Art Aware is a non-profit-making blog that monitors all that’s interesting in the world of contemporary art, literature and culture in Iran and in the Iranian worldwide diaspora.
It is a review and commentary of new exhibitions, events and developments in art media in Iran and in the West. I am a working artist and also an academic art historian.
Edited and compiled by Dr Aida Foroutan
Sadegh Tirafkan, Persepolis, 2 x 28.5", 20.5 x 25.2"
An exhibition of more than 60 works of photography and video installations by 20 of Iran’s most celebrated photographers. The exhibition gathers personal perspectives of contemporary Iran filtered through individual sensibilities, while simultaneously addressing public concerns.
Iran has long distinguished itself with the spectacular quality and international presence of its visual art and film. With the backdrop of increasing attention given to the art and culture of Iran and the current political crisis in that part of the world, an exhibition with this focus is most timely. In expressing their many different visions of their world, these artists offer a look at private and public realms. Their perspectives contradict the way many foreign photographers typically capture Iran on film as purely exotic.
Shokoufeh Alidousti offers self-portraits and family photographs exploring cultural and female identity. Esmail Abbasi draws on Persian literature for his subject matter with contemporary notes on the present circumstances in Iran. Shahriar Tavakoli focuses on his family history through a series of portraits capturing the subtleties and mood of the Iranian family. In Koroush Adim’s Revelation series, the images in the exhibition that feature the veil acknowledge this sign of culture, but the “revelation” is anything but simple. Shahrokh Ja’fari’s use of unusual spacial rendering in depicting the veiled figure demands that the viewer look harder and think harder about what can be revealed through the visual.
The images presented in Persian Visions cannot entirely surmount the physical and cultural distance between Iran and the United States. Nevertheless, the exhibition builds a visual bridge that allows for differences, even as it leads viewers to new awareness of other ways of being and seeing.
Persian Visions was developed by Hamid Severi for the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in Iran and Gary Hallman of the Regis Center for Art at the University of Minnesota and toured by International Arts & Artists in Washington, D.C. This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the ILEX Foundation; the University of Minnesota McKnight Arts and Humanities Endowment; and the Department of Art and Regis Center for Art at the University of Minnesota.
Exhibition co-curator Gary Hallman, associate professor of art at the University of Minnesota, will give the opening presentation at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 14. The presentation introduces an overview of the initiation of the project, the staff and director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, the criteria for the selection of the artists, and a sense of the cultural and political climate that shaped the photographic work and project itself. Selected pieces from the exhibition will provide discussion points illustrating the influences of history, culture and political climate on contemporary practice in Tehran.
Bahman Jalali, Image of Imagination 2, 2003, 28.25 x 28.25"
Mehran Mohajer, T.V. Series 1, 2003, 19 x 51.5"
Arman Stepanian, Untitled, 2001, 27.25 x 38.25"
Koroush Adim, Revelations 1, 19.5 x 29.25"
Ahmad Nateghi, Untitled, 1998, 17.25 x 24"
Shahriar Tavakoli, My Family (Hallelujah 2), 2002, 29 x 29"
Extremes, though contrary, have the like effects. Extreme heat kills, and so extreme cold: extreme love breeds satiety, and so extreme hatred; and too violent rigor tempts chastity, as does too much license. -- George Chapman
Ms. Lane, 41, grew up on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, and studied welding, planning to use the technique to make art (and, if that proved impossible, simply to make a living). Some sculptors, including Richard Serra, who has called welding “a form of stitching,” use the technique to join pieces of metal. Ms. Lane, by contrast, uses her torch to cut baroque patterns into such mundane objects as shovels, Dumpsters and old oil drums.
The work is about the contrasts between the industrial and the fanciful, the opaque and the transparent. Ms. Lane described herself as “a person who always has opposites in my head.”
