Home Is Where They Let You Live

by Jasmin Darznik, NYTimes

“WHERE is your home?” the consular officer asked me. 

I was 13 years old. My parents and I had left Iran eight years earlier, at the onset of the 1979 revolution. Since then, they had bought a house and a business — a small roadside motel in California. I had gone to school and learned to speak English. Then, on a summer trip to visit my mother’s Iranian relatives in Germany, I made the mistake of calling America my home. 

The trouble started when my mother handed me the visa forms. My father had stayed behind to run the motel, and even though my mother had learned enough English to get by, at moments like this, when it was just the two of us, I was still the translator and all-purpose intermediary between “us” and “them.” I took the clipboard and began filling in the papers. My parents and I were in the United States legally, but since we’d traveled outside the country, my mother’s business visa would need to be renewed. It was standard procedure — we wouldn’t have encountered any difficulties if, under the line asking where our home was, I hadn’t written “America.” 

“Are you sure about that?” the officer asked me, her pen pointed at my adolescent cursive. When I nodded, she retreated to a back room. A few minutes later, she returned to inform us that our applications had been denied. We would not be able to return to America, because we had expressed an intention to stay in the country permanently. 

Looking back, the certainty of my response astonishes me. The Iranian revolution and the vagaries of immigration law had dispersed my relatives all over the world. By the time I faced that consular officer, I had cousins in Wisconsin, Stockholm, Istanbul and all points in between. During our time in Germany, my mother stayed up long into the night, reminiscing with my aunts and uncles about Iran and speculating about the country’s future — and the possibility of returning there someday. 

But by that time, I had spent several years distancing myself from the country then known as “Eyeran.” I had seen enough footage of the hostage crisis. I had been called a “smelly A-rab” at school, watched my mother get stared down in grocery shops on account of her accent and witnessed the sharp looks my veiled grandmother drew in the streets. I had quickly learned not to be Iranian in ways that showed.  I plucked my eyebrows, bleached my hair with Sun-In and hitched up my skirts. My accent was pure Valley girl, heavy on the “likes.” By summer’s end, I was desperate to get back to California. A visa was the only thing standing between me and the only country I cared to claim. 

Contemporary Iranian photography

The exhibition, La photographie contemporaine en Iran, will run until 21 July 2012 at Regard Sud galerie. 

The golden age of Iranian photography began in 1997 when international magazines and editors frequently published pictures by Iranian artists, attracting the curiosity of museum curators and exhibition organizers around the world.

Iranian photography is characterized by its thematic organization, and by its refusal to show “the same emblematic pictures seen over and over without falling into the trap of exotic images attracting the eye” comments Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, Director of the Silk Road Gallery in Tehran and an influential personality in Iranian photography.

Through the works of Rana Javadi, Arash Fayez and Hawar Amini, the exhibition offers a pictorial observation of Iranian society. 



Quand tu mourrais, 2008 © Rana Javadi, Courtesy Silk Road Gallery, Téhéran, Iran

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.

A Director Who Likes to Start in the Middle

by Dennis Lim, ArtsBeat, NYTimes

When the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami was last at the Cannes Film Festival two years ago, he brought with him one of his more crowd-pleasing efforts, “Certified Copy,” a two-hander set in Tuscany, and his first film with a movie star (Juliette Binoche, who won the festival’s best actress prize). Mr. Kiarostami is back this year with another film shot outside Iran, the Japanese-language “Like Someone in Love,” about the enigmatic, subtly shape-shifting relationship between a young woman and an old man in Tokyo, but the reception has been quite different.

Amid familiar Kiarostami themes like mistaken identity and role-playing, the film sustains an aura of opacity and mystery that left some bewildered and others enthralled — up until an abrupt ending that prompted some loud boos at the press preview on Sunday. The reception was much warmer at the official screening on Monday, and the movie is still being talked about as a contender for the top prize, given Mr. Kiarostami’s track record (a festival regular, he won the Palme in 1997 for “Taste of Cherry”) and the avowed admiration of this year’s jury president, the Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti (who made a short about opening Mr. Kiarostami’s classic “Close-Up” at his Rome cinematheque).

