote as he carefully gathered up papers from the floor. In the 70s he went to visit Gholam-Hossein Saedi – a gifted writer and courageous regime opponent – in hospital. Saedi, who had been attacked and beaten by an "unknown" gang of thugs, said: "Sometimes you have to feel the hardness of the fist to really understand where you live." These words stayed with me throughout my stay in Tehran.

When I opened the house to visitors on Thursday afternoon, as usual, the atmosphere was emotional, heated. "They′ve stolen the people from this place, as well as the objects," said a friend.

You and Me

“Has a people on the march ever melted away? Tell me where. And how.”

–Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love

Nicky Nodjoumi, Invasive Personality, 2015. Oil on canvas. 65 × 85 inches. Courtesy the artist, Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York and the Brooklyn Rail.

by Yasaman Alipour, The Brooklyn Rail

Nicky Nodjoumi’s exhibition, You and Me, fills two floors of the Taymour Grahne Gallery. The show is made up of his familiar large paintings and a group of sketches that, taken together, represent a new iteration of old thoughts. Inside the anti-iconic culture of his native Iran, Nodjoumi’s practice is daring and bold because of his figurative approach; abroad, he is recognized as the Iranian counterpart of contemporary artists contemplating Social Realism. Whether it is read through Iran’s complex history or from a global humanistic perspective, Nodjoumi’s work evokes the abyss of modern socio-politics.

The artist is famous for his monumental political allegories. In the ten large panels presented here, men are placed next to and in contrast with wild animals amid the surreal ruins of modern societies. Nodjoumi’s canvases become stages; the men study, obey, mimic, and ultimately become the animals. It’s an absurd game of power that the men join without objection. Willingly, slowly, they lose their identity.

In comparison to peers like Neo Rauch and the Kabakovs, Nodjoumi’s symbolism is simple—suited men refer to power, female nudes to desire—and his technique seemingly naïve—cartoonish and, at points, happily flawed. Nonetheless, these artists share a common background; they were all born within, failed by, and have moved beyond Social Realism.

Interview with Bijan Daneshmand

The London based, Iranian Bijan Daneshmand tells art journalist and writer Lisa Pollman about his work and how it's inspired by Persian architecture and mathematical principles.

Bijan Daneshmand, Rood, 2016, Oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm. Courtesy the artist and Janet Rady Fine Art.

by Lisa Pollman, JRFA

At one time, you worked as a Civil Engineer. Does your education and training in this specific occupation have an impact on your work? How?

From my teen years on, I enjoyed drawing and had an interest in structures and buildings - both in terms of how they were built and their aesthetics. I chose Civil Engineering as a degree at Kings College London.

I was inspired by Mondrian and the De Stijl Movement, and later by Frank Stella and Agnes Martin. In particular, I was inspired by the grid type patterns, hard edge finish and solid areas of paint. Rather than say the education or my occupation impacted my work, I would say that I entered an occupation and pursued work that I found interesting and aesthetically engaging. Many years later, I pursued a MA in Fine Art at Chelsea mainly to find direction in my practice.

Explain your interest in Persian architecture. Are there any particular facades that you admire? Which ones?

I have a special feeling for the architecture of my country in both the larger cities of Isfahan, Yazd and Kashan as well as the smaller towns and villages such as Natanz, Nishapur, Gonbad, and Abyaneh. Throughout Iran we have creative and intricate buildings: garden houses, tea houses, private houses, government buildings, palaces and mosques that date from the Persepolis (6th century BC) to later works in the 13th and 14th centuries. More recent works from the Qajar and Pahlavi eras are also of interest.

Persian architecture displays strength in structure and aesthetics. I would say the most notable areas of inventiveness and originality are in our arches, vaults and domes and further demonstrated through the use of ghanats (groundwater systems) and wind towers for cooling. Some argue that the greatest Persian artform has been our architecture and represents the highest and truest expression of our civilisation. I would add poetry to that.

