London Calling: Tehran

The first in a series of exhibitions fostering dialogue between Iranian & British artists

by Joobin Bekhrad, REORIENT 

Between July 21st and 25th at Tehran’s 7Samar Gallery, Yashar Samimi Mofakham and Tarlan Rafiee, an Iranian artist/curator couple, hosted a unique art exhibition aimed at fostering artistic and cultural dialogue between British and Iranian artists.

Curated by John Phillips, a prominent British artist whose works have been exhibited at such institutions as the Victoria & Albert Museum, and Liz O’Sullivan, an art consultant, who among other establishments has lectured at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London Calling: Tehran was conceived at their artist-run, nonprofit organisation/gallery, londonprintstudio. It marked the first in a series of collaborations which seek to further acquaint British audiences with contemporary Iranian art, and vice versa.

I, along with REORIENT’s Tehran correspondent, Fatemeh Kavandi, recently had the chance to speak with Yashar, Tarlan, Liz, and John about the exhibition and its significance in promoting cross-cultural dialogue, as well as the relationship between Iranian and Western artists in general.

What was the motivation behind organizing London Calling: Tehran? How did you come to be in touch with londonprintstudio?

Liz – It never ceases to amaze me how londonprintstudio is like a magnet for the most extraordinary people. They just appear. I would say that John Phillips is the real magnet, actually. I adore contemporary Iranian art, and when John telephoned me to talk about this interesting artist, Yashar, I joined them for lunch. Our lunchtime conversations about art, commerce, visionaries, censorship, and representation were fascinating and enlightening, and I knew immediately that I wanted to work with Yashar. That could have been working on anything — making sandwiches, fixing a car – anything. Developing this show with John, Yashar and Tarlan has been amazing. Incredibly open people. What a privilege.

The tortured face of Iran

A banned novel by Iran’s greatest living writer and a collection of poetry from the country and its exiles give voice to the terrible cost of oppression. 


By Arlice Davenport, The Wichita Eagle


This is how the world ends.

An old man, drenched from relentless rain, having just buried his teenage daughter – who was tortured to death for distributing anti-government pamphlets – meditates on the horrid fate of his five children – three dead at the hands of successive, oppressive regimes; one driven mad in prison and now hiding in his father’s basement; one surviving through marriage to a profiteering sycophant, who props up whichever corrupt despot is in power.

At the same time, the old man reviews the shame and humiliation of his mortal sins – murder and military insubordination. He dons his dress uniform, stripped of its insignia, takes down the gleaming saber from his living-room wall – the saber he ran through the heart of his adulterous wife, then eviscerated her with – feels the edge of the blade, runs his thumb across his jugular vein, steps out into the courtyard, crowded by the specters of his past, and takes his own life.

The Golha Programmes

These programmes covered the entire history of classical as well as contemporary Persian poetry, giving marvellous expression to the whole gamut of traditional Persian music and poetry.

‘Flowers of Persian Song and Music’: the Story of Digitalizing the Golha Archive

by Jane Lewisohn

The Golha (‘Flowers of Persian Song and Music’) radio programmes were broadcast on Iranian National Radio for 23 years from 1956 through 1979. They comprised approximately 850 hours of programmes made up of literary commentary with the declamation of poetry, which is also sung with musical accompaniment, interspersed with solo musical pieces. The programmes themselves were the brainchild of Davoud Pirnia, a one-time Assistant Prime Minister, who in addition to being a well-known politician and judge, was an enthusiastic patriot and scholar who harboured a deep love for Persian culture and its rich literary and musical traditions. When he retired from political life in 1956, for the next eleven years he devoted himself tirelessly to producing of the Golha programmes.

