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.”

At LA Museum, A Powerful And Provocative Look At 'Islamic Art Now'

If you called Andy Warhol a Christian artist would that make sense?
- Professor Ali Behdad

Amir Mousavi's 2011 work Untited, #8, from the series Lost in Wonderland. Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art and NPR.

by Susan Stamberg, NPR

Art galleries are generally quiet, hushed spaces, but at the Los Angeles County Museum a show called Islamic Art Now is sparking some heated discussions as visitors ponder the photographs, paintings and neon sculptures on display.

Moroccan photographer Lalla Essaydi has covered every inch of a reclining odalisque with graceful Arabic calligraphy. The gorgeous woman is staring right at us, and viewers wonder: Is the writing protection? A shield? Imprisonment?

Translating the calligraphy, curator Linda Komaroff doesn't see it that way. "I see it more as: This is who I am. See me for who I am. Read me if you like, but this is me," she says.

Egyptian-German artist Susan Hefuna's Woman Behind Mashrabiya I is a black and white image of a shrouded woman looking out from behind a pierced screen. We can't really see her, but she can see us. Is she protected? Trapped?

"It's very mysterious — and deliberately so," Komaroff says. "It's this notion about: Do we really understand? ... To me, a lot of these images are a challenge to an American audience to maybe rethink what their perceptions are of women in the Middle East, women in the Islamic world. Maybe they're not that different from us after all."

Some provocative images may feel very different from Western experience. Viewers get an extreme close-up in Iranian artist Shirin Neshat's 1996 photograph Speechless. We see a portion of a woman's face, circled by a black headscarf. At her right ear, what looks at first like a clunky earring turns out to be the barrel of a gun. With a look of determination, she's pointing the gun directly at the viewer.

Art's 'Meeting Point'

The Leila Heller Gallery Opens a New Space on 57th Street

One of the rooms in Leila Heller's new 16,000-square-foot, six-floor art gallery. Photo by Keith Bedford, courtesy The Wall Street Journal.

by Jackie Bischof, The Wall Street Journal 

For almost 30 years, Leila Heller ran her gallery from the Upper East Side, making a name for herself as an art dealer and for her support of emerging and midcareer Middle Eastern artists, before setting up shop in 2010 on a gallery-lined stretch of West 25th Street.

Now, Ms. Heller is returning uptown with a 16,000-square-foot, six-floor space in Midtown Manhattan that she will operate in addition to the Chelsea location. The new gallery will open on Tuesday, with an inaugural exhibition on portraiture that will run through August.

"It's been my whole life," said Ms. Heller of being uptown. "I always knew I was going to go back."

The new location on West 57th Street will be headed up by Thomas Arnold, who spent 14 years as director of Mary Boone Gallery's locations in Chelsea and Midtown before leaving in 2012 to set up his own consulting firm.

The exhibition, titled "Look at Me … Portraits: Manet to the Present" is organized by Ms. Heller as well as Paul Morris, the founding director of the Armory Show, and Beth Rudin DeWoody, a curator and collector who has worked with the gallery in the past. It will include works by more than 170 artists, including Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Jean- Michel Basquiat and Shoja Azari, an Iranian-born filmmaker and artist whose work featured in Ms. Heller's Chelsea gallery last year.

The widening Gulf

On the explosion of Middle Eastern investment in Western art and an exhibition of Iranian art at the Asia Society

 

The Museum of Islamic Art. Courtesy James Panero and The New Criterion.

 

by James Panero, The New Criterion

 

A few years ago, I came as close as I’ll ever get to the center of the art world. Over Dover sole at Sant Ambroeus, a restaurant on the Upper East Side, I sat across from someone who might have been mistaken for an out-of-place young grad student. While she was at Duke, my lunch companion, class of 2005, had double-majored in literature and political science. Now at Columbia, she was pursuing a masters in public administration. Casually dressed, she looked as though she were on a study break from Butler Library. Her demeanor was reserved, a little shy, and serious. “It’s work all the time. Sometimes it’s just very difficult, but I think it’s doable,” she explained. The “art world’s most powerful woman,” as The Economist has called her, had much on her mind.