I like to work as a visual devil’s advocate, using contradiction as a vehicle for finding my way to an empathetic image, an image of opposition that creates a balance - as well as a clash - by comparing and contrasting ideas and materials.This manifested in a series of “Industrial Doilies”, pulling together industrial and domestic life as well as relationships of strong and delicate, masculine and feminine, practical and frivolity, ornament and function. There is also a secondary relationship being explored here, of lace used in religious ceremonies as in weddings, christenings and funerals,
With this notion of desirable oppositions I created the structure “fabricate”. In this Structure I hand cut lace trimming patterns into 9 I-beams, then constructed a tower, simultaneously macho, and of delicate finery. The metaphor of lace further intrigued me by its associations of hiding and exposing at the same time; like a veil to cover, or lingerie to reveal. It also introduces a kind of humor through the form of unexpected relationships. Like a Wrestler in a tutu, the absurdity of having opposing extremist stances is there for reaction and not rational understanding; the rational discussion arises in the search for how one thing defines the other by its proximity.
The art of animation in Iran today draws on the artistic heritage of textile design, Persian folk tales and literature, calligraphy and miniature painting, as well as the motifs of interior design, ceramics and architecture. Animation is recognised in Iran as a medium which is closely related to drawing, painting and the graphic arts. This landmark program profiles influential senior figures, including Esfandiar Ahmadieh, Abdollah Alimorad, Vadjollah Fard Moghadam, Ali Akbar Sadeghi and Noureddin Zarrinkelk, through to the current generation of talented emerging artists, including Morteza Ahadi, Laleh Khorramian, Omid Khoshnazar, Mashallah Mohammadi, Moin Samadi, Farkhondeh Torabi and others.
Many animations in The Cypress and the Crow: 50 Years of Iranian Animation feature animal figures — the crow, mouse, fox, goat and many more — which have literary and symbolic associations, and may be alter egos for humanity. The crow appears frequently in literature and animation as an animal which exhibits the baser human traits — selfishness, suspicion and greed — but is also crafty and intelligent. The cypress, sacred in Iran, is associated with the tree of life. In the Islamic tradition, the tree of life is found in heaven and harbours brightly coloured birds, representing the souls of the faithful; it may also represent the human body and aspirations to the divine. Infinitely varied in their reworking of cultural forms, animations from Iran express historical lineages and geographical relationships to create extraordinary visual worlds and produce new identities and forms.
Program curated by Kathryn Weir with film notes as indicated.
It comes to us each worn-out year
Just as December dies on us
And January threatens us
With news of blood and fears that all
Our hopes are dashed…
But, friends, this is the first day of Our Decade!
May all the things come true for which we’ve prayed.
Is it too much to hope in this New Year
That Peace will wipe away our every tear?
Amnesty International supporters have used the power of words to demand freedom and justice for countless human rights defenders around the world. Our words are proof that you stand up for human rights, you never stand alone.
Sky serpent swallowing him once more Yule night has arrived; sun’s longest slumbers.
We eat and drink all that is red Wine, pomegranate, and watermelon, The color of dawn, reminders of what we eagerly wait for.
Shamash, Marduk, Sekhmet, Descending immortals, you’ll rise again Apollo, Ra, salutations to you.
Good night Osiris, weak and tired lying in your coffin, Enclosed by darkness, tricked by Seth again! An infant sun is born, Horus soaring up into the sky.
Mithras, born of a rock and out from the cave, Becoming Sol Invictus and turning the wheel Darkness, now a fading memory.
The Oak king sings outside, as the Holly king lays slain Dawn has arrived, Yule has ended. Drink up your wine.
From ‘The Mysteries of Mithras: The Pagan Belief That Shaped the Christian World’ by Payam Nabarz.
A chance meeting some years ago with an Iranian scholar who, as fate has it, now lives in Helsinki, Finland, introduced me to an aspect of Iranian history; which to this date is nothing short of a love affair with my ancestors. Though long forgotten, they deserve to be remembered for what they truly were. For this enlightenment, I am forever indebted to this friend.
At this particular time of year, I would like to share something with you that I think speaks volumes of plagiarisms and outright thefts of many Iranian thoughts and customs. I feel sure that many of you are aware of this, but circumstances have made it difficult to assert the facts or to remind your colleagues and compatriots of them.
