Ciphers

 A photographic tour of the Iran you’ve never seen

Ciphers: Tension with Tradition in Contemporary Iranian Photography at SAW Gallery. The exhibition will run until June 9, 2012.

Image courtesy of  SAW Gallery

by Peter Simpson, Ottawa Citizen Blogs

You can learn about Iran on most any newscast on any day, but what, really, do you know of Iranian people? Iranian culture? Iranian art?

We see anti-American protests in the streets of Tehran, or we see the president of Iran giving endless, hateful speeches that reliably ramble into incoherence. That’s about all we see of Iran, and of Iranians.

“What we think in North America of Iran is burdened by media images, by news stories that are all about politics and about very difficult things,” says Andrea Fitzpatrick, an assistant professor in the visual arts department at the University of Ottawa, and curator of a new exhibition of contemporary Iranian photographs and video at SAW Gallery. “In this exhibition you will not see those issues. It’s not that the exhibition is a clouding over or white-washing, but the art is . . . not about political issues.”

If that seems a political opportunity lost, consider the alternative value of seeing everyday Iranians doing the everyday things that consume most of their lives. This is the quotidian Iran, the real Iran, an insight into the private lives of the Iranian public.

It’s also a bridge, in that the photographic concepts, techniques and styles on display are universal, and therefore drive home the understanding — perhaps for some viewers the revelation  — that Iranians aren’t that much different from us in the west. Only the motifs and themes make the photographs and videos distinctly Iranian, and they are more easily digested by western viewers precisely because they are wrapped in familiar aesthetics.

“It’s basically,” Fitzpatrick says, “how artists are representing ancient Persian history or those traditions, some of which are pre-Islamic, using contemporary digital technology . . . in a way that is aesthetically sophisticated and could be understood by international art audiences.”

Expressing the Inexpressible

Iranian master Mohammad-Reza Shajarian delivers more than a stunning voice 

by Chris Vitiello, The Independent Weekly‎

Amir Rezvani pauses a moment before he can talk about it. When Mohammad-Reza Shajarian sings "Bird of Dawn," he does this to people.

"At the end of every concert people start to clap and ask him to sing that song," Rezvani, a psychiatry professor at Duke University, finally starts. "And when he sings that song, people sing with him and get emotional and cry."

When Shajarian returns to the stage for his encore Saturday night at the Durham Performing Arts Center, "Bird of Dawn"—or "Morgh-e Sahar," as people shout—will undoubtedly be his choice. Through his power as an activist, and as perhaps the greatest Iranian performer today, the song has become the unofficial Iranian national anthem, representing a persistent hope for liberty in the face of tyranny.

The song isn't about guns and despots. Rather, it's a plea to a caged bird to escape and to summon the sunrise with its song. But the conceit is obvious: Night is any oppressive force, and the bird is the irrepressible spirit within each person. The sunrise is freedom.

Preferring to inspire marches rather than participate in them, Shajarian's politics are expressed through his art. You won't hear this song on state radio in Tehran. To protest the current regime's 2009 crackdown on voter demonstrations, Shajarian no longer allows his music to be played over those official airwaves.

Shakespeare's plays get multilingual treatment in London

The Comedy of Errors will be performed in Dari Persian by Roy-e-Sads as part of the Globe to Globe festival in London. Courtesy Kate Brooks

by Huma Qureshi, The National

Ever imagined what Shakespeare's plays might sound like in Gujarati? How about Coriolanus in Japanese? Or The Merry Wives of Windsor in Swahili? Well, London's Globe Theatre is preparing to find out.

Starting this week, all 37 of Shakespeare's plays will be performed at the Globe as they have never been before, each one in a different language, as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad celebrations. The Globe to Globe season will last for just six weeks and promises to be a unique, multicultural and multilingual theatrical experience. Performances will include King Lear in Belarusian, Richard II in Palestinian Arabic, The Comedy of Errors in Persian and Love's Labour's Lost to be performed entirely in British sign language. The plays will be subtitled in English but with a translation synopsis of each scene, rather than each line.

"With the Olympics coming, we wanted to do something big, crazy and ambitious," says Tom Bird, the festival director for Globe to Globe. "We wanted to do something that reflected London, and its diversity, and that's where the idea of performing in the different languages that you hear being spoken in London came about. It's a huge celebration."