Between taking classes at the time and raising her family, Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, known as Sheikha Mayassa (a name that has a James Bond ring to it), runs the museum operations of Qatar, where she is the fourteenth child of the former Emir and the sister of the current one. “I’m still figuring out the best ways to do all this. I set up video conferences. I have my staff come to New York every month. Then I take classes,” she told me. Funded by the oil and gas riches of her principality, a thumb-shaped pile of sand that sticks into the Persian Gulf from the Arabian Peninsula, Mayassa has been leading an acquisition program that, by a wide margin, has recently spent more money on art than any other entity. “The small but energy-rich Gulf state of Qatar is the world’s biggest buyer in the art market—by value, at any rate—and is behind most of the major modern and contemporary art deals over the past six years,” The Art Newspaper wrote in 2011. On ArtReview’s 2013 “Power 100” list, which ranks “the contemporary artworld’s most powerful figures,” Mayassa is ranked number one.

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.

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.

Female Warriors of Art at Tate Modern

by Karen Ruimy, The Huffington Post, UK

As I was sitting at the Buying Committee of the Tate Modern, my eyes were arrested in awe and also complete ignorance by a piece from an artist I did not know about, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. I was struck by the strength of her art.

The fact that she is a woman working in Iran, in her 80s, made her even more striking. The committee could not complete the purchase. My heart was so sure: this is a major artist, from the depth of the Middle East, this area of the world that is going through some dark ages. She is a star, we cannot let this piece go, let's find a solution.

What made me think of the strength I found in Louise Bourgeois? I still cannot help comparing those women and their force in their art.

So I started to find out about Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. I found she spent her earlier years in New York, studied at Parsons School of Design and Cornell University, collaborated with Warhol, was friends with Pollock, De Kooning and many other geniuses. But she decided to go back to her country where she developed her art with traditional Iranian crafts like reverse glass painting, cut mirrors and Sufi symbolism.

This woman travelled to America and Paris searching for art education. And she always tried to come back to her land despite so much segregation for her as a woman, as an artist-woman... her art was confiscated and burned during the revolution. And eventually she went back to live in her country.

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.

Tectonic presents a new movement in art

 

Back to Back and Guarded, by Holton Rower. Courtesy The Moving Museum and The National.

by Anna Seaman, The National

Cynics may take some convincing, but Aya Mousawi and Simon Sakhai are confident that with their exhibition Tectonic, which opened amid the pomp and circumstance of the quarterly Art Night last month, they are bringing something totally new to Dubai.

Tectonic was the inaugural event for The Moving Museum, a platform for international artists to gather in a group show of solo exhibitions. The main difference from a regular exhibition is that rather than having a curator, artists were selected by a board of advisers – museum curators, artists and prominent, international cultural figureheads – for a “combined perspective”. Presented in a “museum infrastructure”, the idea is that this show somehow encapsulates the global art conversation at an institutional level.

It is an ambitious project and the question as to whether or not they are capturing the international spirit or simply presenting an interesting collection of art cannot really be answered, but it is certainly a memorable show. At the main entrance is the Iranian artist Soheila Sokhanvari’s stuffed horse, whose legs are wrapped around a concrete, turquoise balloon that symbolises the Iranian revolution. Further inside, Holton Rower, the grandson of the American sculptor Alexander Calder, has created magnificent, almost hallucinogenic poured-paint pieces and paired them with an installation of a paper chain made from real US dollar notes. A back wall is adorned by the Turner Prize-winner Jeremy Deller’s Folksong and a variety of video performance-pieces pepper the space. Of the 24 artists, only Slavs and Tatars, an art collective from Eastern Europe, the Iraqi-American Michael Rakowitz and the Iranian artist Ali Banisadr have exhibited in the region before. The 300 pieces, therefore, do offer a window into something new.

Art Dubai 2013: A diverse affair

Galleries from 30 nations converge on the city for Art Dubai 2013. Raising awareness is top priority

 

The letter that never arrived, 2013, by Bita Ghezelayagh. Courtesy Gulf News

by Jyoti Kalsi, Gulf News

A spotlight on West African art, an open-air sculpture gallery by the sea, and an in-depth look at MENA (Middle East Nervous Anxiety) — these are some of the highlights of Art Dubai 2013, to be held at Madinat Jumeirah from March 20 to March 23. The seventh edition of the art fair, which is presented in partnership with the Abraaj Group and sponsored by Cartier, will feature 75 galleries from 30 countries, showcasing latest works by more than 500 artists. Among the booths to look out for is Arndt Gallery’s (Berlin) recreation of Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s recent exhibition of Gothic sculptures at the Louvre in Paris; London gallery Victoria Miro’s solo show by legendary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama; and a group exhibition of kinetic art by Edwin’s Gallery, Jakarta.