When my children were growing up and were still at home, as parents, Christmas was a difficult time for us. Like all other Iranian children, ours could not quite understand the lack of enthusiasm during this particular holiday.
I am inclined to think that this, among many others, may have been the main contributing factor for their feeling that their parents were "different". They wished we would make the same efforts at Christmas as other parents, but because our hearts were not in it, everything we did seemed either artificial or pretentious, which made us in their eyes even more "different".
However, the chance meeting changed all that with the result that a small amount of research produced many sweet historical facts. Had I known this when my children were small, I would have happily, gladly, and most proudly celebrated this particular holiday season as one of our very own. And I would not have had all those uncomfortable feelings at Christmas with or without a tree.
Yalda (winter solstice) is an ancient Iranian word and appears in many of Prophet Mani's writings. The word refers to a new Beginning from which the Arabic words milaad, tavalod etc. were derived. Mitra (or Mithra) the early Iranian Prophet, considering Light as the essence of existence and life, believed in its sanctity. The Sun as its most obvious manifestation was revered and some out of pure ignorance concluded that Mitra worshiped the Sun.
Whether she did or not she was believed to have been born by divine gesture on December 21st, the longest night of the year, specifically to begin the struggle and triumph of "Light" over "Dark" by having longer and longer days following the longest night of the year.
Mitra's birthday was celebrated for a total of 10 days up to and including the First of January. It is not an accident that half way through the celebrations, namely December 25th, was chosen as Jesus' birthday and January 1st as the first day of New Year.
Remember that Romans, prior to Christianity, practiced Mitraism and only out of political considerations, in the year 376, they converted to the new religion that had started within their own territory. They were not too happy about their main philosophy and religion having been imported from their main and only competitor, namely, the Persian Empire, they converted expeditiously.
According to one source, the Iranians celebrated this day as early as 2,000 BC. Zoroastrians after refining and discarding some of the mythical and "heretical" aspects of Mithraism, retained Yalda (The Birth), and additionally encouraged celebrations of Noruz and Mehregan among many others.
Ancient Iranians celebrated Yalda by decorating an evergreen tree, the Sarve. The Sarve, Rocket Juniper (what a name!), also known as the cypress tree, being straight, upright, resilient and resistant to the cold weather (all signs of strength and upright of character) was thought appropriate to represent Mitra, the omnipotent and ubiquitous deity.
The younger girls had their "wishes" symbolically wrapped in colorful silk cloth and hung them on the tree as offerings to Mitra with an expectation, no doubt, that their prayers would be rewarded (remnants of this traditions can still be seen in Iran at remote villages where some young girls tie colorful bundles to trees to answer to their "wishes") . Thus the tradition of decorations of the tree with lights and gifts on or beside the tree was born.
As you may know, Pope Leo, in the fourth century (A.D.376), after almost destroying the last temple of Mitra (Mitraeum) in his campaign against Mitraism and in the good old Christian tradition, "If you can't claim it, imitate it and call it your own," proclaimed the 25th of December as Christ's birthday and January 1st (not March 21st as was the norm) as the first day of New Year.
Again in the same Euro-Christian tradition of not identifying the source, Luther, the famous German reformer, in the 18th century (1756, I believe), having learned of the Yalda Tree tradition, introduced the Christmas tree to the Germans. However, as Sarves were not much known in Germany, nor indeed in much of Europe, the chosen tree became a genus of pine, abundant in Europe.
So now with or without the children at home, we decorate a small Sarve with a star (Mitra's) on top and many presents all around, not necessarily for Mitra, but in memory of my ancestors for my children and grandchildren.
Please, therefore, decorate a tree at this joyous time, call it by its true name -- Yalda Tree -- and celebrate it as your own and don't feel ambivalent when your children wonder if we celebrate the occasion. So Happy Yalda and the greetings of the season to all of you; no matter what your religion is.