Speaking in Farsi through a translator and clad in his signature sunglasses, Mr. Kiarostami discussed his new film in an interview on a rainy Tuesday morning here at a beachside restaurant. Edited excerpts from the conversation follow (his first two responses contain mild spoilers about the film’s final shot): 

Q. A lot of people here are talking about the ending of your film, so it’s worth noting that its original title was “The End.” Why did you first call it that? 

A. When I was writing the script I wasn’t thinking about a title. But then came this scene where the stone breaks the window. All of a sudden I wrote “The End,” in English, and the version of “The End” that came to my mind was that of the title at the end of classic black-and-white American films, even down to the font. I’m not sure why I had this phrase and this image in mind, but I thought, O.K., this can be a temporary title and that shot would be a temporary ending. I sent the script to my translator and producer and expected them to tell me that this is not an end to the story, and if they had, I would have asked for time to find a better ending. But they didn’t, and I gradually realized I was unable to add anything more. I also thought the title was close to the theme of my film, to the character of the old professor.

The Loyal Dissident

Amir Hassan Cheheltan is one of a group of internationally known Iranian artists who have no intention of turning their backs on their country, and who will not allow themselves to be sidelined or frozen out by the regime.

by Stefan Buchen, Qantara.de

"Change is in the air," says Amir Hassan Cheheltan. "Now, in spring, it's easy to imagine. A cloud appears and at any moment, the rain could come pelting down or there could be a storm." The writer is pointing to the spring sky over Berlin, but he's talking about the political climate in his homeland Iran. The tensions are tangible, the discord between enemy factions within the regime more profound and acrimonious than ever before.

56-year-old Cheheltan is on a short visit to Berlin to promote his novel "Amerikaner töten in Teheran" (Killing Americans in Tehran) just published in German. His words make you sit up and take notice.

This writer cannot be compared with those notorious members of the Iranian exiled opposition, who have been proclaiming the "internal disintegration" and "the imminent collapse of the Islamic Republic" for 33 years.

Cheheltan is a quiet observer without political affiliation, whose stories and psychograms unfold against a backdrop of Iranian 20th century history through to the present. Because historic authenticity is important to him, he has carried out meticulous study of the social and political history of his nation, referring to documents and as a contemporary witness.

Return to uncertainty

A Book Fair with Vast Crowds and Some Official Moral Panic

Six million reported visitors, several banned publishers, and one scandalized minister.

by Ali Chenar, Tehran Bureau
 

Tehranis just said goodbye, till next year, to one of the city's most popular cultural events -- the Tehran International Book Fair. Domestic and international publishers gathered together at the fair's 25th annual edition to offer their latest. Professionals, students, and academicians went from booth to booth looking for textbooks, while educated book lovers searched for the latest novels and essay collections. The majority, however, came primarily to socialize, to meet new people, and to have a good time.

The pious always complain of the immortalities that take place during these book fairs: the mingling of boys and girls, the titles that are not as Islamic as they should be, and the publishers who are suspected of liberalism. In recent years, the fair has been held on the grounds of Tehran's municipal mosalla (prayer compound) -- ironic, perhaps, but then the University of Tehran often plays host to the capital's official Friday Prayers. Wherever it takes place, the event brings a breath of fresh air to a city where the atmosphere is as polluted as politics. Many have not missed it for a decade or even more, among them Mahmoud, a 42-year-old government employee. He has been coming to the fair since he was 22.

Many publishers offered discounts of up to 50 percent, making the fair a great book shopping opportunity. Visitors could find rare books as well as new editions of ones long out of print. In a country where Internet access is still limited and online reading is not widespread, old-fashioned hardcopies are one of the few learning mediums accessible to almost all. For many students, the fair represents their best chance all year to buy titles crucial to their studies but hard to come by. These items are not inexpensive, as most of them come from international publishers and are priced using hard currencies. Mahmoud recalled when the government used to provide students with U.S. dollars at a discounted exchange rate to buy their study materials. "It was not much, still it was something. Sometime medical students would put together these [funds] to buy the latest edition of some impossible-to-find medical textbook." These days he comes to see what is new in literature and poetry.

Iran's art scene thrives despite constraints

Contemporary art flourishes in Tehran, despite government censorship and cultural sensitivities.