Bird says he hopes Globe to Globe will inspire people to connect with Shakespeare, but also with the diverse cultures that make London what it is. "Understanding Shakespeare is partly about understanding human nature, which is why it doesn't matter what language you speak. Some people might not normally choose to see a Shakespeare play, but we're hoping that once they see it's in their parents' language, for instance, that it will make them interested," he says. "But it's also really important to us that everyone who comes to see a play gets a chance to see the way in which people all over the world perform. It doesn't matter if you don't speak Arabic or don't speak French; you'll still see an amazing performance on stage."

Survivants

A current exhibition of contemporary Iranian art, curated by Mojgan Endjavi-Barbé, at Lʼespace Le Commun, Bâtiment d'Art Contemporain (BAC), Geneva, Switzerland. The exhibition will run until May 3rd 2012.

Choosing SURVIVAL as a theme for this exhibition, Mojgan Endjavi-Barbé has picked her artists from Iran's contemporary arts scene. Three generations of artists who, like their predecessors, have mastered the art of self-expression without getting involved in social or political trends. All belonging to the post-revolution generation, the artists have the art of survival through the thick and thin of life in Iran, as well as developing their very own unique styles.

In any turbulent social, political and geographical landscape, self-expression may have unwanted and costly consequences, and yet, through centuries, Iranian artists have carefully crafted their own unique multi-layered, indirect and sophisticated approach to self-expression.

Through war, conflict, confrontation, deprivation and constant upheaval, the signature behaviour of almost all Iranians may be the odd level of awareness they have of their surroundings. An indirect and sometimes passive-aggressive approach which doubles as a survival skill.

Sonic Solidarity

An interview with Iranian artist Shahrzad Arshadi
by Stefan Christoff, Art Threat

Portrait of artist Shahrzad Arshadi by Thien V (Montreal, March 2012).

It Is Only Sound That Remains is a sound theatre performance by artist Shahrzad Arshadi, meditating on the life and death of Ziba Kazemi, also known as Zahra Kazemi.

The story of Kazemi’s 2003 death in Iran, the ensuing Canada-Iran diplomatic fallout and the ongoing struggle for justice in the case, led by Kazemi’s son Stephan Hachemi, is relatively well known in Canada.

Kazemi was arrested for taking photographs at a student protest outside Evin Prison in Tehran, a major jail for political prisoners in Iran.

Students were protesting for political change in the country, highlighting issues such as freedom of the press, access to education and youth unemployment, and demanding the release of political prisoners. Protesters in Iran were facing serious state repression at the time; many were arrested without charge, often disappearing for days after being apprehended by state security forces.

Remembering the 2003 student protests in Iran is important because of the role they played in creating the political ground work for major protests against the presidential election in 2009, an election that many both inside and outside of Iran, including Amnesty International, criticize as undemocratic.

Selections from John Waters’ Library

by Brooke Kellaway

Filmmaker/author John Waters — who guest curated the Walker’s Absentee Landlord exhibition — was recently invited to San Francisco where he extended his curatorial prowess to a new Reading Shop in the city’s Mission district.

The shop is part of Kadist SF (counterpart to Kadist Art Foundation based in Paris, France)—a mixed-use 1,400 square foot nonprofit art space on the corner of Folsom and 20th. Since last March when Kadist SF opened it quickly became popular in the local art scene for its flexible, laid-back, and definitely riveting program of exhibitions, events, artist/art magazine residencies, and, notably its reading room. The room would open Saturdays 11 am to 5 pm, inviting visitors to come by and check out more than 100 international art magazines not often available elsewhere. The visibility of these imports brought the public nearer to critical dialogues on art happening from Vancouver to Tel Aviv, and for the most part pretty far beyond the main distribution channels of arts discourse.

Iranian Comic-Book Artists Seek a Unique, Local Identity

by Marc Bennetts, The New York Times

From the grinning Statue of Liberty skull on the wall of the former U.S. Embassy to bloody scenes from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that cover entire sides of residential buildings, graphic art is everywhere in central Tehran.

But graphic arts, like most forms of expression in the Islamic Republic, are tightly controlled by the authorities, whose watchful eye extends even to Iran’s tiny but growing domestic comic book scene. Iranian graphic artists have won international acclaim but are still struggling for acceptance at home. 

