The Persian nightingale and the flowers of hope

Shahram Nazeri is the undisputed master of setting Rumi's poetry to music. At a recent concert in Tehran, the renowned musician sang his audience into a state of ecstasy and gave voice to the Iranians' hopes for a brighter cultural future. After several barren years, the cultural scene is indeed showing tentative signs of change.

Iranian musician Shahram Nazeri. Courtesy Qantara.

by Massoud Schirazi, Qantara

It is midwinter in Tehran, and the concert season is underway. For two long months there were no large concerts – or at least no joyful ones – anywhere in the country. In the month of Moharram, during which Shia Muslims mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, happy occasions and music for entertainment purposes are not deemed appropriate. Traditional restaurants refrain from live performances and teahouses turn the background music down. The month after that, Safar, is the time of Arba'een, the fortieth day after Hussein's passing, and the anniversary of Mohammed's death, which makes such musical events equally taboo.

Among the big names in Iranian music who have started announcing their concerts again in newspaper ads and on posters is Shahram Nazeri. Alongside Mohammad Reza Shajarian and Ali Reza Ghorbani, Nazeri is one of the most popular classical singers in Iran. The "New York Times" once called him "the Persian nightingale".

The cultural face of Iran

Shahram Nazeri's benefit concert for victims of leprosy in the festival hall of the Milad tower is soon sold out. Audience numbers at performances by popular singers like Nazeri are very high in Tehran. For the size of the city, Tehran's concert scene is rather meagre, as most of the artists left the country after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Others – like Shahram Nazeri – stayed and continued to lend Iran a cultural face, even under the difficult conditions of censorship.

Noted Iranian filmmaker makes first US visit

Still from Nedamatgah (Women's Prison), Dir: Kamran Shirdel, 1965. Courtesy of the artist.

by Kevin Begos, The Associated Press

Kamran Shirdel's films have been censored, banned and celebrated for documenting hidden parts of Iranian society — the plight of Tehran's prostitutes, the desperation of female prisoners, and the reality behind false heroes.

Now he's visiting the U.S. for the first time, speaking about his art and what it took to make it as a filmmaker, first under the Shah then under Islamic rule.

Shirdel, 75, began filming poor and working-class Iranians in the 1960s. Early documentaries such as "Women's Quarter" established Shirdel as an uncompromising artist — and got him fired from a job in the Shah's Ministry of Culture.

Shirdel spoke to The Associated Press at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, which invited him to America and sponsored the trip. He's also scheduled to talk at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and at Columbia University in New York.

Educated in Italy under legendary filmmakers Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Shirdel worked as an assistant on John Huston's epic film "The Bible." Although he could have made his career working abroad, he said he couldn't forget "the harsh reality of life" among Tehran's poor and returned home and produced work that in spirit resembled documentary rabble-rousers such as Michael Moore.

Shirdel was at first given the opportunity to work within the system. In the mid-1960s the Ministry of Culture gave him a job and "wanted the propaganda films," Shirdel recalled, yet also allowed him to film inside a women's prison and at a reform school for prostitutes.

Seeing the tragic situations of the women firsthand, Shirdel knew immediately what he wanted chronicle, and knew it wouldn't be acceptable to the authorities, since the Shah was trying to promote an image of a modern, prosperous Iranian society.

Iranian director returns from artistic exile to stage classic tale

With 22 students in tow, husband-and-wife team make journey from Vancouver to a Tehran stage

Stained glass display at Vahdat Hall. Courtesy Guardian.

by Tehran Bureau correspondent, Guardian

“These ... these are the men of Iran ... and they say with a heavy heart: ‘What can we do now? For our bows are broken, our arrows have no place and our hands lie trembling.’ It was exactly as they described. For they had returned from a long war.”

So begins the tale of Aurash, as told by writer and director Bahram Beyzaie. The legend of Aurash the archer is woven into Iranian folklore; among the various texts in which it is mentioned is the Shahnameh, the national epic written more than 1,000 years ago by Abolqasem Ferdowsi. In 20th-century Iran, two men brought the legend back to Iranians’ consciousness: Siavash Kasrayi, with a poem in 1959, and the following year by Beyzaie, then just 21, with a script – more precisely, a barkhani: a story to be read aloud.