Seeing Red

Nomad. Rocker. Lover. The story of Reza Derakshani, an Iranian.

Reza Derakshani, Red Hunting from 'Hunting Series', Oil on Canvas. Courtesy the artist and Sophia Contemporary Gallery. 

by Joobin Bekhrad, REORIENT

He stood there, motionless before the rusty microphone, not knowing what to do with his tanned, wiry hands. A haze of smoke and flowers lingered about in the air, and, in the corner of his eye, he could make out the longhair delicately rolling a joint and smacking his lips. He didn’t make too much of it at first, just as he hadn’t recognised the fellow in the corner after the gig at the boozer in town. It came on like a slow burn, like some supernal, numbing high, inching its way up his knees towards his damp navel and rumbling viscera. A spate of blurred images rushed past his eyes: shining leather trousers, a woman from the city of angels, drawn-out afternoons spun away by hot, scratched vinyl, the glow of blood-red pomegranates. It was then that it hit him: how had he come all that way, from the sleepy village of Sangsar, to be where he was at that particular moment in time? His hands moist, he awkwardly grappled with the forlorn microphone before clearing his throat with a curt cough. Once, many moons ago, an American poet had howled into the same hunk of metal before him, telling tales of loneliness, bacchanalia, and rapture; but as soon as he opened his mouth, the phantom of old Jim fizzled away into those folds of smoke, out of which appeared that of the bard of Shiraz, kindler of hearts. He could feel his knees again; with eyes closed, looking inwards towards a warm, lambent space, he remembered what the stars looked like atop the Alborz mountains.

Watch a Pyramid of Mirrors Morph Based on Desert Weather

Courtesy Italian designer Gugo Torelli and Iranian artist Shirin Abedinirad

by Margaret Rhodes, Wired

FOR A FEW days in October, a ziggurat of mirrored boxes stood in Dasht-e Kavir, a desert in central Iran. The sculpture contained sensors, gears, and an Arduino processor that sensed changes in the temperature and the light, which caused the tower’s nine tiers to spin independently. This being the desert, a place of extremes, the sculpture did a lot of spinning. From any angle, at any time, looking at it was like gazing into a kaleidoscope of the surrounding landscape.

The sculpture was called Babel Tower, and it was the work of Italian designer Gugo Torelli, who programmed the electronics, and Iranian artist Shirin Abedinirad, who handled the mirrors. Before collaborating with Torelli on Babel Tower, Abedinirad installed a similar ziggurat in Sydney for the Underbelly Arts Festival. That project looked more like an optical illusion—as though a shard of blue sky had fallen into the grass. The earthy hues and gradients of the Iranian desert, when reflected in multitudes, create an entirely different effect. It’s like you can see the entire landscape at once.

“We wanted to give a message of unity,” Torelli says. The Tower of Babel, if you need a refresher, appears in Genesis 11. The Biblical story describes an incredible collaboration: The people of the earth all spoke the same language, and decided to join forces and build a brick-and-tar tower where they could come together. As the story goes, the Lord sought to temper the power of the people to maintain control, so he made them all speak different languages. Although the people scattered to the far corners of the world and no longer shared a language, Tower of Babel even now is a symbol for a unified society.

‘To each his own weapon, I have my camera’: Iran's 1979 revolution – in pictures

It took Maryam Zandi more than three decades to get her photos of the revolution published

An Iranian revolutionary with a flower in his rifle. Photograph: Courtesy of Maryam Zandi and the Guardian.

by Tehran Bureau correspondent, The Guardian

I met Maryam Zandi last spring in the cherry-coloured hallways of downtown Tehran’s House of Artists, a prestigious gallery, auditorium and theatre inaugurated under the administration of the reformist president Mohammad Khatami. Zandi was ‘in conversation with’ photographer Nader Davoodi, but I was looking forward to interview her about her book, Enqelab-e 57, published more than three decades after the 1979 revolution.