Pirnia persuaded many of the foremost figures in classical Persian studies in Iran to work alongside him, so that the most formidable literary, academic and musical talents of his day offered him their collaboration and support. These included professors of Islamic Studies like Jalal al-Din Homa’i, Sa‘id Nafisi and Badi‘ al-Zaman Foruzanfar, the writer, scholar and senator ‘Ali Dashti, Iran’s poet laureate Lotf ‘Ali Suratgar, the historian Rezazada Shafaq, and the great song-writers and poets such as Mu‘ini Kermanshahi, ‘Emad Khorasani, Rahi Mo‘ayyeri, Toraj Negahban, Shahriyar, Simin Behbahani, Hushang Ebtehaj (Sayeh) and Bizhan Taraqqi. All the most eminent literary critics, famous radio announcers, singers, composers and musicians in Iran also participated in them. These included the likes of musicians and composers such as Abu’l-Hasan Saba, Mortaza Mahjubi, Ruho’llah Khaleqi, Habibo’llah Badi’i, Lutfo’llah Majd, Mortaza Naydavud, Hasan Kasa’i, Jalil Shahnaz, Reza Varzanda, Hasan Kasa’i, Ahmad ‘Ebadi, Farhang Sharif, Husayn Tehrani. The greatest Iranian vocalists of the twentieth century such as Banan, Marziya, Humayra, Qavami, Golpayegani, Iraj, ‘Abd al-Wahhab Shahidi, Sima Bina, and Puran were also featured in the Golha programmes. Even Iran’s supreme virtuoso singer—Mohammad Reza Shajarian—saw his career launched on these radio programmes.

Five Great Iranian Films

by Hamid Naficy, Tehran Bureau

When A Separation became the first Iranian film to win an Academy Award, more people gained awareness of the country's rich film legacy. Hamid Naficy, a leading authority on Middle Eastern cinema, lists a selection of his favorite Iranian films.

The House is Black (1961), directed by Forugh Farrokhzad

This is a documentary about the lives of the lepers in the Babadaghi Leper Colony near Tabriz -- one of the few films about disability in prerevolution Iran. This was not a typical institutional documentary, however, as it did not laud the services of its sponsor, the Society for Assistance to Lepers, and it did not use the official documentary style (except in a brief medical midsection). In fact, it set the tone and became the model for poetic realist documentaries and their vision of "radical humanism." The film begins with scenes of bitter irony in the classroom of the leper colony in which voice and image counterpoint each other to create a powerful third message. A boy whose fingertips have been eaten away by the merciless disease and another whose face and eyes are ravaged read out loud from a textbook: "Lord, I praise thee for having given me hands to work / Eyes to see the beauty of the world." In other scenes the lepers act like other people: they celebrate a wedding, put on make up, dance. This best poetic realist film by the foremost female poet of the last half of the 20th century, also manifested the parallel between writing poetry and film editing. A detailed examination of films she edited shows that she took a similarly careful approach to film editing as she did to composing poetry. Her written work is characterized by words that are highly evocative, atmospheric, emotional, sensorial, and corporeal. One of her coworkers at Golestan Film Workshop, Karim Emami, noted that many of her words "appertain to senses and the nervous system." Her words refer to the physicality of reality in the same way that each shot of a documentary -- the type of film she made -- indexes an external reality. In addition, her poetic realism stems from her working with each shot in her films as though it were a word in a poem, with great care and precision.

The Cow (1969), directed by Dariush Mehrjui

This is a fiction film about a villager who owns a pregnant cow, the sole source of milk for the village, to whom he is very close. One day when he is town his cow disappears and his wife and other village elders decide to hide that fact from him, claiming that she had simply ran away. The villager does not believe this, but he is so traumatized by the loss of the cow that he gradually becomes the cow, assuming his identity, sleeping in the cowshed. The film helped bring about the new wave movement, which put Iranian cinema on the map of the world cinema. Based on a short story by a prominent writer and psychiatrist, Gholamhosain Saedi, and adapted for the screen by the UCLA trained director, the film inaugurated the theme of the return to authentic Iranian roots in the face of ersatz westernization then in vogue. However, it was also filled with the fear and anxieties of a modernizing nation under authoritarian rule -- inaugurating another important theme of art cinema. It was banned for several years but after its triumph at the Venice film festival it was eventually released to great acclaim.

