Reversing the Stereotypes

by Roxane Zand, Sotheby's

As a student I was a great fan of Edward Said’s Orientalism and used to feel offended by the vague, notional stereotypes that the West held about Middle Easterners. That sensitivity has been turned on its head in recent times with Middle Eastern artists ready to invert the very elements and aspects that used to caused offence.

Take Shirin Neshat’s series of Stills from her film Women Without Men. The other day I was arrested by a print from the series hanging on the ground floor at Sotheby’s New Bond Street. Zarin, the subject of the film, lies crumpled in the foetal position, her anguish contrasted and witnessed so poignantly by the Western icons that surround her.

Shirin Neshat’s Zarin in Bedroom, a still from her celebrated film Women Without Men. Sold for £17,500 in the Contemporary Art Day sale in London on 27 June. Image courtesy of Sotheby's

Her exotic-looking bedroom could be a Moroccan or even Ottoman brothel, although it actually references Tehran’s seamy ‘shahr-I naw.’ While the images of Elvis Presley and Deborah Kerr evoke so many layers of meaning!

For those of us who remember the smoke-filled cinemas of Tehran or Cairo or Baghdad, these actors were not brands the way film stars are today, but larger-than-life characters that symbolized the golden era of Hollywood. I simply love what Shirin has achieved in this series, and totally covet the one that hangs in the study of my good friend Layla Diba in NYC. Just the other day Susanne, another friend who collects Iranian art, showed me the image of her latest acquisition and yes, it was one of these and yes, I felt a pang of envy!

Fire of Joy

The exhibition “Fire of Joy” runs until July 28 at Galerie Perrotin

Inspired by Pop Art, Farhad Moshiri has developed a remarkable and hybrid visual language that draws at once from popular Iranian and Western cultures: “The Iranians are searching for their identity. Depending on their mood, they lean towards the East or the West. Iran is undergoing an inevitable phenomenon that complicates, confounds and diversifies traditions. This is why I am just as inspired by the mall or the bazaar as I am by the ornamentation aesthetic that belongs to Iranian culture.”

In the exhibition Fire of Joy, the artist continues to draw upon the traditional “feminine” technique of bead embroidery for its ornamental qualities, which he combines with thick layers of acrylic and gold leaf. He is here playing upon the concept of “happiness”, which for him leaves greater place for sarcasm and cynicism.

Here Iranian craftsmanship and pop culture merge or often confront each other with irony by using as much the advertising aesthetics for housewives of the 1950’s, Curl, as the popular western icons of comics, Uncaged, Breath. In a country that is mistrustful of representation, Moshiri, like a collector or antique hunter, lifts all kinds of images from daily life such as emblems of kitsch, censored photos, childish motifs and western advertising: “I like to uncover things that have no artistic pretention, that have been created by others and strive to recondition them in the form of works of art.”

In Anatomy of a Woman 2, for example, an icon of Persian tradition is treated like an anatomical image. In Mystery Man a face covered with coloured circles refers to the fuzzy faces of censorship and in God the word repeated infinitely on extremely coloured and sparkling backgrounds such as luminous signs functions like a slogan. Through these effects of juxtaposition, stereotypes and sacred or taboo references — the female body, censorship, God — Moshiri’s language reveals his powerful dissidence defined in relation with other things in a playful, offbeat manner.

Prints of Persia

Contemporary Iranian art defies stereotypes of a narrow-minded culture.

Contemporary Iranian Art Exhibition at New Albion Gallery opens on Thursday 5th July and runs until August 4. 

 Barbad Golshiri, Quad, 2010, type C print, 106.5 x 106.5 cm (The same size as Malevich's Black Square [1913]), edition of 9, Image courtesy of New Albion Gallery

Lynne Dwyer, SMH

Iran is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside a burqa. In the West, it's a nation defined by stereotypes of religious fanaticism, female oppression and human-rights violations. Yet the latest cultural evidence coming out of Tehran would have you think otherwise.

Art, a window into a society's heart, is thriving in the Iranian capital and the West is taking notice. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is now showing work by modern Iranian artists and one of London's Asian art specialists, Rossi & Rossi gallery, held a show by Iranian women last year. In Sydney, the largest exhibition of contemporary Iranian art in Australia opens on Thursday at New Albion Gallery, covering themes of identity, the pull of modernity against tradition and female independence.