“The fact that we have galleries from 30 countries makes us the most global art fair. But we are also proud to be the largest showcase for artists from the Arab world,” Fair Director Antonia Carver says.

This year, the fair’s Marker section is focused on West Africa and features galleries from Nigeria, Cameroon, Mali, Ghana and Senegal. The theme of these concept stands, curated by Lagos-based curator Bisi Silva, is the rapidly evolving nature of West African cities and the impact of these changes on urban society. “Marker exemplifies our aim of making Art Dubai a place of discovery and cross-cultural exchange. Last year, our focus on Indonesia led to the start of many long-term exchanges between Indonesia and the Gulf region, including a section on the Arab art world at the Biennial in Yogyakarta. This year we chose to look at West Africa because we have seen that there are extraordinary artists and art centres there. We want to create awareness about art from that region and encourage cultural interactions and greater synergies that build on the historic and present links between Africa and the Middle East,” Carver says.

Although it is a commercial event, Art Dubai has also played an important role in creating awareness and understanding about contemporary art and engaging the local community with art through its extensive non-commercial programme of curatorial and educational projects. These include free public seminars and talks, art workshops and tours, and various commissioned projects. New curatorial elements added this year are a mobile art gallery located in a truck that will visit different areas of the city; and Sculpture on the Beach — an exhibition of large-scale artworks located on the Mina A’Salam beach. The artworks selected by curator Chus Martinez range from Iranian artist Bitta Fayyazi’s quirky figures, made from pipes and broken porcelain, to Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri’s steel creations. “This picturesque location gives our galleries the freedom to think beyond the confines of their booths and to display large-scale artworks,” Carver says.

Muslima: Muslim Women's Art and Voices Featured at IMOW Exhibition

by Samina Ali, The Huffington Post

As the curator for the International Museum of Women’s new global exhibition, Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices, the one question I’m repeatedly asked is, “What common trait do Muslim women artists and leaders around the world share that strikes you?”

My answer: their courage.

The sad reality is that many of us have grown accustomed to –and comfortable with –seeing Muslim women portrayed as victims.

Yet brave women around the world undertake heroic acts every day. Many do so without anyone bearing witness.

 

From Iranian artist Shadi Ghadirian's series "Nil, Nil," included in the International Museum of Women’s online exhibition at muslima.imow.org. Courtesy Shadi Ghadiria and The Huffington Post

To even out that ledger, I want to share the heroic stories of three women I interviewed for Muslima. It’s just a small glimpse of what you’ll see in the upcoming exhibition, which just launched.

Dr. Shirin Ebadi is the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. For more than 40 years, Dr. Ebadi has worked to improve the lives of women and children in Iran.

A View from Afar

‘You Ask Yourself A Thousand Questions Plus One: Who Am I?’

Chador-dadar, by Haleh Anvari – London. Courtesy Galerie Kashya Hildebrand and REORIENT.

by Joobin Bekhrad, REORIENT

As the bombs from Babylon fell from above across the hazy Tehran skyline, dotting the skirt of the mountain whereon Arash once let his felicitous arrow fly, my family and I made for strange and foreign realms. Leaving the land of roses and nightingales for the shores of Albion, we first settled in England before heading further east towards the New World. Despite the fact that many of my mother’s relatives were in London at the time, my parents nonetheless opted for a new life in Canada, being more accustomed to the North American lifestyle they had enjoyed as students in the United States. True, we would be far from ‘home’ and the bulk of our ilk, and my father would not be given free reign to practice as an architect and civil engineer, but one thing was certain: we would be safe, dignified, and free.