 

Despite issues of censorship and cultural sensitivities, Iranian artists are working to change the image of their nation's art, at the same time educating the world on the Iran's contemporary art scene.

Galleries and artists sometimes struggle with government guidelines, but they nonetheless manage to produce work that is often recognised in overseas exhibitions.

Al Jazeera's Imran Khan reports from Tehran.

Via AJE

'The Other Resurrection': Storytelling through images

The exhibition The Other Resurrection runs until May 30 at Contemporary Art Platform (CAP), Kuwait. This stunning photography exhibition gives a chance to explore the work of the Middle East’s best photographers. They take you on a journey with their poignant images and their visual stories are powerful, haunting and heart wrenching to say the least. In the current exhibition, 40 outstanding images have been selected from the works of six distinguished female photographers, each with her own process, technique and source of inspiration. The featured photographers are:  Laura Boushnak (Palestine), Myriam Abdelaziz (Egypt), Tamara Abdul Hadi (Iraq), Tanya Habjouqa (Jordan), Dalia Khamissy (Lebanon) and Newsha Tavakolian (Iran).

‘Rawiya’ is an Arabic word, which when translated means, “She who tells a story”.  The collective comprises of a group of six female photographers from across the Middle East and made its official debut at the Format Festival in Derby, UK, in March 2011.

Speaking through images, when words fail, these photographers from the Middle East attempt the return to a past that no longer exists and the departure into a future that remains unknown. In their very own words, “They present an insider’s view of a region in flux, balancing its contradictions while reflecting on social and political issues and stereotypes.”

With an artist’s eye, they eloquently capture their visual stories that offer representations against and beyond the stereotypes. The images reflect their diverse perceptions as they successfully explore issues of identity crises, sexual awakening, the literacy crisis and the unconventional graffiti and street art in Egypt and provide insight on the struggles, triumphs, and aspirations.

These women are not only truly remarkable photographers, but their dedication to chronicle the known and the unknown, the forgotten and the oblivious, is commendable.

Referencing History

The exhibition ‘Referencing History’, curated by London based curator Jane Neal runs until July 15, 2012 at the Green Art Gallery. The exhibition features the work of Kamrooz Aram, Hale Tenger, and Ali Banisadr with a selection of some of the most internationally renowned Eastern European artists including Alexander Tinei, Daniel Pitin, Marius Bercea, Zsolt Bodoni, Ivan Grubanov, Ciprian Muresan, Mircea Suciu, and Serban Savu.

The artists brought together in this exhibition share an active interest in history, be that a collective or personal one. In several cases the artists share the experience of growing up under a restrictive regime and witnessing its disintegration, as was the case for those living through the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe. In others, there is simply a fascination with historical processes and the systemic interpretations of “historical events”.

It can be argued that there is a system of historical information in place that is streamed to us regularly, but that system also selects ‘what’ information is transcribed to its audiences and ‘who’ it selects to speak for it. Is history as Avi Shlaim argues, simply “the propaganda of the victors”? The artists featured here, through their different oeuvres, essentially begin their work by questioning the processes from which history itself has been and is being created, interpreted and re-iterated. Antonio Gramsci in his “Prison Notebooks” made an astute observation on historical processes which was later re-visited by Edward Said in his seminal work “Orientalism”:

“The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical processes to date, which have deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory”

For these selected artists the process of tracing the “inventory” begins to form through archives which are created through the organisation and accretion of information. But there is also an archaeological aspect to art making which recognises that any new creation is, in essence, simply an additional layer upon the remains of a deep and porous past.

In some of the work state and religious figures of authority, under various empires and regimes, often find themselves as the protagonists who are brought in to question the human tendency to put faith in a system that has proven itself to be fallible. In others, alternative readings of “factual events” in which personal memory and reality merge and blur simultaneously, force the viewer to re-consider that which they may hold as being incontestable. At a time when boundaries are being re-drawn, territories re-assessed and political and historical contexts are re-examined, the exhibition highlights the urgency for recognising instilled personal preconceptions and collective presuppositions.