Iranian artist, critic and university lecturer Behrang Samadzadegan says: ''I can see a sort of anarchistic art in this new generation of artists … I call them the Tehran hip-hop generation.

''You see the very beautiful pop-art image but with a lot of radical and anarchistic context in it,'' he says.

''They are always narrating stories about politics and the social situation of life and all the stories you hear in the news about Iran right now.''

Fighting Flags

by Tamzin Baker, Guernica

As a child, Sara Rahbar was scolded for refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag. Her command of English was basic, and she didn’t understand why her classmates stood with their hands over their hearts. The flag returned to haunt her shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. She was going to her parents’ Persian restaurant in Queens when her mother called to tell her that someone had threatened the family and ordered them to hang an American flag in the restaurant’s window. “It was a terrifying moment,” she remembers. “I looked for one everywhere, but I couldn’t find a single American flag. I returned to the restaurant with an image I found on the Web.” The murder of a Sikh man who lived in the neighborhood prompted Rahbar to stop speaking Farsi in public for a time. In 2004, Rahbar left New York City for London to study painting at St. Martin’s School of Art and Design; there, fueled by anger and loneliness, she conceived her first flag. (Slideshow “here”)

 

 The flags serve as poignant metaphors fashioned from fragments of Persian fabric, embroidery, gun saddles, and flagellation whips used by Shiite men during the month of Muharram.

Little did Rahbar know that the piece of art would soon blossom into an acclaimed body of work that today includes forty-four hybrid Iranian-American flags made from fragments of Persian fabric, embroidery, gun saddles, and flagellation whips used by Shiite men during the month of Muharram. These works have become poignant metaphors for a large constituency of Iranians and Iranian-Americans in search of democratic pluralism, a compromise between Islamic faith and liberal values. Rahbar assigns melancholy titles to many of her tapestries such as Whatever we had to lose we lost, and in a moonless sky we marched, Flag #41 (2009), which will be on display from June 12th to September 12th at the Palais des Arts et du Festival in Dinard, France. She also currently has an exhibition at the Pompidou Center, on view until February 2011, which showcases her work alongside more than two hundred women artists including Frida Kahlo and Sophie Calle. Flag #41 depicts portraits of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy beside a drawing of the White House, incandescent beneath a starry sky. The flag echoes her own journey to the United States shortly following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. For seven nights, five-year-old Rahbar and her family hiked through snow-covered valleys heading for Turkey en route to New York.

Paris hosts Iranian arts festival

Paris hosts Iranian arts festival by euronews-en

A festival of contemporary Iranian art, Iranian Arts Now, is taking place in Paris until the end of June. It is art in its broadest sense; visual arts, performances, music, dance, film and design.

Arash Fayez is one of four photographers whose work is on show. Describing himself as a conceptual artist, his pictures examine political propaganda, the line between truth and fiction and where it blurs.

Via  euronews

An Iranian Jeff Wall?

Mitra Tabrizian's first solo show at Leila Heller Gallery runs through July 7.

City, London 2008, 2008, C-type photographic print, 48 x 98.5 in / 122 x 250 cm, Edition of 5, 2 APs, Image courtesy Leila Heller Gallery

Dissecting Mitra Tabrizian’s Politically Incisive Photo Tableaux

by Kyle Chayka, Artinfo

At first glance, British-Iranian photographer and videographer Mitra Tabrizian’s photographs, currently on view at Leila Heller gallery in Chelsea, look very familiar. The stiff postures of her subjects and the strictly horizontal, minimally obtrusive perspective of her camera lens is straight out of the Jeff Wall textbook, while her touch of surrealism and the sense of a movie scene stopped in motion comes from Wall, Philip Lorca diCorcia, and Gregory Crewdson. What sets this tight selection of Tabrizian’s images apart from its numerous influences is its cross-cultural, politically aware subject matter rather than its aesthetic execution.