As an immigrant child in Toronto in the early 90s, I had it made. My classrooms were always brimming with a melange of kids from far-flung corners of the earth, just like me, each with stories as unique and colourful as their accents. Not once did any one of us ever feel that we were different or peculiar in any way, even vis-à-vis our friends of Western European descent. Of course, there was no doubt that my parents spoke a funny language at home, pointed fingers at strange, bearded men on the television from time to time, and on more than one occasion sent me off to school reeking of ghormeh sabzi; but then again, stinky stews aside, that was more or less the case with everyone at the time. We didn’t make anything of it. We were kids. We just were. 

Looking back, though, perhaps I wasn’t just another immigrant child with dark hair and eyes who seamlessly integrated into Toronto’s social fabric. Unlike most of the other families we knew from ‘elsewhere’, we weren’t exactly what you’d call giveaways. My mother and father both attended University in the States in the mid-70s, where they met before returning to Iran. They spoke English without the languid, seemingly opium-induced Persian drawl, preferred ski slopes to shopping malls, and made trips to the local Iranian supermarket only when faced with dire shortages of pistachios and basmati rice. People knew we were from somewhere else; they just didn’t know where. We were often taken for Italians or Greeks, or, if someone felt they had really caught on to us, Armenians. Thus, as far as I can recall, I had a relatively Western upbringing, devoid of any of the typical feelings of displacement or awkwardness that usually rear their ugly head in the immigrant experience.

Pop Goes the East

Eric Parnes on Pop Culture, Being Iranian-American, and the 15th Islamic Arts Festival

by Joobin Bekhrad, REORIENT

Currently exhibiting in Sharjah is the 15^th Edition of the long-running Islamic Arts Festival. Featuring over 1,700 works of art from a variety of mediums, including painting, installation, and video art, and showcasing pieces from 45 local and international exhibitions from 18 countries, the festival is among the most prominent of its kind in the Middle East.

Over the holidays, I chatted with the festival’s headlining artist, Eric Parnes, about the exhibition, his artistic journey, and the concept of ‘Islamic Art’, among other things. 

What themes and ideas were most prominent in the festival?

This was the first year I was actually approached by Sharjah’s Art Directorate of the Department of Culture and Information – the Islamic Arts Festival’s designated coordinators – and asked to participate through a solo show featuring my work, so I don’t have any previous experience with the Festival to accurately assess exactly how the 15th Edition differs from the previous ones. However, at this year’s private inauguration event (which took place on December 12), the Ruler of Sharjah – His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan Bin Mohammed Al Qasimi – reiterated the ideals for the program to be a global pioneer in its comprehensive embrace of, and showcase of, authentic examples of Islamic Art from different periods and regions, wherever they happen to originate from.

The 15th Edition of the Islamic Arts Festival’s promoters also expressed that this year’s production aimed to offer a balanced presentation of ‘classic art’ based on traditional foundations, along with ‘contemporary-like’ [sic] art that will offer fresh concepts, but that are held to the standards of what they believe to be ‘Islamic Art’. I intentionally quoted the phrase ‘contemporary-like’ from the Festival’s official press release simply to demonstrate the underlying hesitations that permeate all modern-day considerations when Islamic Art is poised to be reintroduced in the languages of contemporary art.

Ultimately, if applied correctly, contemporary Islamic Art should be created in a thoughtful way that is truly meaningful to our present human condition. It shouldn’t just simply utilise ‘innovative modern techniques and mediums ruled by digital technology’ [sic].

I think this has probably been the primary challenge for the Festival this year, or for anyone working with new voices in Islamic Art being introduced anywhere today. At this Festival, there was even an official presentation of a special seminar entitled The Versatile Compositions of Islamic Arts, which brought together various scholars, who specifically discussed how contemporary art has surfaced in Islamic Art projects within the past twenty years, amongst other subjects that needed to be addressed when reassessing the question, what exactly is ‘Islamic Art’ now?

The Familiar Transformed With the Unexpected

by Susanne Fowler, NYTimes

The manipulation and vulnerability of images are the central themes in “Light From the Middle East,” a thoughtful and layered photography exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum through April 7.

Focusing on the inventive ways that artists use images to tell stories, the show also documents the challenges that have unfolded — and continue to make headlines — in the region, from the now iconic scenes captured by Abbas of the Iranian revolution in the 1970s to Nermine Hammam’s candy-colored and digitally altered shots of Egyptian soldiers in Tahrir Square in 2011. 