Zandi fought long and hard to have the book, which spans the turbulent winter of 1978-9 when people gathered to topple the Shah, published in the form she wanted, with nearly 200 photos. Under the administrations of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the authorities said it could be allowed only with some parts removed - something she refused.

“This is a record of the rising of a people, it should be seen in its entirety,” she told me. After the victory of Hassan Rouhani in the 2013 presidential election, the culture minister agreed the book could be published whole.

The photographs run from the citywide demonstrations of November 1978 to 1 April 1979, the day of the national referendum with the simple question: ‘The Islamic Republic, Yes or No?’. They capture such momentous events as the mass march to Mohammad Mossadegh’s home in Ahmadabad, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s first media interview upon his return to Iran, at Alavi School. It was published in October 2014.

In the introduction, Zandi describes asking - almost negotiating - with a man at the door to let her into the school where only men were allowed that day. Aptly, the book begins with her plea: “To each his (or her) own weapon, I have my camera, and I have my cry.”

She recalled the frenzy of the revolutionary protests as a time of “inclusion, when divisions were momentarily set aside”. On one occasion, having found no one to take care of her baby daughter, she carried the infant in her arms and asked people to hold her as she took photos.

Farideh Lashai: Towards the Ineffable

Farideh Lashai Rocks the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art With Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly

Farideh Lashai, Untitled (1967). Image: Courtesy of the Collection of Centre Pompidou, Paris and artnet.

by Benjamin Genocchio, artnet news

A sensual Picasso painting of figures and an airbrushed portrait of the Ayatollah Khomeini are the first things you see inside the imposing storage vault buried beneath the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

It is hard to imagine a more unlikely pairing, the work of the greatest iconoclast of the 20th century next to the work of a man who imposed a medieval caliphate on what was then—and still is—the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated culture in the Middle East.

But then again Iran remains a frightening, if fascinating, bundle of contradictions.

We all know the Iran from the news: It's an ugly, belligerent Muslim state that locks up reporters, denounces the US and Israel, and yet educates and promotes women and is proud of its cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity. It's also a society closed to the outside world in which hospitality is an art form and visitors are graciously welcomed.

Iran is possibly the most bizarre and contradictory place on earth.

So to find an estimated $2 billion dollars worth of modern and postwar European and American art lining the racks at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, several feet below ground, seems strangely normal in this abnormal place. It was bought with public money during the 1970s under the patronage of the Shah, whose oppressive and ultimately illegitimate rule ended abruptly with the Islamic revolution in 1979.

I've seen bits and pieces of the collection before, four years ago while reporting on the Tehran contemporary art scene for the New York Times. To say it's impressive is an understatement. The depth and diversity of the holdings are nothing short of monumental—around 1400 words of classic European and American art.

Abbas Kiarostami on his fixation with doors, the still image and carpentry

The Iranian film-maker is showing a photographic series he’s worked on for 20 years at Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum

Abbas Kiarostami. Photo: Janet Kimber/Aga Khan Museum. Courtesy The Art Newspaper. 

by David D'Arcy, The Art Newspaper

Doors Without Keys, by the Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami, is a maze-like installation of 50 photographs, all showing locked doors fr om buildings in Iran, Italy, France, and Morocco, printed life-size on canvas. The pictures, which have never been exhibited before, are now on view at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto until 27 March 2016. The show, which is expected to travel, is co-curated by  Peter Scarlet, the former director of the Tribeca and Abu Dhabi Film Festivals and Amirali Alibhai of the Aga Khan Museum. At the show’s opening in November, 76-year-old Kiraostami, one of Iran’s best-known artists, talked about the still photograph and the visual nuances of wood.

Did you take still photographs before you started making films?

It happened afterwards. I owe it to the 1979 Revolution, because it was very hard to make films. I had to go on producing images, so I started taking still pictures. It became a parallel activity to filmmaking. They interact. There’s a mutual influence.