Despite his wishes, Beyzaie never got to direct a version of his Aurash barkhani for the Tehran stage, but Ghotbeddin Sadeghi finally did in 1999. Sadeghi, given the smallest space in Tehran’s City Theatre complex, the Chahrsou room in the basement, masterfully brought the sweeping story of war and its aftermath to life.

In Beyzaie’s telling of the story, Iran has been defeated in a long, wearying conflict. Bruised and broken, the country must send an archer to shoot from the highest summit of the Alborz mountains. The spot where his arrow lands will mark Iran’s new border. Aurash is a simple stablehand who, through a series of misadventures, is compelled to take on this great duty. As he makes the gruelling journey to the Alborz, the storyteller declares, “It is your soul that will throw the arrow, and not the power of your arms.” When the time finally arrives, he and the bow become one, disappearing over the horizon. Iran gets back every inch of its land but Aurash is never seen again. The barkhani concludes with the line, “But I know a people that still say Aurash shall return.”

Images of the Prophet Muhammad In and Out of Modernity

The Curious Case of a 2008 Mural in Tehran: 
Q&A with University of Michigan art history professor and muralist Christiane Gruber

Mural of Muhammad’s ascension, located at the intersection of Modarres and Motahhari Avenues, Tehran, Iran, 2008. Courtesy Jadaliyya.

In 2008, a five-story mural was painted onto the wall of an apartment building in the northern section of Tehran. The mural represents the Prophet Muhammad’s ascension into the heavens, as well as an inhabitant of Paradise offering a flower to a man in the lower right corner. While the composition is based on a 15th-century “Book of Ascension” manuscript, it nevertheless has been altered in two significant ways: first, a man painted in a hyper-realistic mode has been inserted into the composition and, second, the facial features of the Prophet have been removed. Tracing how the original painting has been pictorially augmented and edited for the public sphere, this talk offers some new ideas on how images are received and updated in modern Islamic artistic practices. It will do so by paying special attention to the mural’s symbolic position within Iran’s Shi‘i-Islamic politico-cultural agenda and oppositional responses to the Jyllands-Posten cartoon controversy of 2005-2006.

by Sarah Vassello, The Daily Tar Heel

Christiane Gruber, an art history professor and director of graduate studies at the University of Michigan, will speak at Hanes Art Center today about her work on a five-story mural in Tehran, Iran, painted in 2008, that represents the Prophet Muhammad and the changing visual representation of Islamic tradition. Sarah Vassello spoke with Gruber about the ways in which changes in the Iranian political, artistic and cultural spheres are shown in the painting and how the Dutch cartoon controversy of 2005, in which the Prophet Muhammad was depicted, prompted such a strong response from Iranians.

Daily Tar Heel: What first made you interested in the lecture topic?

Christiane Gruber: I’ve been researching this topic for about a dozen years — images and texts of the Prophet in Islamic devotional traditions — so, for me, what is interesting as an art historian is the way in which Islamic religious cultures and political cultures use images to make certain claims or to send message.

DTH: This mural is relatively recent. How did you come to hear about it?

CG: I drove right across it when I was in Tehran and it caught my eye. I’ve been working on images of Muhammad in Islam across the board and also mural arts in Iran for the last 12 years. I typically do go around Iran and look at the murals — I’ve studied them, I’ve written about them — and when I found this one, which captures both my interest in images of Muhammad and mural arts, and I saw what was happening in the mural, I decided I should really set myself to the task of understanding what was happening with that mural.

From Tehran to Newcastle

“I Am Nasrine” and the Politics of Telling Migrant Narratives

“I Am Nasrine” is the first feature length-film from Iranian-British Director Tina Gharavi. Newly available on DVD, the BAFTA-nominated film follows two Iranian siblings as they struggle to make new lives for themselves in the UK. It can also be watched online here.

by Alex Shams, Ajam Media Collective

Iranian-British director Tina Gharavi’s new film I Am Nasrine is a groundbreaking tale of the lives of an Iranian brother and sister (played by Micsha Sadeghi and Shiraz Haq) who flee to the United Kingdom and find a world that looks very little like anything they expected. Ajam Media Collective sat down with Gharavi in Paris to discuss the film and the difficulties involved in giving a complex account of an Iranian immigrant story for a British audience.