The curator, Marta Weiss, has divided 95 works from the V&A and the British Museum collections, plus acquisitions using an Art Fund grant, into three categories — recording, reframing and resisting — using pictures of historic events, photographs of other photographs and photographs that reflect how the medium is used by societies. Thirty-one artists from 13 countries are represented. 

“We all know that photographs can be manipulated and that we can’t really trust them,” the curator said, “and yet there’s also something very instinctive about relying on a photograph and that’s something a lot of these artists are engaging with.” 

During a private tour of the exhibition, Ms. Weiss said the works included “references to studio portraits, to postcards, to propaganda images, to news photography and to the fact that a photograph is a vulnerable object.” 

The first section — recording — “brings together photographs that are using photography in the most kind of direct way possible,” Ms. Weiss said. “We think of it as factual, we think of it as authoritative. This exhibition certainly explores in lots of ways the reliability of photography.” 

The opening images from Tehran of powerful ayatollahs, executed generals, and rioters burning a portrait of the shah are by Abbas, based in Paris and part of the Magnum cooperative. He photographed the Iranian revolution from 1978 to 1980, and later focused on the resurgence of Islam throughout the world. 

Another example of recording is the “Mothers of Martyrs” series from 2006 by Newsha Tavakolian, a self-taught photographer who worked early in her career for a women’s daily newspaper in Iran. 

The Veil: Visible and Invisible Spaces

An Interview with Jennifer Heath, Writer, Activist and Curator

by Valerie Behiery, Islamic Art historian, Ph.D., IAM

"My motivations are complex, even somewhat convoluted, but in a nutshell, I grew up in veiling cultures –both heavily Roman Catholic and Muslim– and thus know from experience that what the West perceives as the whys and wherefores of veiling –primarily oppressive, antiquated customs of the “Other”– are often distorted. I wanted to dispute those notions." (Jennifer Heath)

 

Jennifer Heath is an independent scholar, award-winning cultural journalist, critic, curator, and activist. Her most current exhibitions are “The Veil: Visible & Invisible Spaces,” which has been touring the United States since 2008 and “Water, Water Everywhere: Paean to a Vanishing Resource,” which began traveling this year. Others include the renowned “Black Velvet: The Art We Love to Hate.” She is the author of eleven books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Veil: Women Writers on its History, Lore, and Politics and Land of the Unconquerable: The Lives of Contemporary Afghan Women (with Ashraf Zahedi) both published by the University of California Press. Children of Afghanistan: The Path to Peace (with Ashraf Zahedi) is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press, and her collection, The Jewel and the Ember: Love Stories from the Islamic World, is currently under consideration. Future art exhibitions include “The Map is Not the Territory: Parallel Paths-Palestinian, Native American, Irish,” to launch at The Jerusalem Center Gallery in September 2013.

 

The exhibit, The Veil: Visible and Invisible Spaces, is part of a larger project of yours to unpack the veil which also includes a book. Why did you find it important to address what has become a charged symbol of supposed cross-cultural conflict with both words and images? Tell us also bit about what made you want to address the veil.

 

I love that you say “unpack the veil” – because that is precisely what we’re doing. Unpacking the history and the universality of the veil and veiling practices, so as to bring it to light, engage received wisdom and challenge stereotypes. My motivations are complex, even somewhat convoluted, but in a nutshell, I grew up in veiling cultures –both heavily Roman Catholic and Muslim– and thus know from experience that what the West perceives as the whys and wherefores of veiling –primarily oppressive, antiquated customs of the “Other”– are often distorted. I wanted to dispute those notions. This is also why I wrote The Scimitar and the Veil: Extraordinary Women of Islam. In order to understand the multiple truths inherent in any issue, and speak those truths to power, we must contextualize. The book, The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics (University of California Press, 2008) tackled the veil from as many cultural and historical angles as possible –Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, various secular and pagan and pre-Abrahamic points of view, male veiling, mourning, the arts– by writers who approached the topic via personal, political and/or scholarly paths. Having had a visual arts, as well as a literary background, I wanted also to see what artists were thinking and doing. And since I am interested in issues of social and environmental justice, I wanted to combat what I perceive as violations of civil liberties and discrimination against veiling practices, particularly in Europe.