The fact and fiction of revolutions

For the fiction that will arise from the Arab Spring, the pain of the past must be wedded to the hope of the present.

by Hamid Dabashi, AJE

On May 1, as thousands of New Yorkers staged their modest but hearty May Day rally - hoping to revive the Occupy Wall Street movement in the city - faculty, students, and a few other denizens gathered in the small but delightful Martin E Segal Theatre Center at the City University of New York (CUNY) to watch and listen to theatrical performances and selected readings by playwrights and novelists from Egypt, Georgia, Iran and the United States.

The event, dubbed "Revolutionary Plays Since 2000" and organised in conjunction with the PEN World Voices Festival, featured works by Laila Soliman from Egypt, Lasha Bugadze from Georgia, the Civilians from New York City, and Mahmoud Dowlatabadi from Iran, with Mike Daisey as the moderator.

Founded and chaired by Salman Rushdie, the PEN World Voices Festival is now an annual event in New York City, and attracts writers from around the world to read and stage their work.

The event, as the organisers had envisioned it, was "dedicated to the emerging global voices of revolution from Egypt, Georgia and the United States", seeking to explore "the links between uprisings in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and movements like Occupy Wall Street, looking for similarities between these grassroots expressions of frustration, fury and optimism. How does theatre react to these crucial historical moments? With documentary exactness? With lyrical outrage?"

The mournful colonel and the young revolutionary

Particularly poignant in this gathering was the barely noticed encounter between the young Egyptian playwright Laila Soliman and the aging Iranian novelist Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, who was in New York to promote the English translation of his novel, The Colonel (which has yet to pass the censorship of the Islamic Republic and be published in its original Persian in Iran). As he began to read an excerpt from his novel, Dowlatabadi turned to Soliman and said: "I hope what I will read will not disappoint you" - and when Soliman came to join him on stage she asked in a whisper why he thought she may be disappointed.

Dowlatabadi thought Soliman was full of hope and devoid of caution; she thought he was full of pessimism and lacking hope. They were misreading each other. The stage was deceptive.

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's The Colonel is a heavy read - and like any other literary work of art, it must be read in the original. But the original does not exist - except in a handful of copies that Dowlatabadi has entrusted to a few close friends - while one fateful copy is wandering through the miasmatic labyrinths of the censorial policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Dowlatabadi wrote his novel in a span of two years between 1983 and 1985, as the Iran-Iraq war was raging and the Islamic Republic began in earnest its reign of theocratic terror, with mass executions in its prisons, cultural revolutions, university purges, and a massive totalitarian attempt to pacify the multifaceted, defiant Iranian political culture.

Dowlatabadi sat on his novel for almost three decades. When he finally submitted it to the ruling authorities for permission to publish, they said no. He subsequently allowed a German, then an English, and now a French and Italian - and soon an Arabic and Hebrew - translation. But to this day, the custodians of the sacred censorship refuse to allow its publication in its original Persian in Iran. Though there are possibilities of publishing it in Persian in Europe or the United States, Dowlatabadi insists - and rightly so - that its original Persian must be published in Iran or nowhere else.

Profiles in Cartooning Courage

How artists in Syria, Iran and India wield free-speech pens against powerful government forces.

by Michael Cavna, The Washington Post

Speaking Thursday at the Library of Congress, “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau highlighted an intriguing dynamic of satire: The more the intended target reacts, he said, the more its practitioner gains the advantage. If the victim flinches or returns fire at a cartoon, the illustration only gains in power.

If you consider that cause-and-effect, then three editorial cartoonists around the map — in Syria, India and Iran — are presently among the most powerful practitioners in the world.  And this week, news involving that trio reminds just how perilous the act of satire can be in some countries.

The Virginia-based Cartoonists Rights Network International has announced that Ali Ferzat and Aseem Trivedi are the 2012 recipients of the group’s Courage in Editorial Cartooning Award. The honor is presented to a “cartoonist in great danger or who has demonstrated exceptional courage in the exercise of free-speech rights.