From the outset, I Am Nasrine defies stereotypes and simplistic explanations of the motives and desires of migrants. The main character Nasrine’s parents force her to leave Iran against her will after she has a nasty run-in with the morality police, and she is accompanied by her brother, Ali, to start a new life abroad.

Relocation by immigration authorities to the public housing projects of an industrial northern English town, however, shocks the two middle-class siblings, as they find themselves isolated in a dark, impoverished and unfriendly new setting. The pair eventually find love and opportunities in their new home, as Nasrine befriends a girl from a local English Traveller community and Ali finds companionship, work, and romance in the city center. But the spate of Islamophobia that overtakes the town following September 11 combined with a pervasive and violent homophobia, leads the duo to a tragic end.

 “England is portrayed in a very brutal way”

Director Tina Gharavi, an Iranian immigrant to the UK herself, has few delusions about the realities of modern working-class British life, and the film spares no punches to reveal the unforgiving realities facing the young siblings both before and after their flight abroad.

“England is portrayed in a very brutal way,” she explains. “You almost feel like the Iranian government could show this film to potential immigrants and be like, ‘This is what happens to you if you go! You end up in a rubbish house, people are racist and they’re not very nice!’”

'Art doesn't have a border'

The artist, Hadi Hazavei, discusses freedom, growing up with cows and responsibilities that limit art

Hadi Hazavei’s brick structure: crude organisms and formal abstractions. Courtesy Shirin Gallery.

by Tara Aghdashloo, Tehran Bureau, Guardian

An exhibition of 49 works by Hadi Hazavei at New York City’s Shirin Gallery shows the artist’s material range and conceptual progression. An array of colours, lines, and layers come together in his older series, while his fingertips and palms have left their imprints amid the chaotic aesthetics of his more recent pieces. One wall is filled with minimalist geometric sketches reminiscent of glassworks from his Iranian homeland.

Hazavei’s oeuvre revolves around the duality of crude organisms and formal abstractions. This interplay is evident more confidently than ever in his new brick sculptures, a series both primal and prim. The bricks – some of them from around his current home in New Jersey – seem to hover, dancing in different directions. Some, around 150 years old, appear on the verge of crumbling, highlighting the artist’s fascination with the tension between organic and inorganic processes. He describes them as self-portraits.

TA: So tell me about this exhibition and how the works were chosen.

HH: Some of the works you see in this exhibition are from 1982, but most are from 2005 onwards. The brick works are from 2011 and 2012.

TA: Where did these bricks come from?

HH: Historically brick was the most fundamental unit in Iranian and Middle Eastern architecture and buildings. At some point clay was heated and made into bricks. As early as the time of the Achaemenian dynasty, they used bricks that were 30cm or 50cm thick. These were glazed, had 3D designs on them, with abstract natural figures; you can see examples of this in Persepolis – such as [the carvings of] soldiers, which are a masterpiece in colour and execution ...

I wanted to get to the foundation of it. Like how the foundation of the rug is the knot, bricks are architecture’s foundation.

TA: Have you had a deep interest in and attraction to architecture?

HH: Always. You know art doesn’t have a border. Painting, architecture, music, poetry, literature, and visual arts in general ... they are all summarised in one concept and that is the spiritual expression of people, articulated through different forms and mediums. Yet architecture has an additional function, which is that we live in it. It’s a space that we try to be happy yet also physically active in.

I took the purpose of the brick from that simple foundation of buildings and changed it to my own artistic expression. When I look at a brick, it is sitting there, all dignified, polite and proper, like how our parents always ask us to be! And I hate all these words ... Some suggest the same words to describe works of art. They want art to follow certain national traditions or to be “honest.” These are stupid responsibilities that limit art.

Persian Visions exhibition to shed new light on Iran

Bahman Jalali, Image of the Imagination series, 2002/7, Digital print on paper, 65 x 65 cm. 

by Tyler Murphy, The DePauw

Walking through the Persian Visions Exhibit in the Low Gallery of Peeler Art Center, visitors are invited to look at a less-explored side of Iran. High contrast prints and mysterious videos contrast the war-torn Iran the media shows with a more beautiful version.

