Black Hand, Iran’s Underground Banksy

Black Hand condemns the hunting of the endangered Persian leopard with colours of the national flag.
Courtesy IranWire.

by Ayeda Nik Farjam, IranWire

Graffiti is not only an ancient and controversial way of conveying a message to the public but also a continual contest between  the sender of the message and those who do not wish the message to be heard.

The messages on the walls of the Islamic Republic are not exception. State-sponsored graffiti covers many buildings and walls in Tehran and other cities, but the government is unwilling to cede any urban space to anything it has not produced itself, let alone messages that directly challenge its authority. Spray paints and markers however have made the battle less unequal.

In April of this year a street artist who goes by the pseudonym “Black Hand” held an exhibition of his work in an old house in central Tehran. The property was under the protection of the Historical Preservation Society for its unique architecture but the authorities concluded that it was too small and decided to tear it down, presumably to make space for a new development.

Black Hand’s signature tag becoming familiar in Tehran, and his work often pops up in various corners of the city. He chooses his locations cleverly so that his graffiti can be seen immediately and people record the sight on their mobiles before the city workers arrive with their paint cans.

Black Hand’s exhibition uses the rooms in the condemned but beautiful house to explore the social themes that engage him.

For example in one of the rooms, called the Shirin (sweet) room, every object is printed endlessly with its own name, the sofa, the framed painting, the table, the cigarette box, the lighter and the dresser, and a harsh strobe light completes the nightmare. Black Hand seems to suggest that we live in a society where everything introduces itself by labels with no regard for content and meaning. As in the famous painting by Belgian painter René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, in which a pipe is labeled “This is not a pipe”, a dresser can easily be not a dresser and even the house can be a piece of land destined to become a high-rise. In contemporary Iran the label can be changed quickly and the form can remain without content.

Calligraffiti

Deitch Takes Another Look at ‘Calligraffiti’ for New York Gallery

Leila Pazooki, This Is Not Green, 2009,  Illuminated neon tubes,  19.29 x 78.74 in / 49 x 200 cm. Courtesy Leila Heller Gallery.

by Carol Kino, The ArtsBeat, New York Times

Last month Jeffrey Deitch resigned as the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Although he won’t step down immediately, the art world is abuzz with rumors about what he’ll do next. Perhaps a clue to his future interests may be found  in “Calligraffiti: 1984-2013,” an upcoming show at the Leila Heller Gallery in Chelsea opening Sept. 5.

It will explore the relationship between graffiti and calligraphy with the work of nearly 50 artists, from Jackson Pollock and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Keith Haring and his protégé “LA II” (as Angel Ortiz is known). Many of the artists are Middle Eastern, including Shirin Neshat and Hossein Zenderoudi, and several are street artists, like the French-Tunisian star eL Seed.

The show essentially updates “Calligraffiti,” an exhibition that he and Ms. Heller collaborated on in 1984, back when he was a Citibank art adviser with a passion for street art, and she was an Upper East Side dealer specializing in art from the Middle East, primarily Iran.

MoCA Los Angeles acquires taste for Iranian art

A painting by young Iranian artist Ali Banisadr has made it into MoCA’s permanent collection, while contemporary art from Iran continues to impress internationally.

Gifted to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles in 2012, Ali Banisadr’s painting It’s in the Air (2012) was part of the exhibition “A Selection of Recent Acquisitions” (10 February to 11 March 2013), which included some of the 117 works collected by the art institution over the past two years.

Ali Banisadr, 'It's in the Air', 2012, oil on linen, 82 x 120 inches. Image courtesy Ali Banisadr and MoCA, Los Angeles

by Art Radar Asia

Ali Banisadr: the art of war

Originally from Tehran, Ali Banisadr relocated to the United States at the age of twelve during the Iran-Iraq war. Although he is now based in New York, these childhood experiences of war and displacement continue to inform Banisadr’s work, as he explained in a 2011 interview with Asian Art Newspaper,

I decided I was going to make these charcoal drawings based on the sound of explosions that I used to hear at night…. This work prompted me to ask questions like, ‘Why the war happened?’ ‘Who was involved?’ ‘Who was behind it?’, etc. These questions opened a whole flood gate for me to think about world politics in general and world history. Thinking about the experiences in Iran has had a huge impact on the work I do now.

Taking Back the Streets: Iranian Graffiti Artists Negotiating Public Space

Icy and Sot; “The Old” Tehran, Iran, Image courtesy of Ajam

by Rustin Zarkar, Ajam Media Collective

On the eve of Iran’s 1979 Revolution, the Iranian public sphere was transformed into places where information could be exchanged verbally, textually, and visually. The walls came alive with opinions and the chants of the masses. After revolutionary forces under Ayatollah Khomeini triumphed and became institutionalized, these same walls became the space for the dissemination of new revolutionary values. This co-optation, however, meant silencing other views from finding space on the walls. Despite this, since the late 1980′s Iranian street art culture has emerged again and has refused to be silenced. Today, Tehran’s walls are the site of competition between the messages of government murals, graffiti artists, Green movement political activists, and pro-government Basiji groups.