Ferzat, you may recall, was abducted and badly beaten last August amid the Syrian regime’s crackdown. Ferzat, 60, had become critical of the government in his cartoons; the assailants tellingly injured both his hands, breaking at least one.
At the time, political cartoonist Matt Bors — who spoke before Trudeau at Thursday’s Herblock Prize event — said to Comic Riffs that the attack on Ferzat was “a reminder that picking up a pen to draw cartoons is still a dangerous act in many parts of the world.” And when Ferzat was named to the “TIME 100 Most Influential People for 2012” list in April, Politico’s Matt Wuerker wrote in the magazine: “Tyrants often don’t get the jokes, but their people do. So when the iron fist comes down, it often comes down on cartoonists.”

Persian poetry power: Writers are bringing the spirit of Iran's verse to Britain

In Iran, verse moves crowds to tears.

by Christina Patterson, The Independent

Three years ago, in a garden full of cypress trees, I watched men and women kissing a marble tomb. Some of them were smiling. Some were wiping tears away. Nearly all of them where whispering words that sounded like a prayer, or song. But the words they were reciting, in this beautiful garden, in Shiraz, in Iran, weren't the words of the Koran. The words they were reciting were the words of a poet born in Shiraz 700 years ago called Hafez.

If you grow up in a country like England, where poetry is something most people study a bit at school and then forget, it's quite a shock to see poetry have so much power. You know, in theory, that it can. You've heard about the poets who filled football stadiums, in Russia, and Eastern Europe. You may even, like me, have met quite a few of them, and heard them read, and talk about, their poems. But it's still a shock to see men, with moustaches, and women, in chadors, fighting tears, as if the words they're reciting are written on their hearts.

So when I heard there was going to be a tour of Persian poets in this country, I wanted to find out more. It's nearly a decade since I ran an organisation promoting poets and poetry, and since I talked, publicly and often, about poetry's role, and power. I wanted, in an age when we get our entertainment at the click of a mouse, to be reminded that poetry can matter. To see if I still believed it could.

"I think," said the poet Sarah Maguire, at the launch of the Persian poets tour, at an art gallery in Bloomsbury last week, "that what you experienced in Iran you'd also experience in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Somalia or Sudan. Poetry in these countries is of overwhelming importance. Both Arabic and Persian culture have this very old, pre-Islamic tradition of written poetry. In Somali culture, it's oral. The most poetry-obsessed people in the world are Somalis." I knew about the Arabic and Persian obsession with poetry, but I didn't, I told her, know about the Somalis. But Somalia is as near to a failed state as you get, and only an Ayatollah could claim Iran was a successful model of anything much. So what, exactly, is gained?

Maguire was quiet for a moment. "I think," she said, "it's the people's pride. Somalis are the most traduced and stepped-on people on Earth, but they have this sense that their identity is carried by poetry. One of the things I wanted to do in setting up the Poetry Translation Centre was to try and get across to British people that there are these people here who may be at the bottom of the social pile, but have this extraordinary tradition of rich culture, and this dignifies them."

But isn't poetry a bit of a luxury when lots of very poor people are having their meagre incomes cut? Why should we pay to hear work by foreign poets we've never even heard of?

Music, Exile and Trauma

by Mena Mark Hanna, The Huffington Post

On March 15, I attended Houston Grand Opera's 46th world premiere, The Bricklayer, a chamber opera by American composer Gregory Spears and Iranian librettist Farnoosh Moshiri. Ms. Moshiri's libretto is drawn from her painful experience in exile following the Iranian revolution of 1979. The Bricklayer is a harrowing piece of musical theater, directly confronting the torture and death of Iranian intellectuals and political dissidents at the hands of a despotic theocratic regime. During the performance, I detected shifts of uneasiness and stifled sobs emanating from an audience largely comprised of Persian émigrés; the premiere was met with an irrepressible standing ovation.


This uniquely intense experience -- that of the exile -- has been rehashed time and time again in our increasingly violent and globalized world, but it has only emerged with such saliency in the public's consciousness through art during the 20th century. The philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno best encapsulated the problem of art's relationship with such trauma with the dictum, "To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric... " Adorno's words are problematic, to say the least; they imply that art cannot be created in a state of exile, after severe social trauma. But one could make the case, as émigré intellectual George Steiner has, that the entirety of 20th-century Western literature is extraterritorial. Nearly everything written is in some way affected by a state of exile (be that internal or external), a result of the violent social upheaval that characterized the past century. I readily agree with this idea of the "extraterritorial," and I think it can be extended to Western classical music.