The exhibition, which illuminates 20 Iranian artists and 58 original works of art, was made possible in part by the Ilex Foundation, the University of Minnesota McKnight Arts and Humanities Endowment and the Department of Art and Regis Center for Art at the University of Minnesota. These institutions have been working with DePauw University since February 2012 to bring the exhibit to campus.

Though the artists come from different parts of Iran, the works seem to flow as one consistent show that brings together black and white prints, color prints, video and audio elements.

Craig Hadley, curator of exhibitions and university collections, hopes the exhibit will shine a new light on Iran that many students are unaware of.

“For many Americans, our familiarity with Iran is colored almost exclusively by conflict, political instability and the threat of nuclear weapons,” Hadley said. “The photography and film in Persian Visions provides a completely different perspective on how we might come to try and understand life in Iran.”

The sound of a man walking over crunchy gravel can be heard throughout the high-ceilinged room, matching the footsteps of those observing the pieces.

Many of the works feature high-contrast black and white colored pieces such as those by artists Ebrahim Khadem Bayat and Koroush Adim.

 Their pieces feature up-close views of Iranian people, as well as panoramic views of urban landscapes. Their works also overlap different photos to create multi-layered prints.

Islamic Revolution Can't Upstage Iranian Cinema

by Charles Recknagel, RFE/RL

When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took power in Iran 35 years ago on February 11, Iran's filmmakers had good reason to worry.

The strict code of censorship ushered in by the Islamic Revolution convinced many that creativity and film were no longer compatible in Iran.

Yet today, despite the continuing strict censorship rules governing them, Iran's artistic films -- as opposed to the country's commercial-release films -- are universally acclaimed as among the most innovative and important participants in international film festivals.

The filmmakers' ability to overcome the suffocation of censorship, while still working under it, is one of the rare successes in the daily struggle ordinary Iranians wage to have greater personal freedom under an authoritarian regime. At the same time, the battle against censorship has had a great influence in forging the look and style of Iranian art films, which have earned a place of distinction in the eyes of film lovers worldwide.

Many authoritarian governments impose strict political restrictions on artists. But the Islamic republic's censorship code is unusually strict because it includes social restrictions as well. The social restrictions particularly limit how relationships between men and women -- one of the most fundamental subjects of the arts -- can be depicted.

The red lines forbid almost all physical gestures of romantic love, limit the kinds of issues that can be discussed, and bar women from singing or dancing on screen. They also require actresses to wear the hijab -- clothing that masks the figure and covers the hair -- for indoor as well as outdoor scenes, even though in reality Iranian women generally dress at home as they wish and don't cover their hair.

Jamsheed Akrami, a professor of film at William Paterson University in New Jersey, says that the censorship code is so burdensome that the first talent any serious filmmaker must possess is the ability to get around it.

"Whenever you are under strict restrictions, you try to find out ways of getting around them to still communicate your messages. To the credit of the Iranian filmmakers, they have become very adept at skirting the censorship codes," Akrami says. "In fact, as an Iranian filmmaker your most prized possession is your ability to undermine the censorship codes and find ways of getting around them. Your artistic gift is like a secondary requirement."

Women’s Role in Iranian Cinema

'You all have lost a woman, you all are looking for your lost one.'

(B. Beyzaie, Fath Nameh Kalat)

Dir. Tahmineh Milani, Yeki Az Mā Do Nafar (One of Our Two), 2011.

by Niloofar Beyzaie, IranDokht

In February 1994, Ms. Niloofar Bayzaie gave a lecture titled “A Look at Women’s Role in Iranian Cinema” in Frankfort. Ms. Beyzaie graciously provided us with a written version of her lecture. Due to limited space in the magazine, we will provide only parts of her text here. Another friend and colleague, Jamileh Nedaee, also discussed women's cinema in the same seminar, and we hope to publish her lecture as well in the future.