A rare exhibition of comic book art was held in Tehran this spring. Amin Tavakoli, an illustrator in his 20s, participated. “We haven’t published much,” he said. “But we have great potential.” 

Many young Iranian artists admit to a passion for comic books from the United States and Europe. They can be purchased in Tehran, though they are expensive and often covered with the censors’ black ink. But local artists say they are trying to stamp their work with an Iranian identity. 

Life for them, though, is not easy because their creative aspirations are kept firmly in check by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, responsible for approving all publications in the country. 

“All our art has to conform to Islamic law,” said Mr. Tavakoli. “So our published art differs a lot from Western graphic novels. For example, women’s hair should not be visible, and all female characters have to be dressed in accordance with Islamic tradition.” 

And even then, their work can run into trouble.

Iran Before Islam: Challenging Stereotypes Through Art

A Smithsonian exhibition of ancient Iranian offers a different perspective on the country than what Westerners normally see.  

by Jennie Rothenberg Gritz & Massoud Hayoun, The Atlantic

A hemispherical bowl from the Sasanian period, 7th or 8th century. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

Americans are bombarded with media coverage of the three-decade-old Islamic Republic and its nuclear aspirations. But there's more to Iran than Ahmdainejad, as can be seen in the Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries' new project, Feast Your Eyes: A Taste for Luxury in Ancient Iran, a new exhibition of pre-Islamic Iranian artifacts.

The Atlantic invited a panel of Iranian-American leaders to discuss the exhibit. Taking part in the dialogue are Azar Nafisi, the much-acclaimed Iranian-American author of long-standing New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran; Massumeh Farhad, chief curator and curator of Islamic Art Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; and Mahnaz Afkhami, Iran's former minister of women's affairs and president of the Women's Learning Partnership.

A New World of Art

Gallerists, artists and the curious public decamped this week from the United Arab Emirates as Art Dubai drew to a close. As was to be expected, not only art, but also political messages played a major role at the fair. Werner Bloch reports

'Ali, give us strength' by Khosrow Hassanzadeh (photo: Werner Bloch)

Berlin gallerist Matthias Arndt spends much of his time travelling the world, but he had never experienced anything like this before. On 21 March, the opening day of Art Dubai, police detectives suddenly appeared at his stand and demanded that he take down a picture by his premier artist within thirty seconds. The art experts in Dubai's police department had discovered at the show works by the Iranian painter Khosrow Hassanzadeh that the censors found objectionable.

What made the work so controversial were the words "Ali madat" ("Ali, give us strength"), which were written on the canvas. Invoking Ali is an everyday matter for Shias, but Sunni-dominated Dubai evidently mistook these words for a political battle cry. Especially now that tensions between Iran and the West are on the rise, the overcautious Emiratis thought that a line had been crossed.

At the latest with this incident, it is plain to see how eminently political Art Dubai – the most important art fair in the Arab world today – has become.

Artists crossing the line: Ultra-sensitive Emirati censors insisted that "Ali, give us strength" by Khosrow Hassanzadeh be removed from the stand of Berlin-based gallerist Matthias Arndt at the art fair Art Dubai  

Khosrow Hassanzadeh (photo: Werner Bloch)

 
Art looks at the Arab revolution

Mounted for the sixth time at a luxury hotel, framed by palm trees and one of Arabia's most beautiful beaches, Art Dubai is still the most elegant and luxurious fair in the world. And as there is – with the exception of Doha – not a single museum for Arab contemporary art in the Middle East, Art Dubai assumes this function as well. It is not merely a trade fair, but rather the showcase par excellence for Arab contemporary art.

Dreams and Nostalgia

By Jyoti Kalsi, Special to Weekend Review

No Subject was the unusual title of an exhibition of contemporary Iranian art featuring the work of ten young artists based in Tehran. Curator Vida Haideri chose this title because rather than restricting the show to a single theme, she wanted to focus on the ideas of each artist. The show features a diversity of media, subjects and styles. As expected, many of the artworks reflect the uneasy atmosphere prevailing in Iran and the region.