Iranian art needs more exposure, says artist

Exhibition showcasing Iranian and Middle Eastern art underway at Arsh Art Gallery runs till August 31, 2012.

by Carolina D’Souza, Staff Reporter, Gulf News

Iranian art needs more exposure, said Iranian artist Saba Orouji by way of observation at Arsh Art Gallery, Dubai, where an exhibition showcasing Iranian and Middle Eastern art is underway.

The exhibition, titled Group Exhibition, features surrealist and abstract paintings and sculpture by mostly Iranian artists Taha Behbahani, Parvin Soheili, Mona Orouji, Tara Behbahani, Behnaz Sarhangi and Italian Marinella Campisi.

The 37 pieces are of oil on canvas and mixed media.

“There are so many artists in Iran whose works are still unknown to the world. Not many foreigners travel to Iran to be familiar with contemporary Iranian art,” said Orouji, who is also the Co-Director of the Gallery.

Her reasoning also feeds in to the idea behind the Gallery that was launched earlier this year. “There are many contemporary artists in Iran who are interested in exhibiting their work around the world; our gallery provides the space for them,” she said.

War in the Iranian Theater

A terrified stupor in the realm of the absurd.

  

by Arts Correspondent, Tehran Bureau

Three years have passed since the last presidential election and its violent aftermath. Three years are nothing. But strangely, most of the Iranians I know don't talk about those events anymore. No significant tribute has been paid even on Facebook, though the occurrences of June 2009 were instrumental in establishing it as the virtual theater of political protest.

Could anyone not recall what happened? It is difficult to forget such traumatic violence and humiliation. But memory is a strange thing, it changes over time, and the artistic expression of painful events transforms as well. I have in mind a play I saw in February, during the 30th Fajr International Theater Festival: Two Liters by Two Liters of Peace, written and directed by Hamid Reza Azarang.

The Birth of the Iranian Vampire Western

One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilisation represses and oppresses - Robin Wood

 Never seen an Iranian vampire Western flick? Neither have we!

by Sara Zia Ebrahimi, REORIENT

Ana Lily Amirpour is an Iranian-American screenwriter and director of narrative films and music videos, whose work has been screened at festivals around the globe, and honoured with prestigious international awards. Ana, along with lawyer and producer Sina Sayyah, is the co-founder of Say Ahh … Productions, whose team is gearing up to shoot a groundbreaking new feature length film, entitled A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. I recently sat down with Lily to ask her about the film, which is being hailed as the ‘first Iranian Vampire Western’.

SZE: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Nightis a unique mix of genres. Can you tell us a bit about the inspiration for the project? You’ve noted David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish as influences, but what inspired the overall idea for melding all these inspirations together to create an Iranian vampire film?

When you’re this indie, a lot of the film grows out of necessity. Like, ‘I have to somehow make a film. This is generally what I’d like the genre to be – now what else do I have, and what can I do with that’, you know?  So I had this deep desire to have my first feature be an Iranian film, but it’s not like I could shoot in Iran. So I thought, I’ll make my own place, like an Iranian Gotham – and I invented Bad City. I had these actors whom I wanted to work with, so I actually wrote the parts with them in mind, and there was this desert ghost town near where I grew up which became the location, and these amazing Iranian musicians I know, and a badass Iranian graffiti artist, and a 57 T-Bird also came into the picture. So it started from there and very quickly came together.

Women's Life

This is a 3 minute video about the series of paintings Women's Life 

with a narration by the artist Aida Foroutan.

Related Link: Representation of Women in Iranian Art

It’s a Man’s World

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

Shurooq Amin, My Harem in Heaven, Image courtesy REORIENT

by Joobin Bekhrad, REORIENT

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

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

Mise–en–scène

An exhibition of emerging Iranian Art

Mise–en–scène is shown at Etemad Gallery Dubai until 28th July

 Farniyaz Zaker, Puppet behind the curtain, Puppet behind the window, 2012, is a new interpretation of Sadegh Hedayat’s popular short story of the same name which details the accounts of a young man who falls in love with a mannequin in a shop window. Image courtesy of Etemad Gallery

by Paul McLoughlin, Brownbook

As one of the best representatives of Iranian art outside the country, Etemad Gallery Dubai continues to push the envelope in promoting emerging Persian artists. Etemad’s latest exhibition is testament to this, bringing together some of Iran’s brightest young artists in Dubai through a mixed media display entitled mise–en–scène.