During the 1970’s, a sizable percentage of the Iranian population was illiterate. Printed literature were of little use to the masses of urban poor, thus increasing the role of visual and audible revolutionary sources. Ideologues soon realized the power of pictorial imagery and dramatically delivered anti-Pahlavi sentiment. Since then, Iranians from all walks of life have been bombarded with revolutionary slogans, themes, and motifs represented by images. The public square and open street have served as living canvases for artists– whether state-sanctioned or independent– to express emotion and ideas through the art of persuasion.

Since the 1960’s, visual street art in North America and Europe has traditionally been associated with youth, counter culture, and bohemianism. However in the Iranian case, the revolution and subsequent events led to the eventual domination and co-optation of the public sphere by the state, and thus was utilized by the government to display aspects of the ideological grand-narrative of the Islamic Republic. While the city was not entirely devoid of independently produced visual art, the most visible forms of graphic representation were articulated by the powers-that-be to instill the populace with mobilizing conviction. The most apparent expressions of this tactic were produced during the Iran-Iraq War, where buildings and walls were covered with the faces of Iranian youth who lost their lives in the 8-year-long bloodshed.

"Made in Iran" and a Studio Visit with Icy and Sot

Iranian Street Artists Step Into New Territory as they prepare for US Debut

 Icy and Sot (photo © Jaime Rojo)

by Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo, The Huffington Post

Both born in the 1980s, Iranian Street Artists Icy & Sot are equally fans and loyal students of all the stencil techniques that have characterized the western scene in the last decade. What's fascinating in this story is that, despite creating work on the street since 2005, neither brother has been able to attend their own gallery show in person outside of Iran until this week in New York.

With a new sense of freedom and some new works for "Made in Iran", the self taught Tabriz-based artists are riding the momentum that will take this show to Amsterdam, Berlin and Milan. The gallery work on display is similar to the variety of styles they have experimented with in streets of cities like Tehran, Paris, Turin, Istanbul, and even the rural Mazichal forest in Northern Iran. Thematically they wrestle between oppression, celebrity, freedom, war, and daring to dream.

Hitting the well promoted New York opening will be an eager audience of curious fans who have been waiting to see in person the svelte guys who have become a bit of an Internet sensation because of their origin, and because being caught painting in Tehran is more severe than most illegal street artists in the west would care to imagine.

LSD Magazine Interviews Iranian Street Artists - ICY & SOT

If you peer past the stereotypes, endless propaganda on both sides of the divide and the dark theocratic veil of Iran, it won’t be long before you touch both the not so silent underground and the extraordinarily nuanced pathos of Icy and Sot’s art. Infusing the international visual language of global street art with a deeply personal and targeted meaning, their spectacular range of work takes on the political, the individual and the universal as haunting flashes of innocence sweep through bold statements of identity, freedom and social justice. Whether it be sperbly layered stencils rendering an almost photographic sense of fleeting memory, silent screams of humanity, intensely political canvases beckoning a new dawn of cultural freedom or quick cheeky pastes in Tehran’s streets, they have truly made the medium their own and made the stencil and the can sing their own biting refrain. They were open enough and brave enough to speak to LSD, although we did keep our direct political questions to a minimum. If its a tale of resistance and the triumph of the spirit you’re after - the art does all the talking you need. 

Tell us a little about Tabriz and the creative scene there 

Its a city in the north-west of Iran, and kinda boring - there really isn’t much going on here to be honest. It does have really beautiful countryside and landscapes surrounding it, but all the creativity is mostly focused on the traditional art fields.

How did you first develop an interest in art 

It started with our career in skateboarding, especially Sot’s. We used to watch skate videos and play skate games all the time, and we saw graffiti and stencils on the walls which initially sparked our interest. We then started with smallthings like stickers and small amateur stencils, and we began spraying them and posting them up on our spots and gathering places.

How did being brothers and working together influence the development of your art 

We were and are best friends, and when we started, there were very few people (most of whom were in our circle of friends) who knew what graffiti, stencil and the whole street culture was. Being brothers helped us a lot as we did everything together – drinking, hanging out, stencilling – everything and overall we just understood each other.

When did you first begin to cut stencils and how differently did you have to approach that from canvas pieces 

A few years ago when we began thinking about our first exhibition and we started sophisticating our works around 2008.

Is your art seen as a political statement in Iran 

Well it is, even our non-political works are considered offensive to the government and it’s also illegal like everywhere else except for the glaring fact that it’s much more dangerous for us here as the accusations potentially levelled at you go way beyond vandalism and criminal damage, so the risks are far greater

How do the public respond to your work and how does that differ with the reaction of the authorities 

Graffiti and stencil has a long way to go before it becomes a part of our culture, and people realise what it really is. because of the lack of exposure here in this field, people aren’t familiar enough with these sorts of things., maybe if a pedestrian passes by a graffiti or stencil they might not know what it is or they might not have any interest in it, or maybe in some cases they might even wipe it off. For an example Icy once did a wheatpaste, went away for a few minutes just for it to dry off and when he came back a guy was tearing it off. But despite all of this it does now and again impact and influence some people on very rare occasions.  

READ FULL ICY & SOT INTERVIEW 

LSD Magazine Issue 7

 Open publication - Free publishing

Via LSD (London Street-Art Design) Magazine