The themes of exile -- nostalgia, loss, and bewilderment -- are explicit in the German avant-garde following World War II. Arnold Schoenberg's "A Survivor from Warsaw," written in 1947, is perhaps the most succinct and uncompromising musicalization of the Jewish tragedy. Schoenberg, an Austrian Jew living in exile in California, developed the twelve-tone technique of composition, a system that orders all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale in a manner to prevent the emphasis of any one specific pitch. A Survivor from Warsaw is a departure from this taut, formalistic manner of composition. Instead of composing with notational symmetry and structural rigidity, as Schoenberg was wont to do in the later years of his exile, the composer presents the listener with an intense, highly expressionistic fictional representation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising through the use of a narrator, men's chorus, and orchestra. By eschewing the strict compositional formalism for which Schoenberg was famous and indulging in the expressionism of his youth, we have a composer trying to come to grips with his own state of exile and the guilt of that exile-a subconscious attempt to prove Adorno wrong.

Jackson Pollock’s Splashes of Paint From Iran

Iran Loans Jackson Pollock Painting for Centennial Exhibit at Tokyo's Museum of Modern Art

By Kelly Olsen, WSJ

The U.S. and Iran have been at odds for decades, with tensions escalating further this year amid talk of possible armed conflict in the Middle East over Tehran’s nuclear program.

But in Japan, a nation that tries to maintain good relations with both countries, a major exhibition featuring the work of one of America’s most recognizable artists is showing how appreciation for good art can bring even the most intractable foes closer together.

The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo has been holding a special exhibition to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of American abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock.

Visitors to the museum, located near the moat surrounding the leafy Imperial Palace in central Tokyo, are unlikely to be surprised that “Jackson Pollock: A Centennial Retrospective” has received what the museum describes on its website as “special support” from the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.

But the fact the exhibition, which wraps up a three-month run Sunday, is also “patronized” by the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran might raise a few eyebrows.

As it turns out, there is a good reason for Iranian involvement. The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art has lent a famous and extremely valuable Pollock painting it possesses, Mural on Indian Red Ground, for the current exhibit.

Gender and Exposure in Contemporary Iranian Photography

The exhibition will run until 16 June 2012 at G44 Gallery in Toronto, Canada.

Discourses about Middle Eastern art tend to be preoccupied by certain issues: femininity, the veil, gender disparity, religious tradition, and revolutionary conflict. This exhibition shifts the focus by considering the following themes: masculinity; female agency; secular activities (for example, café-culture, amateur wrestling, or extreme body building); Persian traditions; and the unique situation of Iran. The artists communicate visual messages that are by necessity subtle and ambiguous. They use strategies such as metaphor and allegory, the blurring of boundaries between fiction and documentary, and the adoption of visual styles more typical of fashion, advertising, and graphic design. Understanding of Iranian art will differ depending on one’s knowledge of the country. However, works in this show also offer audiences an opportunity to abandon old assumptions and gain new insights about the culture. Curator Andrea Fitzpatrick has conducted extensive research into Iranian culture and in 2010 traveled to Tehran to do field work. For this exhibition she has selected the works of Iranian artists Samira Eskandarfar, Amirali Ghasemi, Abbas Kowsari, Zeinab Salarvand, Arman Stepanian, and Sadegh Tirafkan, all of whom live and work in Tehran. Their images express the wit, elegance and sensitivity of the culture, and the individuality of the artists. Gallery 44 hopes that this exhibition will be a process of discovery for the viewer, and an exploration of artmaking as an increasingly important tool in international dialogues.

Interview with curator Andrea Fitzpatrick and artists Samira Eskandarfar and Amirali Ghasemi

by Barbara D. Waginski, artoronto

B.W: Where did the idea for this project come from?