Mahta Saghafi, Untitled 7, 2011, Acrylic & colored pencil on Paper, 100 x 70 cm

Mohsin Sadeghian's latest set of boxes, titled Love and Rage, explores an eternal conflict in which hostility and war, represented by an army tank, are a constant element, while love and humanity symbolised by organic bodies painted on the glass, and a poet's quill, try to find their place in a turbulent environment. Similarly, Amirali Ghasemi's digital photographs, titled Deconstructing White, juxtapose images of people with strategically placed drawings of deconstructed objects such as a gun and a knife. The white drawings superimposed on the colourful images of people in relaxed poses suggest the overt and covert presence of violence in society and highlight the need to calm down and find peaceful solutions.

Sara Abbasian and Katayun Karami's depiction of the political scenario is more graphic. In Abbasian's dark marker drawings, the eagle — a symbol of strength and courage — has been reduced to bones and crucified. On the other hand, Karami expresses her own fears and her desire for change and breaking free through a self-portrait framed in shattered glass, titled Have a Break.

Amirali Ghasemi, Knife, Deconstructing White Series, 2012, Digital photograph & graphics, C-type print, 44 x 66 cm

Kimia Rahgozar's black-and-white photographic works feature multiple exposure images of silhouettes of men and women who appear to be lost in their dreams. "The idea behind this work was to peek into the imaginations of these people. While shooting on one negative, I have to imagine the final result, hence the process of creating these artworks is similar to the concept itself," the artist says.

When Cultural Identity Is Denied

By Souren Melikian, The New York Times

When the Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia were inaugurated at the Metropolitan Museum in November, few visitors were ungracious enough to ask why the book published on the occasion is titled “Masterpieces From the Department of Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

The department, of course, has not changed its name. The longer denomination echoes the preference that art historians like the head of the Islamic department Sheila Canby have for historically accurate characterizations. Ms. Canby, who has devoted a lifetime of research to Iranian studies, said, “This has crystallized a real issue in the field that we have been calling ‘Islamic art.”’ 

A glazed tile from the 13th- and 14th-century Koranic frieze in Natanz that was  taken off the walls and sold as single pieces to Western museums.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

The denial of cultural identity in such a meaningless phrase is deeply resented in those Islamic lands, which have ancient cultures that are considerably longer than any West European nation. Most Western scholars appear to be unaware of it. 

Yet, the phrase spread in the later 19th century, largely because of the French. The notion of an “Art Musulman” received significant museum credentials at an exhibition held in 1878 at the Paris Trocadéro and was set in concrete following the first important art show of works of art from the “Arab lands, Turkey, Iran,” etc..., at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1903. 

This was the age of European colonial occupation, which continued to expand after World War I as France and Britain shared the spoils of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The “Islamic art” myth conveniently matched the Western perception of all these non-European people with funny names written in the same Arabic alphabet. 

Feminism Manifested in Art

By Roxana Marcoci

To speak about the feminist epistemes of the year 2000, one needs to look back at the decade of the 1990s, a period when feminist practices related to visual and performing arts, theory, criticism, and activism became more dissenting and schismatic than ever before. While the pioneering Women's Liberation Movement of the early 1970s had a clear mandate -the construction of a distinct female subjectivity and the inclusion of women within the orb of cultural production-, modified ensuing generations to calibrate a clearly articulated oppositionality between "grass roots" and poststructuralist theories of gender, more recent feminist investigations have ceased to operate by any such clear-cut demarcations. In other words, since the end of the 20th-century two aspects have been problematized: the received categories of feminist art, and the idea that "woman" can be literalized in terms of a normative collective identity, a gestalt of some sorts. This being said, one should not hastily conclude that feminism, now fractioned and divergent, is bankrupt or in reflux. On the contrary, I would argue, that if contemporary feminists have less of a sense of themselves as a movement, it is because their power subsists no longer in a unified Pan-feminist voice, but in the disjunctions among their voices, in the differences among women themselves1. 

It is through this prismatic lens that I would like to focus, even if briefly, on three different practices which have contributed to understanding our period and concurrently have extended the social contexts in which these practices still unfold. 