The movie camera is a tool to record images. It searches the world to find and select particular subjects. The camera focuses on personal problems and displays what it finds to the audience, which. Is then obligated to see what the camera shows. With that in mind, when a male filmmaker directs a female actor, he focuses only on those aspects of women that are important and worthwhile to him. Therefore, the female character is influenced by the director’s own stereotypes. Now let’s look at a female filmmaker directing a female actor. Under this theory, a female director would portray women differently than a male director. Does this actually occur?

In reality, not every woman filmmaker is capable of creating work that truly defends women’s rights. Additionally, most movies made by men are extremely anti-feminine, since our patriarchal society emphasizes the power and capabilities of men and the weakness and incapability of women. Studying the roots and causes of this problem is not within the scope of our discussion.

A Brief Look at the Post-Revolutionary Cinema

The dominant image of women in post-revolutionary cinema is that of a tempting, seductive and dangerous person.

The Strange Fruits of Fascination

Exploring the mutual fascination between Iran and Europe through art in Switzerland

Still from Hamed Sahihi’s ‘Observer’. Courtesy REORIENT.

by Natasha Morris, REORIENT

Though the German word sehnsucht is often translated as ‘fascination’ in English, it also carries with it connotations of longing and desire. Between September 2013 and January 2014, the concept of sehnsucht was explored, particularly with respect to the longstanding relationship between Iran and Europe. Focusing on the threads of contact woven between the 1600s to the present day, a rich and thought-provoking dialogue of aesthetics, politics, and identity was presented, which featured some 200-odd works from both Persian and European classical artists, as well as some of Iran’s most important contemporary artists.

Nestled in a park below the Alpine mountains, Museum Rietberg is widely known as Switzerland’s sole museum dedicated to the showcasing of non-European art. For the exhibition, the building’s transparent façade was covered with confetti of green geometrical shapes that implied a sort of serendipitous Islamic minimalism, while the work chosen for the poster of the recent exhibition, Sehnsucht Persien – roughly translating to The Fascination of Persia – was one of a series of towering late 17^th century Safavid oil paintings depicting quixotic characters amongst ornate backgrounds. Although thought to have been decorated for the interiors of Isfahan’s wealthy elites, the subjects in the paintings were devoid of any concrete identity or attribution, thus presenting an immediate allure for the beholder. An older enigma in the series, that of a blonde, blue-eyed man in flowering Turco-Georgian robes stood out particularly luminescent beneath the dim lighting inside the museum.

The exhibition itself, housed deep within an underbelly extension of the building, presented an admixture of the grace and delicacy of classical Persian and European works with the beauty and brutality of ones by contemporary Iranian artists. The curation by Axel Langer and Susann Wintsch was sensitive in its display of a refreshing departure from the usual narrative of trade in an exhibition hinged on cross-cultural exchange. Speaking with Langer, he told me that the link he drew between his curated works became increasingly conceptual rather than formal, which resulted in comparisons between the pieces that were at times more subtle than straightforward. Langer and Wintsch didn’t shirk from past-present dialogues either, although the works by the contemporary artists in the exhibition seemed to be more influenced by modern-day Iran, their historical ties and connections with a Perso-European past being largely formulated through the curation. Also present there, sprinkled throughout the impressive and varied exhibition catalogue, were black and red caption boxes presenting a tripartite and trilingual dialogue between the works from Baroque Europe, Safavid Persia, and contemporary Iran.

Our House Is On Fire

Exiled Iranian artist Shirin Neshat looks at the Egyptian revolution

Hassan, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. Via W

by Ruth Tam, The Washington Post 

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian visual artist who was born in Qazvin, Iran, educated in Berkeley, California and is currently based in New York. Her earliest work as a photographer was born out of a trip back to Iran in 1993 where she explored concepts of exile and identity under a feminine lens. In the late nineties, she devoted herself to a series of stark, black and white video installations that referenced contradictions of gender in society. Breaking away from photography, she turned to cinema and directed her first feature-length film, “Women Without Men,” which won the 2009 Venice Film Festival Silver Lion award for best directing. Most recently, Neshat was honored by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland with a 2014 Crystal Award. The award is given annually to artists who have made contributions to improving the state of the world. On January 21, she shared the stage with fellow recipients actor Matt Damon, singer Juan Diego Florez and conductor Lorin Maazel. She spoke to She The People from New York after her return from Davos.