A.F: The idea for this project was a response to the discovery of the history of Iranian photography which happened for me about 3 years ago. Through research I discovered that Iran has an incredible history of photography going back to 1848 and in fact it was the first Middle Eastern country that was creating, taking, and collecting photographs from a local indigenous perspective rather than colonial or imperial tourists coming to take pictures of the Iranians. This history of photography is not represented at all in the Western history of photography books, even those who call themselves global, and this was an absolute shock and revelation. In 2010, I discovered the book Iranian Photography Now by Rose Issa, which had a beautiful selection of Iranian contemporary documentary and art photography, and most people only know the name of Shirin Neshat.  I didn’t know a single artist in that book and that completely shocked and amazed me. Besides that I was reading the wonderful memoirs published by Iranian exiled artists such as Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi, Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, as well as the Canadian Iranian writer Marina Nemats Prisoner of Tehran. The most exciting thing though was discovering that there was this huge scene of contemporary Iranian photographic art happening that I was not aware of as a specialist in the field. This project and the sister exhibit at the SAW gallery in Ottawa is a result from my trip to Iran in 2010 and that research. I wanted to share this with Canadian audiences because for most people here, we know the name of Shirin Ebadi and a lot of Iranian filmmakers but so far the young photographic and video artists are not known here. In Iran I saw such a vibrant art scene and the number of women artists was really impressive as was the work because it just gave a whole other view of art, culture and values that are important and this is very different unfortunately from what we know about Iran coming only through news stories.

The Kafkaesque World Of An Iranian Cartoonist

Iranian Mana Neyestani, shown here in one of his works, now lives in exile in France. Image courtesy RFE/RL

by Golnaz Esfandiari, RFE/RL

A cockroach landed Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestani in jail and turned his life upside down.

In 2006, a cartoon by Neyestani that showed the pest speaking Azeri sparked riots among Iran's minority Azeris. The cartoon, which ran in the children's section of the state newspaper, "Iran," showed a cockroach asking, "What?" in Azeri. It was deemed insulting by many members of Iran's Azeri minority, who took to the streets to show their anger.

The government responded with force. Nineteen people reportedly died in the clashes and many others were arrested.

Neyestani and the editor of the paper ended up in solitary confinement in Tehran's Evin prison under conditions the cartoonist described as "Kafkaesque." Three months later, Neyestani used a temporary prison leave to flee the country with his wife. He finally ended up in exile in France after spending time in several other countries, including Turkey, Malaysia, and China.

Now, the 39-year-old cartoonist has recounted his time in prison in a graphic novel titled "An Iranian Metamorphosis," which was recently published in France. The book, whose title is a reference to Franz Kafka's famous story about a man who turns into a giant insect and is ostracized by his family, is also due to be published in other European countries and possibly in the United States.
 

In the novel, Neyestani's time in jail -- including the psychological torture he faced and numerous interrogations where he was purportedly asked to confess to having received money from foreigners and other fabricated charges -- is depicted in powerful black-and-white illustrations with his signature dark humor and, of course, many cockroaches.

Art commentator offers insight on Middle Eastern art scene

by Bianca Bonomi, The National

Anthony Haden-Guest is to the world of art commentary what Hans Ulrich Obrist is to the world of curation. Both operate in fields traditionally excluded from the monographic series of art history, which prioritises an interest in the artist and the art over the distribution, dissemination and exhibition of these works. Both have pioneered interest in their relative areas; both are celebrated as prolific and engaging individuals.

As a writer, reporter and cartoonist, Haden-Guest has contributed to the world's most lauded publications; as a bon vivant and socialite, he has become part of the art world of which he writes. Rumoured to be the inspiration for the British expatriate journalist Peter Fallow in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, he has documented his findings in, among other titles, True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World and The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night.

Having written extensively on the art market, Haden-Guest is bound up in the global arts scene and has watched the growth of the Middle Eastern cultural movement with keenness. "I've been going to the Middle East for many years," he says. "I covered the Lebanese civil war and so I started going to the region extensively from 1980 onwards. I'd go and see the galleries there and was interested in the wealth and scope of the art on show."

For Haden-Guest, the clichéd view of Arab art as "white and gold and ornamental" doesn't ring true. "In reality, it is far more complex than that," he says. "For instance, identity plays a strong role, whether an artist is Egyptian or Lebanese, whether they have spent their working career in London or Paris and how those European influences factor into the work, how different cultures complicate it."

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.