Shirin Neshat - Turbulent

To begin with, nineties feminism not only jettisoned gynophobic stereotyping, but also probed sexual, ethnic and racial differences. This explains why, on one hand, feminism today is more likely to address all the clichés about what it means to be a woman -since as a construct (whether historical or fictional), woman is always open to investigation. On the other hand, it offers a much broader range of positions, not to mention realignments, as in the challenge posed by women of color to the authority of white women to speak for all women in general2. The sustained productions of the last twenty years of Adrian Piper, Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson are just few of the known paradigms. The same can be said about non-Western feminist rebuttals of Western hegemonic discourses.

Searching for Shahrzad

Modernity, Sexuality, and Ideology in Iran
The Life and Legacy of a Popular Female Artist
By Kamran Talattof
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011

Excerpt from the introduction:

On March 8, 1979 (International Women’s Day), less than a month after the victory of the Islamic Revolution, my friend Azar and I were standing near the front gate of the University of Tehran, which was filled with outraged women. They were preparing to protest the mandatory public veiling of all women. Two days earlier, this demand had been voiced by Ayatollah Khomeini in a speech he delivered in the city of Qom.

We were joined by another woman who told us the crowd at and around the University of Tehran was about to move to the prime minister’s office, where another rally was in progress. We all walked down the street and the newcomer, who like the two of us was young and secular, but somewhat more leftist, pointed out famous people who were marching. One woman was a former political prisoner, another was an author, and she laughed when she identified an actress whom I did not recognize at that time.

This rally and others that took place over the next few days were covered at length by the press. One newspaper reported the events in a supportive tone. Others attributed the demonstrations to supporters of the old regime and so called antirevolutionary forces. One published a photo of the demonstration that featured several women wearing makeup and mocked them as “the kind of women” who have been rallying against the revolutionary government. In the center of the photo was a woman with large glasses, a rare color photo in that newspaper in those days. I realized this was the actress whom we had seen on the day of the demonstration: Shahrzad, the dancer. I also learned from these reports that she was one of a few women who were arrested.

More than a decade later, in 1991, in a section of the Graduate Library at the University of Michigan known as “the Cage,” where they stored publications that lacked sufficient cataloging information, I was combing through Persian materials when I came across a book that aroused my curiosity. It was a short book of poetry entitled Salam, Aqa (Hello, sir), written by Shahrzad, whose picture appeared on the cover.

'Islamic Art' as Catchall Term

By Souren Melikian, The New York Times

The West has a problem when dealing with the cultures of the lands that adhered to Islam over time. It begins with apprehending their differences, far greater than those that separate European nations.

On the museum scene, the meaningless label “Islamic art” is stuck to works visually and conceptually unrelated. 

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which ranks among the world’s four or five greatest institutions of its kind, the recently opened “Islamic department” unwittingly illustrates the confusion. 

A glass bowl with  eagle emblem about seven inches  high is labeled at the Met as being from mid-13th-century Syria. Metropolitan Museum of Art 

When visitors stroll into the galleries devoted to European paintings, they will not see panels from 15th-century Germany hanging together with pictures from the Florentine Quattrocento on the excuse that they are Christian. And Chinese scrolls will not be thrown together with ones from Japan or Korea on the basis of shared Buddhist themes. The arts of China, Japan and Korea, whether Buddhist, Confucianist or other, are considered from the historical perspective of their cultures, sparing viewers any aesthetic inconsistency. 

When it comes to Islamic lands, inconsistency is apparently not a worry. Never mind that their histories explain the highly distinctive character of the art of each broad cultural area. 

Historic Iran, broken up into the modern states of Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Azerbaijan, plus bits here and there, shares with China the privilege of being one of the two oldest civilizations in the world with an uninterrupted continuity on its own territory. 

'A Separation' Wins Oscar in First for Iranian Film

 

A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin), written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, won Iranian cinema's first Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards ceremony, held in Hollywood Sunday night. Since 1956, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences instituted a regular, competitive award for the best feature-length film produced outside the United States with predominantly non-English dialogue, A Separation had been only the second Iranian picture to garner even a nomination, following Majid Majidi's 1997 film Children of Heaven.

Accepting the award, Farhadi said, "At this time, many Iranians all over the world are watching us. And I imagine them happy.... Happy because the name of their glorious country, Iran, is spoken through culture.... They are people who respect all cultures and civilizations and reject all hostilities and resentments."