Congratulations on winning one of this year’s Crystal Awards.

Thank you, I was so nervous. The awards ceremony was in front of political and economic leaders who have never heard of me before. Matt Damon is a known figure but I’m a visual artist; I don’t have that kind of familiarity. To go and leave an impression for two minutes was very challenging.

What does it mean for an artist like yourself to win an award that is not necessarily for art but for cultural leadership?

This was one of the most meaningful experiences I’ve had in my artistic career. Very often, I talk about politics in my work but in an artist’s community, people are distant from those issues. At Davos, I participated in a couple panels where the audience was not from the art world. I felt like an oddball but to see that they were listening and were interested in the role of an artist was really meaningful to me.

You directly addressed Iranian president Hassan Rouhani in your acceptance speech and “passed him the torch to be the nation’s saving grace.” Rouhani was also at the forum. Did you get to meet with him afterwards?

I am supportive of him but critical of the government and past administration. A director of the forum asked me if I wanted to request a meeting, but it would have been very awkward because he was surrounded by people from the administration. For him to acknowledge and talk to me, who has been blacklisted, it would look like he was endorsing me. And to be honest for myself, I don’t think it would have been a good idea to meet him. I have very mixed feelings about it.

What inspired your latest body of work, Our House Is on Fire?

Dance and Diaspora

ODC series spotlights Persian dance

by Andrea Pflaumer, San Francisco Examiner

Shahrzad Khorsandi and Farima Berenji, both Bay Area performers of Iranian descent, are on a special mission to preserve the spiritual heritage of Persian dance.

“I always danced informally. It’s so much woven into the culture. In my family we’d just grab a pot or pan and bang on it and start singing our folk songs. And everybody would dance,” says Iranian-born dancer Khorsandi, whose unique contemporary Persian dance includes quintessential Persian movements that are informed by training in other dance cultures.

Berenji, who has degrees in art history, anthropology, archeology and performance, showcases dances of ancient Persia with rich meaning and transcendence.

This weekend, both appear at ODC Theater in the latest installment of its “Dance and Diaspora” series. They are accompanied by musicians Saman Mahmoudi on santoor and Samandar Dehghani on percussion.

Berenji approaches Persian dance with the passion of a historian.

“Due to the lure of technology and city life, the ancient nomadic dances are rapidly disappearing,” she says. “But if we have saved them for 5,000 years, the younger generation can do so for the next 100 years.”

While preserving the culture, she discovered mystical meanings in dances associated with Persian poetry and art.

Farsi Funk, Bosphorus Beats

Examining the recent surge of interest in the sound of 60s &70s Iran and Turkey

Googoosh. Courtesy REORIENT.

by Joobin Bekhrad, REORIENT

A few months ago on a lazy Sunday afternoon, as I was strolling down the quirky fashion drag that is Toronto’s Queen Street, I spotted something in the corner of my eye that seemed just ever so slightly out of context. Stopping for a moment, I looked into the display window of a trendy vinyl store, and eyed there amongst the colourful sleeves of obscure folk and rock albums the word Zendooni (Persian for ‘Prisoner’) in garish yellow lettering above a conspicuously Iranian-looking woman in a field of sunflowers; Funk, psychedelia and pop from the Iranian pre-revolution generation read the description. Lacking a record player, I immediately looked up the album on the Internet upon arriving at home (after enjoying a dose of coffee and pre-Revolution Iranian pop art at nearby R², of course), and discovered that it was yet another pressing by the American record label Light in the Attic, which had previously released albums in a similar vein such as Khana Khana!, as well as a formidable compilation of hits by the Iranian rocker Kourosh Yaghmaei and a previously unreleased selection of songs by the hitherto unknown Tehran-based garage band The Jokers.

Although I had successfully sourced with eagerness the tracks on Zendooni, it wasn’t the first time I’d gone digging in pursuit of Iranian ‘nuggets’ (as record collectors like to call them) from the 60s and 70s; that is, from that brief era of bliss before the shit hit the fan for the Iranian music industry. My love affair with these quirky disco, funk, and psychedelic tracks began some years ago during the autumn of 2009, whilst a humble University student in dankest, darkest London. Somehow or other, I managed to stumble upon a compilation of songs, mostly rarities, from pre-Revolution Iran, simply entitled Pomegranates. Featuring a wistful looking, headscarf-clad Ramesh on the sleeve, the album more or less constituted the soundtrack of my university days, and sparked within me an interest for not only the rock and popular music of 60s and 70s Iran, but also of nearby Turkey, India, and the Arab world.