In the contemporary art world, the moving image seems to be replacing everything. Why do you remain drawn to still photography?

I guess it’s a defense mechanism, but also kind of a protest against all this—in my view—unwelcome movement in images. Some of my latest works are experimental films that last four or five minutes. But each still image can last four or five minutes. If an image is worth seeing, it takes concentration and contemplation. The reason why there is so much movement is probably that nothing is worth being seen in what is actually shown. This is my way of protesting against that.

Look at how people relate to the pictures shown here. They choose the best position, and they stand still in front of it, and they stare at it. This is the kind of opportunity that is given less and less in contemporary art.

Egyptomania, orientalism and modernism

Farhad Ahrarnia at Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai

Lawrie Shabibi presents the first solo exhibition by the Iranian artist in the Middle East.

Running until 14 January 2016, “A Dish Fit for the Gods” features Farhad Ahrarnia’s unique works expressing the ambivalent engagement between West and East through a combination of sculpture, painting, photography and embroidery.

Farhad Ahrarnia, ‘The Delirium of Becoming, a Moment Caught Between Myth and History, No. 1′, 2015, digital print dyed onto cotton fabric, hand embroidered using silk, cotton and metallic thread, and needles, 147.5 x 113 x 2 cm. Image courtesy the artist, Lawrie Shabibi and Art Radar.

byC. A. Xuan Mai Ardia, Art Radar

“A Dish Fit For the Gods” at Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai marks the first time Iranian-born, UK-based artist Farhad Ahrarnia exhibits in the Middle Eastern region.

Ahrarnia’s diverse work typically draws from his upbringing in Iran and engages with inter-cultural cross-pollination and influences, media manipulation of reality and the constant power play between tradition and modernity.

His hometown Shiraz, where he was born in 1971, provides a constant reference and source of inspiration for his artistic practice, which utilises local, traditional techniques and crafts such as embroidery, metalwork and mosaic in combination with contemporary ones such as photography and digital printing on canvas.

On the opposite spectrum lies another major source of inspiration: western modernism. Kazimir Malevich, a key figure of Suprematism, is one of the artist’s major influences, while the modernist architecture that coexists with ancient ruins and historic buildings in Shiraz provides Ahrarnia with a heightened receptivity to and aesthetic sensibility combining East and West, tradition and modernity.

From the West, celebrity icons and images, Hollywood posters, beauty pageants, Time magazine covers or heroic war photography also contributed to animate Ahrarnia’s imaginative work, which juxtaposed such imagery with references to his cultural heritage and that of other areas of the Middle East.

Retrospective

Shadi Ghadirian’s Evocative Photos of Iranian Women in Lyon

Too Loud a Solitude | 2015, Copyright Shadi Ghadirian. Courtesy Silk Road Gallery and BLOUIN ARTINFO.

by Nicholas Forrest, BLOUIN ARTINFO

“Shadi Ghadirian: Retrospective” at the Lyon Municipal Library (La Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon) is a major exhibition celebrating the work of influential Iranian photographer Shadi Ghadirian. Presented in association with the Silk Road Gallery in Teheran, the exhibition surveys Ghadirian’s entire photographic oeuvre from 1998 to the present day and includes a new video work titled “Too Loud a Solitude” which the artist describes as “a slice of instants, similar to photography, in which the subjects move.”

Since graduating from Azad University in Tehran with a B.A. degree in Photography, Ghadirian has established herself as one of Iran’s leading creative talents. She is best known for her evocative staged portraits which address a wide range of issues including female identity, censorship, and gender roles. Drawing inspiration from her own life experiences, Ghadirian uses humour and parody as the points of departure for poignant investigations into the paradoxes of women’s lives in Iran.

According to Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, associate curator of the exhibition and Director of the Silk Road Gallery, in the late 1990s Ghadirian became one of the first Iranian photographers to change people’s perceptions of Iranian art and contemporary society. “Using a unique style of expression, she began contradicting the harsh and brutal images commonly seen and associated with Iran, challenged Eastern social dilemmas and how the world saw Iran, through the language of art.”