At the time of Iran’s 1979 revolution, the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami made a documentary film called First Case, Second Case. The film was originally shot just before the revolution and completed only after the declaration of its victory. The film, itself divided into two opposite moral takes on its subject, later faced the same fate, that is, first winning an award for what was interpreted as a parable on the Shah’s secret police, and later banned for addressing issues politically too sensitive for the post-revolutionary government.
The film is about a boy not owning up to having misbehaved in the classroom. The teacher, who does not know who the guilty party is, sends a group of pupils out of the classroom. ‘First case’ involves the pupils refusing to name the guilty party, and as a result, remaining expelled from the class. In the ‘second case’ one pupil from the group identifies the culprit and returns to his seat. School inspectors, the education minister and other newly appointed political figures from the post-revolutionary government are filmed commenting on the two cases. Some believe the students should not name names as this undermines the model of moral character, while others agree with the second case as being principally correct. Throughout the whole film we see either the pupils standing in a row against the corridor wall outside the classroom, or the talking heads of the commentators. At the time the film was banned, the political climate was quite similar to what this film depicts. One reason for its later ban was because some of the commentaries were coming from members of political parties that had been declared illegal in the few years after the revolution.
First Case, Second Case operates within the gap between the two moral poles: enouncing (naming) the name of the guilty boy and complying with the principles of the school system, or remaining silent and renouncing one’s place in the classroom for the sake of the other. In both cases, however, the ‘name’, in its exposure and concealment, is just an instrument for a moral arrangement. What is truly sacrificed, either way, is the boy’s ‘real’ name.
The film avoids taking sides. Nor do the comments by the established figures offer a way out either. On the contrary, they only increase and widen the gap between the two points of view. In simply documenting both cases, the film seems to offer two differing options. But what it truly shows is that there is in fact no real third way, not as an alternative discourse, and this is exactly what makes this dilemma unbearable. In remaining inconclusive, i.e. neither depicting the group as ‘heroes’ nor the fellow pupil who named the boy’s name as a ‘traitor’ (or the other way around), the film leaves us simply in the midst of its dilemma. What the film unfolds is the symptom in each discourse. Both are undermined in the face of this impasse of choice/sacrifice. One either favours one ‘case’ over the other, or eludes both and is left with nothing—the non-discourse of the third option that the film is about. This is exactly why this film can only be misinterpreted if one remains within the fields of one of the two options; this is why it was first given a prize and later banned, on the basis of two opposing interpretations.
What Kiarostami seems be saying with this film is that we are relentlessly entangled in these discourses of social posture, outside of which is nothing but the very place the film itself occupies: the ambiguity of social and political being.
In a place like Iran, where most of life evolves between speculative relations to history and vague notions about the future, cultural production has to a great extent become a volatile and impulsive endeavour. If there is any political or cultural indecisiveness in Iran, it is the consequence of the discrepancy between social reality and its political representation: this essentially irreducible gap between the multiplicity of social logics and its totalising representation by the ruling force acting in the name of the society as a whole. Rulers and governments in Iran have been explicitly concerned to close this gap with symbolic and imaginary identifications to implement the illusion of a unified and sovereign society. With these identifications, the society is offered false knowledge of itself.
The period of the war with Iraq provided the best chance for the Iranian government to reinforce the symbolism on which it had based itself during the revolution. The war was represented as an ideologically collective event, articulated with historical references and rhetoric, mobilising a national force for what was called ‘the sacred defence’. To this day, these representations are revived and reformulated at every possible opportunity, in order to maintain the illusion of social uniformity and continuity. However, symbolic representations start to lose their context when every experience hints at their inconsistency with reality. In being compelled to repetition, discourses of power are permanently at risk; in other words, the social and cultural conceptions they repeatedly institute run the risk of becoming de-instituted at every interval. It is exactly in these intervals that the society engages in producing substitutive discourses and representations of and about itself. It is no surprise that only after the end of the war was it possible to disseminate other political views, slightly moderate in their approach, in the ruling elite. During the years after the war, the number of newspapers with different political views increased enormously. During and before the war, any idea of a reform within the existing political establishment was unthinkable. However, it is appropriate to say that the idea of reform has given way to disappointment, even among some of those who promoted it in the first place.