A Separation previously won the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin Film Festival and Best Foreign-Language Film at the Golden Globe Awards, as well as top honors from many critics' groups, including the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle. For more on the context in which the film was made and received in Iran, see this report by Tehran Bureau correspondent Ali Chenar. For appraisals of the film itself, see this review by TB senior editor and arts critic Dan Geist and this response by one of our regular contributors.

Via Tehran Bureau and YouTube

No Subject...!

A group show of 10 young Iranian artists living and working in Iran has left the freedom to the artists to share their latest thought provoking ideas.

Curated by Vida Heydari

Opening reception at 7pm on Feb 22, 2012 – The exhibition will continue for three weeks at 1x1 art gallery in Al-Qouz, Dubai.

Amirali Ghasemi will be unveiling his new "Deconstructing White" series of digital photographs and graphics. Deconstructing certain objects, he is inviting us to unwind and find practical solutions against violence.

Mattresses, once a place for sweet dreams, love making and peace, have become cots of thorns and worries in Kambiz Sabri's works. Dry and non-resilient even the childhood memories have taken a new shape, filled with screaming voices wanting to erupt and let loose. Yet still not having lost the very essence of purity, his sculptures send us a message of hope that change is not so unattainable. Coming out of their confined self-made spaces, the men in Sabri's works are finding their way to new horizons and reaching their dreams.

Katayoun Karami's work is about breaking certain dogmatic behaviors. She is being the change she wants to see in the world by breaking her own image.

Grey Art Gallery’s Enhanced Database of Modern Art from Iran, with Annotated Bibliography

by Caitlin McKenna, IFA NYU M.A. ’11, former Graduate Assistant, Grey Art Gallery, NYU; and Curatorial Assistant, Arts of Asia, Africa and the Islamic World, Brooklyn Museum

Part One

Siah Armajani, Sealed Letter, 1964. Acrylic, ink, string, and sealing wax, 10 1/4 in. x 13 in. Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection, Gift of Abby Weed Grey

While the Grey Art Gallery regularly organizes loan exhibitions, it is also home to an “in-house” landmark—the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Art from the Middle East and South Asia. This collection, one of the most comprehensive of modern art from Iran outside the Middle East, comprises works by Iranian artists working in the pre-revolutionary period of the 1960s and ’70s. It includes examples by many well-known figures of the Iranian art scene, such as Siah Armajani, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Faramarz Pilaram, Parviz Tanavoli, and Charles Hossein Zenderoudi. As Graduate Assistant at the Grey during 2010, I wrote “chat” labels for about forty of the works in Mrs. Grey’s collection and compiled an annotated bibliography on modern and contemporary art from Iran. I am happy to announce their publication on the Grey’s website, to discuss the nature of the project, and to share a few personal reflections.

For readers unfamiliar with the collection’s history at NYU: Mrs. Grey was a philanthropist from Minneapolis who amassed a substantial collection of modern art from the Middle East and Asia, about one-fifth of it from Iran. While it may be difficult to imagine the international art scene before the recent upsurge of interest in the “global contemporary,” Mrs. Grey’s interests were unique in the 1960s and ’70s. She eventually chose NYU as the home for her collection, endowing the Abby Weed Grey Art Gallery and Fine Arts Library. Selected works from Mrs. Grey’s collection were on view during the gallery’s inaugural exhibition in 1975 and were included in the groundbreaking exhibition "Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture" presented by the Grey Art Gallery in 2002. The latter exhibition’s accompanying publication, Picturing Iran: Art, Society, and Revolution, edited by Shiva Balaghi and Lynn Gumpert with contributions by Fereshteh Daftari, Haggai Ram, and Peter Chelkowski (I.B. Tauris, 2002) remains one of the most comprehensive scholarly treatments of the subject. Along with the database of the Iranian works from Mrs. Grey’s collection that appeared on the Grey’s website in 2007, the research begun with “Between Word and Image” formed the basis of my project to publish in more detail this important resource for the study of Iranian art.

Sister Act From Iran Promotes Pop Music in Era of Repression

By Kristen McTighe, The New York Times

The sisters Melody and Safoura Safavi blend Iranian soul rhythms with reggae, rock, ska, and flamenco, singing in their native Farsi, plus English, Spanish and Swedish. Their lyrics, at once humorous and rebellious, speak of love and politics. 

They call their music Persian World Pop, for want of a better description.