Upturned Ziggurat

 Study of an Upturned Ziggurat, Shaqayeq Arabi’s first solo exhibition in New York.

3 — 30 Oct 2015 at Department of Signs and Symbols

Shaqayeq Arabi, Study of an Upturned Ziggurat. Photo Credit: The Department of Signs and Symbols. Courtesy of the artist and artnet.

by Amanda Thomas, artnet

"A lot of my work is about entering into dialogue with a particular city," Iranian artist Shaqayeq Arabi told artnet News in an email.

Although she has shown her work extensively in the Middle East and in Europe, this is her first solo-show in New York. Her exhibition Study of an Upturned Ziggurat is currently on view at the Department of Signs and Symbols in Brooklyn.

The space was originally a studio but its function has expanded in recent years. It has just enough room to squeeze in pieces for an intimate viewing. Co-founder and curator Mitra Khorasheh explained to artnet News in an email, "What we do here is not just 'selecting artworks', its more commissioning an artist to create something in situ and developing ideas and concepts together."

The large site-specific piece is made of abandoned picture frames and tree branches that Arabi found on nearby Brooklyn streets. The structure is lashed together with cloth and string, and light bulbs underneath cast shadows on nearby walls. The dimly lit room and the frames offer a skeletal shape of a tower, creating an immersive and meditative experience for viewers. Arabi said to artnet News in an email, "What interests me in site-specific work like this is the way in which it can engage all the senses."

Unfamiliar territory: artists navigate the complexities of the refugee crisis

From Shahpour Pouyan’s creative reappraisal of Persian miniatures to Bissane al Charif’s exploration of the memories of Syrian refugees, artists are using their work to highlight the human dimension of the refugee crisis

Making history … Shahpour Pouyan’s reworking of a 16th-century Persian miniature entitled God Sets the Course for the Ship, and Not the Captain. Photograph: Shahpour Pouyan/Lawrie Shabibi/Copperfield Gallery, courtesy the Guardian.

by Dale Berning Sawa, The Guardian

Earlier this month, as the words “migrant crisis” permeated daily conversation, and migrants became refugees became people fleeing for their lives, the image of a small, ancient ship landed in my inbox. A sailing boat, really, thin wooden masts and white sails rolled up, the hull hovering against a darkened sea. Framed demurely by gold thread and two boxed-out captions, it was a quietly arresting thing. In between stories of fraught Mediterranean crossings and lives lost in terrifying circumstances, it lodged itself in my mind.

This diminutive work is one of a series of revisited Persian miniatures that the Iranian artist Shahpour Pouyan is currently showing at London’s Copperfield Gallery in an exhibition entitled History Travels at Different Speeds. Of the 16 miniatures in the show, the boat – entitled God Sets the Course for the Ship and Not the Captain – is the one that stops you in your tracks. Pouyan sees a bleak metaphor for the refugees’ plight in the piece’s colours. “Silver was used to paint water,” he says. “But the destiny of silver is to oxidise, to blacken. People are putting their lives into the hands of traffickers, who put the boats on autopilot and jump ship. The ships travel west with no captain or crew, but packed full of believers, literally entrusting their destiny to God.”

Art Doc of the Week: Fifi Howls from Happiness

The late Iranian artist Bahman Mohassess didn’t care about offering succor or touchy-feely platitudes to anyone. That was part of his greatness.

Bahman Mohassess, Requiem Omnibus (Death of Martin Luther King) Piper, 1968, Mixed Media on Canvas, 100×150 cm. Courtesy CraveOnline.

by Ernest Hardy, CraveOnline

We’ve become so inundated with insipid TED-talk presentations (and by speakers who’ve taken their presentation cues from that template even when not speaking at actual TED events) that conversations on art and politics, particularly where the two intersect, have become exercises in facile uplift and affirmation. Artists who traffic in grittier, darker, more nuanced work or perspectives, those who don’t think the role of art is to be sure the consumer (because that’s what we’re reduced to in those settings) leaves the experience feeling good about themselves are hamstrung by current dictates on the roles and responsibilities of the artist.