Taking Risks in Art and Politics

Shirin Neshat: An Artist — Iranian, Muslim and Female — Engages

Image courtesy of Scene in NY

by Aysegul Sert, NYTimes

Over the past two decades, Shirin Neshat has drawn on her personal experience of being an artist at home in the West with roots in Iran to illustrate her creed: “People should be free to choose what they want to do with their lives, what they want to wear, what religion they want to believe in; this is not something a government or a community should impose.”

Perched in her spacious studio in downtown New York, she added: “Globalization is happening, and the world is becoming more homogenous. We have to accept that we are not going to be all the same; we have to tolerate each other’s differences.” 

Born in 1957, Ms. Neshat left Iran before the fall of the shah, settling in New York after a short stay in California. “I will never belong to anywhere completely,” she insisted. “I will never fit in anywhere completely.” Although if Iran were to become democratic, she allowed later in the conversation, “then maybe one day I could go back.” 

Ms. Neshat has exhibited at the Tate in London and the Whitney in New York, and she earned a Silver Lion at the 2009 Venice Film Festival. She first gained attention in the mid-1990s, with “Women of Allah,” a series of photographs depicting women in veils, their skin covered in calligraphy of Islamic poetry. It was a meditation, she said, on the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran — on martyrdom, patriotism and religion. 

That revolution, she asserted, led to many Iranian women becoming “brainwashed and submissive.” In recent years, first with the opposition protests in Iran in 2009 and then with the Arab Spring, “we see a generation of women and men no longer divided but equal. They are educated, they are not ideological, their interest is pure and positive, which is change, democracy and freedom.” 

See the Light

Documenting the Sociopolitical Upheavals in the Middle East through Photography

 

Abbas – ‘Rioters Burn a Portrait of the Shah as a Sign of Protest Against his Regime. Tehran, December 1978′ – Images courtesy the Art Fund Collection of Middle Eastern Photography at the V&A and the British Museum

by Sophie Kazan, REORIENT

London has been undergoing its own Arab Spring of sorts in the past months, as a steady flow of exhibitions and cultural events focusing on the Middle East have been flourishing around the capital in rapid succession.

In the summer of 2011, Shubbak, London’s first festival of contemporary Arab arts & culture was launched by mayor Boris Johnson, and was quickly followed by the city’s second Nour Festival of Arts in October of that year. In January, just a few months later, the British Museum launched its Hajj exhibition, and in almost no time, an assortment of similarly themed exhibitions blossomed around London.

This November, less than two weeks after Edge of Arabia’s dazzling #COMETOGETHER exhibition in East London’s Truman Brewery warehouse, the Victoria and Albert Museum opened the Light from the Middle East photography exhibition. This major museum exhibition, running until the spring of 2013 celebrates the photography of 30 artists from 13 countries, both within the Middle East and the diaspora. While some of the works in the exhibition are to be expected – veiled women, dramatic 60s Orientalist images courtesy Youssef Nabil, and the like – others are representative of the discontent felt by many Middle Eastern artists and young idealists in countries that are at war, under occupation, or facing political turmoil. A rather eclectic assortment of works, the spellbinding photographs vary wildly in their subject matter and style, and on viewing them, one can’t help but wonder if the paradox of the mysterious, beautiful, and yet dangerous Middle East is what keeps London audiences coming back for more.

‘The emphasis is on how the medium of photography is being used, interrogated, and even undermined by Middle Eastern artists’, says Marta Weiss, Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as of the exhibition itself. ‘This is exciting, because this is the first exhibition to look at a wide range of work from this vast and diverse region, while focusing exclusively on photography’. While it is definitely the first of its kind in that respect, the exhibition is also unique in terms of its curatorial approach. ‘This exhibition presents the work in a new light (excuse the pun) by looking carefully at the choices artists make about how to use photography’, Weiss explains.