“We really don’t know what else to call it. It is so far away from what people are used to,” Safoura Safavi, 29, said during an interview late last year before a concert in Stockholm. “For Iranians who haven’t heard reggae, sometimes they will ask if I’m even singing in Farsi at all.” 

Born in a country where so-called Western music is deemed satanic and women are banned from performing solo, the Safavi sisters have fought to reach Iran with their music from abroad.

At the same time, with international media coverage of Iran regularly dominated by the country’s violent repression of internal dissent, its nuclear ambitions and the consequent international sanctions and confrontations, the sisters are part of a different Iranian world that struggles for visibility behind the headlines: a flourishing underground music scene, both at home and abroad, which has remained resilient despite rigid theocratic restrictions on musical expression.


They face another challenges, too, in the scattered lifestyles of their band: Safroua lives in Stockholm and travels frequently to Spain; Melody lives in New York; other band members live in cities across Sweden.

“In the beginning it was a family project, something that my sister and I did for fun,” Melody Safavi, 36, said by telephone, referring to their band Abjeez, which is Persian slang for “sisters.” “Then, when we started getting all this positive feedback from people in Iran, we realized we could really touch people with our music.”

Rumi’s ‘The Elephant in the Dark’

or

‘Disagreeing over the Description and Shape of the Elephant’

An elephant was in a darkened hall –

            Hindus had brought it as a spectacle.

Into that darkness everybody passed

            to have a look at it, so many people.

Since seeing with the eye was not permitted,

            they felt it in the darkness with their hands.

The hand of one fell on the elephant’s trunk.

            This someone said, ‘This structure’s like a drainpipe’.

The hand of one reached to the creature’s ear –

            It seemed to him as though it were a fan.

When one hand felt its leg the person said,

            ‘To me the elephant’s shape is like a pillar!’

And one who put his hand upon its back

            remarked, ‘This elephant’s just like a sofa!’

Just as each one had touched whatever part,

            so people formed their view from what they’d heard.

Their statements differed as their point of view –

            one man would call it ‘chalk’, another ‘cheese’.

If each had held a candle in his hand,

            the disputes would have vanished from their speech.

The sensual eye is like the hand, that’s all –

            a hand can’t grasp an elephant entirely.

The Ocean’s eye is one thing, spray’s another.

            Give up the spray! Look with the Ocean’s eye.

Spray leaping from the Ocean day and night,

            you see the spray not Ocean – how surprising!

Translated by Alan Williams from the third book of Rumi’s Masnavi, ed. R.A. Nicholson III.1259-1271, (ed. M. Este‘lami III. 1260-1272).

Alan Williams is Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Manchester, England, and the author of Rumi Spiritual Verses: The First Book of the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi, London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2006 and an audiobook, The Spiritual Verses, read by Anton Lesser, translated and abridged by Alan Williams, London: Naxos, 2007.

Magical Gallows Humour in Tehran

Expectations have been enormous for the follow-up to Persepolis. Would it be a new masterwork full of rebellion and subversion? Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud have instead taken a completely different trajectory with their new film "Chicken with plums." The result is a wonderful, surreal melodrama.

Scene from Marjane Satrapi's ''Chicken with Plums''

By Susan Vahabzadeh, Qantara.de

One thing has to be made clear from the start – food is a big deal for your average Persian. If you can't shake someone out of a gloomy mood with their favourite dish, it can only mean that they are desperately unhappy. Nasser Ali Khan (Mathieu Amalric), the mournful hero of the new film by Marjane Satrapi, the creator of "Persepolis" (once again in collaboration with Vincent Paronnaud), sees no meaning in life after the loss of his violin.

At first, he attempts to find a comparable instrument as a replacement, but when he does not succeed in his quest, his reaction appears quite drastic. He decides to die. That is the opening premise of "Chicken with Plums," and the rest of the film is an exploration of misfortune and melancholy, as well as a fabulous explanation of why some people simply have had enough of life.

Angels of death and a good dose of black humour

"Chicken with Plums" takes us on a journey to Tehran during the era of the Shah. The film actually has the look and feel of the cinema of that time. It is as if Douglas Sirk filmed a melodrama in Persian, yet, with a surreal touch and featuring mysterious antique dealers, angels of death, and a good dose of black humour.