What makes Mitra Farahani’s documentary Fifi Howls from Happiness so refreshing (on top of being simply a fantastic documentary) is that the film’s subject, the great, under-recognized Iranian visual artist Bahman Mohasses, truly does not give a fuck about offering succor or touchy-feely platitudes to anyone. He’s gruff, biting, cynical and utterly without faith in humanity. He’s also wickedly funny in his raspy garrulousness. His work – paintings, sculptures, theater design – was tough-minded, beautiful, and confrontational. It challenged those in power, but also took citizenry to task for their complacency, their “boot-licking” when resistance is what is called for.

Having fled Iran after the American-backed coup of 1953 overthrew the democratically elected government, the openly gay Mohasses settled in Italy. (His comments on contemporary gay culture are absolutely withering.) He’d return home some years later and start to divide his time between his birthplace and his second home. Eventually, disgusted by what has become of Iran, he returned to Italy permanently. By the time Farahani finds and films him in 2010, when he’s nearly eighty, few people outside art students and the most well-versed art collectors even know his name anymore, and most of them assume he is dead.

Numinous

Yari Ostovany at Stanford Art Spaces

Chelleneshin #21, oil on canvas, 30 x 22 inches. Courtesy The Huffington Post.

Interview by John Seed, The Huffington Post

The paintings of Yari Ostovany, now on view at Stanford University's Paul G. Allen building, are stylistically related to works by second-generation American Abstract Expressionists -- for example Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski -- but as curator DeWitt Cheng notes, they also are inspired by and refer to the artist's Iranian cultural background. For example, the title of Ostovany's painting Chelleneshin refers to a period of solitude:

Chelleneshin is a compound word in Persian consisting of the words Chelleh; which describes a period of forty days; and Neshin, which literally means sitting. It refers to a seeker going into solitude for a period of forty days and forty nights to pray and meditate. In several mystical traditions, The Cycle of Forty is a common duration needed for spiritual metamorphosis and transitions to another, transcendent dimension.

Ostovany's interest in and ability to reference culture strikes DeWitt Cheng, who organized the exhibition, as admirable:

"I find his seriousness about spirituality and his cultural heritage interesting and inspiring. I wish that more artists today took it upon themselves to attain a modicum of cultural literacy both inside and outside of their disciplines/professions. And Yari makes beautiful, gutsy paintings too."

I recently interviewed Yari Ostovany and asked him both about his background and his art.

What can you tell me about growing up in Iran? Were you always artistic?

My father's love of music (both western classical and Persian classical music) meant that music was always filing the air in our house when I was growing up.

My first love was poetry, modern Persian poetry to be precise. When I was 14 a friend of mine who had started taking painting classes encouraged me to do so as well saying that she thought it wold suit my temperament perfectly.

My first art class was a Tehran University extension class while I was still in high school (my sophomore year). I was hooked. Gallery hoping in Tehran became my favorite pastime and the newly built Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art my hangout.

It’s written all over their faces

Still from “Munis,” 2008. Single-channel color video installation. Courtesy Shirin Neshat, Gladstone Gallery and Washington Post.

by Philip Kennicott, Washington Post

The first Hirshhorn Museum exhibition organized under the watch of its recently appointed director, Melissa Chiu, is structured around three turning points in Iranian history. “Shirin Neshat: Facing History” contextualizes the artist’s work around the 1953 ouster of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, the 1979 revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power and the abortive Green Movement of 2009, which raised and dashed hopes of more democratic, secular-leaning governance.