The exhibition includes the work of contemporary artists such as Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Pedram Baldari, Mostafa Choobtarash, Elnaz Farajollahi, Arash Fesharaki and Farniyaz Zaker combining painting, photography, sculpture and film. Subjects often deal with contemporary issues through traditional modes of expression such as Choobtarash’s pop art-inspired paintings that references Persian folk tales. Jareh Das from Etemad Gallery Dubai says of the exhibition, ‘mise–en–scène brings together the works of emerging artists from Iran, showcasing the diverse practices, influences and approaches adopted by a new generation of Iranian artists.’

A Defiant Beauty

“Contemporary Iranian Art from the Permanent Collection at the Met” is on view until September 3, 2012 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

(L) Faces #10 Y.Z. Kami  (American, born Iran, Teheran 1956),1992 , Oil on canvas, H. 22, W. 14 inches (55.9 x 35.6 cm.), Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

(R) "Way In Way Out": Women of Allah Shirin Neshat  (Iranian, born 1957), 1994, Ink on photograph, H. 12, W. 9 inches (30.5 x 22.9 cm.), Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

by Pamela A. Lewis, GALO Magazine 

Given the media’s almost daily drumbeat reporting the ill will, distrust, and unveiled hostility defining today’s Iran, it seems not only implausible but foolhardy to believe that art – whether good or bad – can be created in such a benighted place. The coupling of art and Iran may be oxymoronic, but the current installation, Contemporary Iranian Art from the Permanent Collection, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, displaying seven works by six contemporary Iranian artists spanning three generations, puts a powerful lie to notions that nothing good or beautiful can come out of that deeply scarred land.

The Met has been collecting contemporary Iranian art since 1993, its earliest objects acquired by the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, and in 2011, the Department of Islamic Art began to collect in this area.

The artists – Monir  Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (born 1924), Afruz Amighi (b. 1974), Ali Benisadr (b. 1976), Y.Z. Kami (b. 1956), Shirin Neshat (b. 1957), and Parviz Tanavoli (b. 1937) – are living cross-sections of modern-day Iran, not only by age and gender (Farmanfarmaian, Amighi, and Neshat are women), but most significantly by their socio-political messages and their chosen artistic media to communicate their respective visions. While all are natives of Tehran, four of the six make their home in the United States or Canada, and the remaining two continue to work in Iran. Within their essential diversity, each artist addresses the larger issues of identity, gender, religion and politics, evoking at the same time nostalgia and pride in a rich artistic and cultural heritage.

Whimsical Cool

At play in a painter's mental universe.

by Setareh Sabety, Tehran Bureau

On a beautiful sun-splashed Sunday in May, I went to visit Manou Marzban at his studio-villa in a fishing village a few miles up the coast from Cannes.

Manou is the sort of man whom everyone sooner or later loves. He is full of himself, but in a good way. His character is so large, so generous, and so vibrant that people find themselves happy in his company. His enthusiasm is contagious.

The son of an Iranian diplomat who served under the Shah, Manou was educated in Britain and the United States. As the eldest son of a family in exile, he was not able to pursue his passion for art as a young man, opting instead for an MBA and a corporate career. Perhaps it is this latent desire, now happily released, that makes his art to explode with youthful panache. It is the art of an inner boy set free.

Visiting his studio, I was moved by how much it reflected him. Not in the heavy sense of expressing his anxieties or "demons," but in the childlike, whimsical manner of artists who have approached art as play. His art is dramatic, thought-provoking, but above all beautifully animated and colorful.

A renovated and refitted boat garage serves as Manou's studio and gallery. It displays the artist's paintings, drawings, and sculptures. But it does more than that. The place itself is an art installation, with the artist's jet black 1973 Corvette Stingray as its proud centerpiece.

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.