While Pomegranates represented one of the first major compilation of ‘nuggets’ from the Middle East, it certainly wasn’t the last of its kind. Shortly afterwards, scores of compilations of obscure tracks from Iran, Turkey, and the Arab world began to abound in record stores, while fans of these genres uploaded individual tracks and homemade playlists on YouTube and other music-based social media sites. As I fell prey to the allure of these all-but-forgotten (in many cases, at least) gems from a bygone era and began creating an archive of what I believed to be the more noteworthy numbers, I began to ponder the phenomenon of the growing interest in this sort of music, particularly in the West. As well, as my collection expanded, I also started noticing considerable differences in the styles, variations, and forms of the 60s and 70s contemporary music of the countries across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as their place within the broader sphere of the respective music scenes and the zeitgeists of the region.

Persepolis: Word & Image

Iranian Artists Featured in UConn Reads Exhibition

Inspired by both the format and content of Persepolis, the graphic novel and coming-of-age memoir by Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: Word & Image draws from the Benton's permanent collection to present some of the ways that text and art have functioned historically. Also featured are works on loan from several contemporary Iranian artists, including Pouran Jinchi, Shirin Neshat, Afarin Rahmanifar, and Hadieh Shafie, for whom text is intrinsic to their practice.

Pouran Jinchi. Untitled 18 (Entropy Series), 2012. Acrylic and ink on canvas. Courtesy of the artist, Leila Heller Gallery and UConn Today.

by Kenneth Best, UConn Today

In organizing the first two exhibitions celebrating the UConn Reads program, the permanent collection of the William Benton Museum of Art offered many works of art that connected thematically with that year’s book selection.

The Benton’s permanent collection contains a number of works that provided historical perspective on the gender-based oppression issues raised in Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. It also includes a wide range of art created during the 1920s that reflected F. Scott Fitzgerald’s themes of wealth, widespread urbanization, and modernity in The Great Gatsby.

This year’s selection for UConn Reads, the graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, posed a challenge for Carla Galfano ’05 (SFA), ’11 MA, assistant curator at the Benton, who organized the current exhibit, “Persepolis: Word & Image.”

Galfano says that while the museum’s holdings did not quite match the content of the book – which deals with, among other things, the experience of a young woman growing up at the time of the Islamic Revolution – the art itself offers a strong visual link to Persepolis, as a graphic novel.

“Instead of focusing on the content of the book, we focused on the format,” Galfano says. “We looked at works that feature text [as well as images], because this combination of text and image is interesting and also is pervasive in art. Many contemporary Iranian artists use text because calligraphy is such an important part of the culture.”

Reflections of Persia

An Italian photographer’s lifelong love affair with the land and culture of Iran

Reflections of Persia celebrates the journey of a scholar, photographer, literary translator, and above all, an Iranologist, who has gone above and beyond the political borders of Iran

Riccardo’s Iran, discovered and rediscovered in verdant valleys, dense forests, and desert plains becomes a mirror in which the world and its distant lands appear before one’s eyes.  From the Iranian Encounters series (1972 – 2006). Courtesy REORIENT.

by Aria Fani, REORIENT

Imagine a teenager having recently immigrated to the United States spending the summer in his native Shiraz. The August of Shiraz, hot and dry, draws him inside the bookstores of Molla Sadra avenue. Intimately familiar with the poetry of Sohrab Sepehri, he has a ravenous appetite for commentaries on Sepehri’s oeuvre, which encompasses too many titles to note, even in a bibliography; and, with his new camera, one may even say this teenager has an eye for photography. He grabs a few books, goes to the cashier, and spots underneath the display case at the counter a copy of Ta Shaghayegh Hast (While Poppies Bloom) – an exquisite find!