Tabrizian shoots in both England and Iran, offering a series of desolate landscapes. She focuses in on Leicestershire, a county in the English Midlands, depicting a quartet of ruined warehouses and empty factory buildings. In one shot, a single suited gentleman, Middle Eastern in appearance, stands in profile in front of a grid of mossy windows. The combination of polished, besuited businessman and crumbling industrial decay is incongruous, and feels unexpectedly sad. Rather than mournful, “City, London” (2008), a collection of bankers gathered in the austerely marbled lobby of some anonymous office building, has an air of vague foreboding. The grey gradient of suited men stand to attention but their gazes never meet one another’s, or anything, for that matter. They look, perhaps, like they’re shiftlessly dodging the blame for the global economic collapse.

Marry Me Till The End Of Love

A New Interactive Live Sculpture

Curated by: Fereshteh Daftari, 23-30 June 2012

Watch Live Stream at Amir Baradaran: Saturday 23 June 2012 6-9pm (Paris Time)

Image courtesy Amir Baradaran

Amir Baradaran announces a new interactive performance—his wedding to anyone and everyone he can convince to enter a temporary marriage (Mut'ah/Sigheh). This pronouncement of marriage also functions as an invitation, where participants are welcome to wed Baradaran’s live sculpture and become an element in both Baradaran’s body of work and the larger schema of performance art.

The collaborative performance is an attempt to introduce temporary marriage into the performance art lexicon and playfully question the recent and perplexing push by "progressives" to "include" same-sex couples in the definition of marriage. When asked about his lack of enthusiasm regarding gay marriage, Baradaran says, “it is ironic that to be considered progressive today, one must adopt a conventional attitude and conform to the confines of a failing conservative institution.”

Baradaran’s fascination with temporary marriage stems from its recognition that love and desire are temporal, shifting, and always changing. Moreover, Sigheh sheds light on the transactional aspect of any relationship. But above all, this Islamic edict, also known as “pleasure marriage,” permits desire for desire’s sake rather than for procreation. Baradaran asserts that, “although Sigheh may not be egalitarian at its core—for example, women must either be widowed or divorced to seek partners for pleasure—introducing Sigheh into conversations about marriage and sexuality throws the paradigm off kilter, just enough, to open up new understandings and lines of inquiry.”

The Red Ink

What happens when censorship becomes an artistic device? 

Image from Flickr via j. verspeelt, Courtesy Guernica

by Tomas Hachard, Guernica

There’s a Communist joke that the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek loves to tell about the tricky nature of freedom of speech. A man moves from East Germany to Siberia, where he knows his letters will be censored. He establishes a code with his friends: anything written in blue ink is honest and true; anything written in red ink is false and only there to get the truth past the censors. A month goes by and the man’s friends receive a letter written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.”

Speaking at Zuccotti Park, Zizek interpreted the joke as an allegory for the West (we have the freedom to do whatever we want but dissent; we have everything but red ink). But in his 2002 book, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Zizek points out the subversive quality of the joke. In the absence of red ink, the letter writer still manages to get the truth about conditions of life in Siberia past the censors. The letter, the friends know, should have been written in red ink. The joke is about the illusion of freedom, but it is also about the various manipulations and contrivances to which individuals—or, for my present interest, works of art—must resort if they are to not only speak truth to power in the face of censorship, but, much more simply, speak truth at all.

Not surprisingly, then, Circumstance is a movie about escape, about hoping for change and then realizing that fleeing is the only option.

In the past year, three movies were released about Iran that found distinctive ways of eluding censorship in order to give us an intimate view of the effects of repression on individuals living in that country. Circumstance, A Separation , and This Is Not a Film have making-of stories closely tied to Iran’s lack of free speech; the first was filmed in Lebanon, the second was approved by Iranian censors, the third had to be snuck out of the country in a cake in order to be screened. But these films are not only noteworthy examples of works that “maintain resistance in the face of seemingly absolute power,” as Edward Wong wrote about Ai Weiwei in the New York Times. They share a specific form of resistance that provides a vision of the personal weight of repression, a notion of Iranian society as an enclosure that divides and slowly suffocates the individual, and, to differing degrees, a sense that such a situation cannot go on much longer without either the necessity of escape, a slow spiritual death, or, most radically, an outbreak of violence.

Things We Left Unsaid

Zoya Pirzad is a renowned Iranian-Armenian writer and novelist. She has written two novels and three collections of short stories, all of which have enjoyed international success. Things We Left Unsaid has been awarded multiple prizes, including the prestigious Houshang Golshiri award for Best Novel of the Year and her most recent collection of stories, The Bitter Taste of Persimmon, won the prize for Best Foreign Book of 2009 in France. She grew up in Abadan, where this novel is set, and now lives in Tehran.