It’s a Man’s World

Interview with Shurooq Amin, Kuwait’s Rebel with a Cause

Shurooq Amin, My Harem in Heaven, Image courtesy REORIENT

by Joobin Bekhrad, REORIENT

On March 5, 2012, just three hours after opening, Shurooq Amin’s highly anticipated exhibition at Kuwait’s AI M. Gallery, It’s a Man’s World, was shut down. Commencing at 8 PM, the exhibition attracted a large number of people, and Amin managed to sell a few pieces, although by 10 PM, the local police stormed the scene, and began questioning both Amin and the gallery owner. Apparently, the authorities had been informed that Amin’s work was of a ‘pornographic’ nature, and as such, could not be shown in Kuwait. As the evening progressed, more and more officials arrived at the galleries, taking pictures of Amin’s paintings to send to the Ministry of Interior Affairs and the Ministry of Commerce. Needless to say, in the end all of Amin’s paintings were taken down, and the exhibition was cancelled.

Although various accounts of the incident exist in both Arab and Western media, I talked to the woman behind the paintings herself, to hear her side of the story. As Amin would say, this is the story heard straight from the horse’s mouth!

Promoter of Contemporary Middle Eastern Artists

Eric Parnes, Neo-Orientalist, 2011, Acrylic on Canvas, 66 x 117 cm, Image courtesy art clvb

by William Dobson

With a passion for all things Middle Eastern, and having a natural affinity for the arts, it seemed only natural to Shahdad and Joobin Bekhrad to merge their two loves in their latest venture, art clvb (yes, that is a ‘v’).

Established in 2011 by Shahdad and his son Joobin, along with their close friend, Farnaz Taghavi, art clvb’s mandate, simply put, is to promote the works of contemporary artists from the Middle East. However, art clvb also considers itself a ‘cultural ambassador’ and patron of the arts for countries in the region, and thus its goals go beyond simply championing particular artists and selling their works.

In promoting the arts & culture of the Middle East, art clvb works with visual artists at all career stages, from those who are just emerging, to those who have already made a name for themselves within and outside their home countries. At present, art clvb’s roster features a good mix of artists from around the region and the surrounding area, from countries such as Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and India, with new artists from different countries being added on a routine basis.

Based in Toronto, London, and Dubai – three major art capitals – and having myriad connections in Iran, art clvb is international in every sense of the word. With strong ties among galleries, cultural institutions, publications, and other organisations in each of these locations and elsewhere around the globe, art clvb works to provide as much exposure and recognition for its artists as possible, and continuously seeks to broaden its reach. This international presence, merged with their social media savvy, communications expertise, and extensive database of collectors, gallery owners, auction houses, and opinion leaders, is something that truly adds value to not only their artists, but to all those who collaborate with them.

Majeed Beenteha, Untitled, From the 2011 Series, C-Print on Aluminium Paper, 24 x 36 ", Image courtesy art clvb

Young upstarts plotting Mid East art revolution

By Catriona Davies, CNN

Lara Zankoul and Lara Atallah are both young Lebanese photographers taking their first steps in promising artistic careers. Their work, however, could hardly be more different. While Atallah focuses on the gritty reality of life in urban Beirut, Zankoul's images are whimsical and surreal, created from her imagination. They are both among the latest emerging artists to be featured in the Young Collectors Auction run by Ayyam Gallery in Dubai. 

The auction, held on May 15, featured 75 lots from 63 emerging and established Middle Eastern artists, 10 of them aged 30 or under. Ayyam Gallery has been running Young Collectors Auctions since 2008, aimed at supporting emerging artists and opening the art market to new collectors. Almost all the works had estimates well below $10,000, with most in the region of $2,000 to $3,000.

"The art market here is quite young and people are interested in buying art, but intimidated by the gallery scene and auctions," said Hisham Samawi, Ayyam's auctioneer. "We wanted to start something with a relaxed atmosphere, lower estimates and young emerging artists." The recipe has been a success and Ayyam has just run its 13th Young Collectors' Auction. The latest raised a total of $550,000. Samawi believes Middle Eastern art could be on the verge of an explosion similar to that seen in the Chinese and Indian art markets in recent years. "There's great art in this region and internationally it's undervalued," he said. "There has been a steady increase in prices and this is just the beginning. Politically there's so much going on and that's reflected by artists."

Here we feature 10 emerging Middle Eastern artists aged 30 or under from the Ayyam Young Collectors Auction who could be names to watch out for in the future.

Lara Zankoul (Lebanon), Excess, 2011, Archival Print on Cotton Paper, 80 x 80 cm.

This photograph, "Excess," shows the irrelevance of the water in the watering can compared to the sea.