What is interesting is the way these socio-political inconsistencies condition the production of indecisive discourses, from one moment to the next, in variations, and sometimes in contradiction with one another. Rumours are good examples of this, always suspended between belief and disbelief, falsity and truth, pointing to the very ambiguity of knowledge. Recently, after a report on an explosion heard near a nuclear plant in the south of Iran, rumours started spreading about an American bombardment. Newspapers started reporting contradictory explanations. These varied from ‘explosives used for road expansions’ to ‘a military training plane having to discharge its explosives due to technical problems’. The total destruction of a building and the firing of anti-aircraft missiles near where the sound was heard were also reported. Although the truth has not yet been clarified, and most probably it never will be, the rumour did temporarily affect the price of oil that day when the New York oil market opened. (The reality rumours entail does not lie in the truth about an event but exactly in the rumours’ very indecisiveness, for they will always return to their true source in spite of being a lie. The source of the sound of the explosion may never be located, but it did reach the ‘true’ instigator of the rumour, that is the New York oil market.) By pointing out the representational gap in the totalising articulations of reality, rumours as indecisive discourse undermine discourses of power. Yet they remain hesitant and speculative. What would be the radical yet productive equivalent of such a subversion?
At this juncture cultural practice may take on a double-edged role, at once occupying the space of this gap and rearticulating it into a space for dialogue. Always involving this gap between social representation and pure difference, cultural practice attests to the irresoluteness of political identification, encircling the very ambiguity of discourse. Cultural activities are political in the way they relentlessly reinscribe a split in the heart of any discourse, opening it for negotiation. To give in to this ambiguity is to keep open the possibility for constant rearticulation and negotiation. This is exactly what Kiarostami’s film is implementing. It is as if it reconsiders the corridors between classrooms as the place where discourses meet to collide, to be diluted and split into two, a place where the ‘real’ lessons are picked up.
Pursuing the Indecisive Beyond Locality
Cultural vocabularies change rapidly, as do the contexts upon which they reflect. Today’s discourse on the social and political currents of a place may be dated tomorrow. There are always multiple flows of discourse in a society, crushing and cross folding unto one another. Therefore any totalising symbolisations are bound to fall short of this complexity. Cultural projects attempting to pursue a critical flow of discourse are successful only to the extent of escaping symbolisation of any sort. It is the internalising of the very intricacy of conditions that is challenging and constitutes complex articulations.
First Case, Second Case was one of a few films in Kiarostami’s oeuvre that did not receive enough recognition outside of Iran. The reason is obviously that most festival viewers and critics do not know of the distinct political—and now historical—context the film refers to. When these historical distinctions enter localities other than their own, they can affect them in the most direct manner —for one thing, they are no longer mere narratives of a far-off place. To welcome complexities of other conditions, i.e. to re-insert them into one’s own representational discourses about the ‘other’, may not only de-certify our subjective position, but also render certain estrangement into the ‘reality’ of our own condition.
Recent trends in the art world in depicting cultural and artistic practices from various localities have often resulted in simplified articulations and presentations. What should be accounted for is not merely the differences between cultures, or conformist categorisations of conditions, but rather the difference within each and every locality. The latter is of course a more timeand mind-consuming effort and would require certain sacrifices were it to be taken seriously. In coming close to ‘real’ difference, one is exposed to a kaleidoscopic inconsistency against which all prescribed knowledge is bound to break into pieces. The hardest venture is then to pick up the shattered bits and pieces of fragments and to renegotiate them into alternative configurations.
Here, reconfigurations of meanings are pursued always in regard to the ‘other’, to other meanings and configurations; in a sharing of knowledge based on its ambiguity, its suspension between (in)comprehensiveness and discord. In other words, to share knowledge is to produce and de-produce it together in a network of enunciations and of localities. This conditions an approach beyond consistencies of cultural representations and identifications, where knowledge is then a discourse of exchange and of constant transposition. As Georges Bataille wrote, ‘Every time we give up the will to know, we have the possibility of touching the world with a much greater intensity.’
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