About the Novel

A model wife and mother, Clarisse leads an unremarkable life. She has all she's ever wanted: a well-respected engineer husband and three children, tucked away in a wealthy, middle-class neighbourhood. But her tranquillity ends forever with the arrival of an enigmatic Armenian family across the street. The debonair widower, his beguiling tween daughter, and his mother, a domineering aristocrat with an exotic past, steal their way into Clarisse's home. Before she has time to understand what's happening, passions, politics, and a plague of locusts have whipped up emotions that she never knew she had. Suddenly, there are options, opinions, and desires, a wholly different life ready for the taking - but only if she can figure out what they are. Things We Left Unsaid is a humourous yet poignant insight into the hopes and aspirations of Iranians in the years that led to the Islamic Revolution.

Excerpt from Chapter 9

I went inside and locked the door behind me. In Abadan, nobody locked the door in the middle of the day; I only did so when I wanted to make sure I was alone. My penchant for self-criticism meant that I had challenged myself on this more than once: What does locking the door have to do with being alone? To which I always answered: I don’t know. I leaned up against the door and closed my eyes. After the bright light and heat outdoors, and the noise of the children, the cool, quiet chiaroscuro of the house was lovely. The only sound was the monotonous humming of the air conditioners, and the only smell, a hint of Artoush’s cologne hanging in the hallway. I felt like having a coffee.

I looked at the kitchen clock. It was just before ten. Mother and Alice would certainly turn up within half an hour. I’ll wait¸ I thought, so we can have coffee together, and took the pack of cigarettes out of the fridge. Where had I heard that cigarettes would not go stale if kept in the fridge? I didn’t smoke much, but when the house was empty, I liked to sit by the window in the green leather armchair, lean back, puff, and think. In these rare moments of solitude, I tried not to think about daily chores like fixing dinner, getting Armen to study, Artoush’s forgetfulness and indifference. I would reminisce about things I usually didn’t have time to think about. Like our house in Tehran – its little yard and big rooms, its long hallway that was dark even in the middle of the day. My father used to come home at noon, wash his hands and face, sit down at the table and eat a big lunch. He ate whatever Mother had prepared that day with great enthusiasm, listening attentively to her recount the morning’s events in minute detail: how the watermelon she had purchased proved pale and unripe once cut open. About the rising price of pinto beans. About the fights between me and Alice, which were a daily occurrence. Father would mutter things under his breath that we could not quite make out, or if we could, we would not remember. Then he would get up from the table, thank Mother for lunch, and head down to his room, at the end of the somber hallway. It was a small room with brown velvet curtains, always drawn, and cluttered with stuff that Mother would constantly complain about, saying, ‘Why do you keep this junk?!’

After fleeing Tehran, three young Iranians release album in adoptive US

The Iranian post-punk band Yellow Dogs - Obaash, 23, guitar and vocals, Looloosh, 25, guitar and synthesiser, Koory, 23, bass, synthesiser and backing vocals and Arash, 26, drums, all of whom go by their first names only - fled possible arrest in Tehran to settle in Brooklyn, New York, in 2010 and chase the rock'n'roll dream. Their EP Upper Class Complexity was released on May 9.


by Mark Lepage, The National

How do you play in a rock'n'roll band when it's illegal?

We all met in 2006 through the skate park in Tehran - skaters, punk rockers, it was a Shangri-la for rock'n'rollers, that kind of subculture. We were underground. Our rehearsal space had soundproofed walls. There is the ministry of culture in Iran and any sort of art you wanna do, you have to get their permission. But getting their permission is so hard - you have to play the music that they want. So we went underground all the way. Playing concerts was a really, really risky thing to do, but back then we were 18-year-old kids, so we didn't care.

Was it dangerous? 

Yes. You could be arrested, and the punishment was unpredictable. They could send you to jail for a couple of years, or fine you, or lash you - the lash is such a common punishment in the court system of Iran.

Then how did you find out about western rock'n'roll?

We grew up as teenagers listening to The Clash, the Sex Pistols, then as we got older we got into more electronic music. We basically downloaded it all - with a faulty internet speed. I remember there was a time when you would start the download, go to bed and when you woke up, you had it in your computer.