A history lesson is never unwelcome, especially now, with the United States attempting to forge a new relationship with the regional powerhouse. Americans with a simplistic or monolithic view of Iran as a dangerous theocracy are generally oblivious of the role played by the United States, and the CIA, in the overthrow of the democratically elected Mosaddeq and the decades of misguided support for the brutal, corrupt and ridiculous regime of the Shah. The Iranian government is horribly oppressive, of course, but Iranian society is vibrant and artistically rich, with women representing well more than half of the student population at the university level.

Unfortunately, the historical focus of the show doesn’t always serve Neshat’s work well. Historical photographs and even a newsreel give visitors a sense of these epochal events, but Neshat’s work isn’t particularly documentary in its focus. At its best, it is a kind of poetic descant to history, reimagining it in a lyrical and reflective mode. The exhibition’s approach also threatens to make Neshat into a conduit, or worse, a martyr, of the tragedies of Iranian history, inviting us to indulge the superficial and aggrandizing view of the artist as someone who suffers on behalf of her people. Finally, the historical organization also emphasizes an uncomfortable aspect of Neshat’s career: Her recent work is not nearly as powerful as the work she was doing two decades ago.

Framing the show as an ambulation through history, however, does accomplish a few curatorial ends. Most of this work is already familiar to art lovers who have been paying attention to the trends of the past 20 years. Almost everything in the Hirshhorn exhibition, including the seminal videos made in the late 1990s, was also seen less than three years ago in a Neshat exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts. So how to reframe it? How to make it new?

An Iranian-American Artist Uses Tools to Question Social Structures

“Man is a tool-making animal,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1778. Philosophers and scientists from Marx to Darwin have elaborated on the definition, and this weekend at NADA New York, the Iranian-American artist Sarah Rahbar explores the theme in a contemporary context.

Trespassers, by Sara Rahbar, 2013. From the series 206 Bones Collected vintage wooden tools, rifles, cross and cruxifix, and bullets 45 × 41 1/2 × 9 in 114.3 × 104.1 × 22.9 cm. Courtesy Carbon 12, Dubai, and Artsy.

by Bridget Gleeson, Artsy Editorial

Rahbar’s sculptures, composed of vintage tools and objects including pieces of wood, scraps of bronze, wheels, batons, shoe forms, and rifle stocks, are at once familiar and mildly disorienting. One piece in particular, Trespassers (2013), bears a striking resemblance to a standard wall-mounted rack taken from a garage or a tool shed—save for a crucifix planted in the middle. Other sculptures, like The Comfort of Feeling Safe (2015), employ similar materials, but the pieces are arranged in a way that’s illogical, even bewildering. And the title provokes further questions; after all, the concept of “feeling safe” is not typically associated with a range of objects, like axes, saws, and rifles, that could be used as weapons. Unless, of course, those same objects are used to protect you, or to tame and beautify the wild world around you.

Indeed, Rahbar’s works conjure up childhood memories—and intriguing questions about the relationship between child and parent, the vulnerable and the protected, the natural world and the ways we’ve invented to control it. Memory, and basic human needs, are themes that the artist has arrived at partly due to personal circumstance. Rahbar was born in Tehran; amid the turmoil following the Iranian revolution, her family fled the country. Years later, she pieced together Iranian and American flags for her evocative “Flag” textile series. “Years and years of memories, experiences and attachments and what is the work but a direct reflection of my life? What I’m focusing on, and what is boiling, twisting and turning inside of me,” she has said of these collages.

Rahbar’s current exhibition, featured at NADA New York by the Dubai gallery Carbon 12, is a satisfying thematic extension of both the “Flag” series and her later “War” series of sculptures and installations built with military paraphernalia. “In the end we are all just visiting and we all come to this world alone and we leave alone,” she writes in her artist’s statement. “But while we are here we try so desperately to belong to something, to someone and to somewhere.” Life is a battle, Rahbar suggests—but only some of the battlefields are easily recognizable.