How did people hear about you? I mean, the Iranian rock scene isn't very prominent internationally.

We were in this movie [No One Knows About Persian Cats which received the audience prize at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival in 2009] by Bahman Ghobadi, this famous Iranian director, made about our scene and the general underground scene in Tehran, including hip-hop artists, not just rock'n'roll. That film got huge [it won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 2009] and suddenly brought a lot of attention to the scene, especially the government's attention, which sucked. We were afraid of getting caught. We had cops taking pictures of us, so we were paranoid. We wanted to go to America, but we had no passports.

We had a lot of problems getting out of Iran, but we did it at the right time, when the movie was everywhere. We sorted all the paperwork and went to America to play. First we came with an artist visa, then we got political asylum. Now we're a travelling band, but we're based in America. Our first stop will be Istanbul.

Painted Politics: The Mural in Modern Iran

Rain bird by Mehdi Ghadyanloo, 2012, Image courtesy Mehdi Ghadyanloo

by Bahamin Azadi, Tehran Bureau

The history of mural painting returns to the first efforts of human beings to trace their experiences and thoughts in pictorial form in an effort to communicate and adorn their lives. The term comes from the Latin word murus, "wall." Urban murals are distinct from other forms of painting in that they bear the feature of "publicity" -- in other words, a painting that is created in public for the public. 

In the modern era, across different societies and cultures, mural painting has generally reflected the political atmosphere of the time. Murals have been used to express protest and a desire for emancipation. Through their use of symbols, murals have the power to express narratives that promote social awareness and a variety of minority and socioeconomic class viewpoints. 

Bringing art into the public sphere is one of the most important characteristics of murals. In numerous societies -- especially ones, such as postrevolutionary Iran, that are highly politicized -- they tend to express the ideological values of the state because they are almost invariably commissioned and sponsored by the government or its affiliated organs. Art, and in this specific case, murals, can perform the role of a vital medium for the expression of ideological, economic, social, and cultural change. This is because they are a "place" where everyday life, publicity, and artistic expression cross paths.

The Mexican muralist art movement, identified with painters such as Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and José Orozco, is perhaps the best-known of this genre. Other countries with important traditions of political mural painting include Northern Ireland, Colombia, and East Germany. In each, murals played an important role in reflecting changes in the political culture through the depiction of subjects ranging from religion to sex. 

Murals in modern Iran and elsewhere have often served the role of creating public awareness of certain issues and in decisive ways performed the function of sociopolitical critique, as well as reinforcing political and community identities. The mural has the power to act as a mediator between the public, the government, and artists. This relationship is complex and very prickly at times, especially when, as is so often the case in Iran, art is politicized and politics is aestheticized. 

Your Veil Is a Battleground

A girl with dyed blonde hair at Tasua parade in the Jolfa neighborhood in Tehran. 2011. Image courtesy Kiana Hayeri

by James Estrin, Lens, NYTimes

Kiana Hayeri grew up in Tehran, where the country’s morality police restricted her public behavior. She left in 2005 when she was 17 and moved to Toronto, where she studied photography at Ryerson University.

Ms. Hayeri returned to Iran in 2010 to explore the dual lives of many young women who are expected to behave and dress modestly in public by covering their hair, arms and legs. But behind closed doors, these women act very much like Ms. Hayeri’s Canadian friends — dating, singing, studying ballet and even swimming.

“Everything that is banned by the government is being practiced, but behind closed doors,” said Ms. Hayeri, 24. “I think that my generation is exposed to the West through satellite and Internet so much that they don’t let the restrictions stop them.”

The young women she has photographed come from mostly middle- and upper-middle class religious families, though many of them are not religious themselves. Some of their parents were either relatively lenient or they found a way to dress conservatively when they left home but changed their clothing afterward.

Ms. Hayeri does not claim that her project represents the entirety of Iran. But she said there are many young people in the big cities who yearn for a less constricting public life.

“It’s a whole world that many Americans are unaware of,” she said. “Nowadays, with all this talk about war, sanctions and nuclear weapons, people tend to forget about ordinary people, the actual people who live in Iran, and they only look at the government.”

Promoter of Contemporary Middle Eastern Artists

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

by William Dobson

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

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

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

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

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

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.