With colours popping out of its cover, While Poppies Bloom is a coffee table book of 80 photographs of Persian landscapes published together with the poetry of Sohrab Sepehri in both Persian and English. It represents a collaborative effort between the translator, Karim Emami, and the photographer and Iranologist Riccardo Zipoli. In the book’s introduction, written with sincerity and style, Riccardo speaks of his love affair with Iran, its culture, and its people.

Upon his return to the United States, the teenager in question reached out to Riccardo; he admired how well his images of rural Iran captured the voice and sentiment of Sepehri’s poems. Their correspondence marked the beginning of a friendship, initially formed through phone conversations and emails, until the two eventually met several years later over coffee in Campo San Polo in Venice, Riccardo’s ‘second’ home.

Although their correspondences had primarily been of an intellectual nature, their first meeting held a casual, social pleasure as well. The young man – yours truly – immediately stepped into a different world through Riccardo’s eloquence in Persian, his knowledge of Iranian geography, and his ability to tune in to the nuances of Iranian society. With a style of speaking and humour unique to him, tactfully and humbly, Riccardo began to describe his first encounter with Iran in 1972. Having reached Iran via a road trip through former Yugoslavia and Turkey with his mentor, Gianroberto Scarcia, Riccardo’s one-month stay in the country commenced a lifelong love affair that brought together his passion for exploring the Iranian landscape and his area of expertise, Persian poetry.

Recalling The Future

Post-revolutionary Iranian art at the SOAS

Masoumeh Mozaffari’s ‘Table’. Courtesy Financial Times.

by Gareth Harris, Financial Times

After a long political freeze between Iran and the UK, a cultural entente is quietly under way in London with the launch of Recalling the Future: Post-revolutionary Iranian Art, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Four curators including Hamed Yousefi, an Iranian culture critic, and David Hodge, a London-based art historian, have presented trends, ideas and techniques shaping the Iranian art scene today through the works of 29 established, emerging and late artists.

The 1979 revolution, which overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the country’s last royal ruler, provides the provocative impetus for the show. Participating artist Mahmoud Bakhshi says that his generation are often referred to as “children of the revolution”, adding that the tumult of 1979 presents “a rupture point not just for the art history of Iran but for the society at large”.

Most of the artists are based in Iran. “The [Iranian] diaspora is part of an international world scene,” says Hodge, pushing the point that artists located outside Iran are trained differently, living and working in different circumstances. Pivotal and populist art market darlings such as Farhad Moshiri (his crystal-encrusted “Eshgh (Love)” assemblage from 2007 fetched $1m at Bonhams Dubai in 2008) are noticeably absent. Hodge emphasises that the exhibition “is not an all-encompassing survey of Iranian artists”.

“The artists all reject the idea that ‘Iranian-ness’ is a single, fixed identity that remains the same throughout history,” he adds. The press blurb goes even further, boldly claiming that “the work [on show] calls for a complete rethinking of modern Iranian art history”.

Edward Said and Graphic Novels

by Alexius, The Tiger Manifesto

Part 1: Introduction 

Graphic novels represent a new frontier for cultural critics. Today, the graphic novel has taken its place alongside the action blockbuster and the evening (and morning, and afternoon, and nightly) news, America’s favorite source of education about the Middle East. That is no cause for either simple celebration or lament. Peering through the lens of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, this paper will try to see what Americans might be learning from this relatively young medium and what kinds of ideology they might be imbibing. Following a discussion of Frank Miller’s propagandistic oeuvre, the humanistic fairy tale of Craig Thompson’s Habibi, Brian K. Vaughan’s Pride of Baghdad, and Iranian-Western counterpoints Persepolis and Zahra’s Paradise, the paper will briefly point to the potential of a renewed cultural criticism grounded in Lenin’s definition of imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism,”thus grounding his analysis of Western false consciousness in a material analysis of global political economy.

First, however, the reader will benefit from a short exposition of the key concepts and terminology Said uses in Culture and Imperialism, especially the terms “culture” and “imperialism.” Despite Said’s fondness for complicated syntax and burying the lede, he readily supplies such definitions. For “culture” he provides two definitions: first, he means “practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation” which are relatively autonomous from social and political forms. In the second sense, culture is “a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society’s reservoir of the beset that has been known and thought.”¹ Culture is in this way situated as a source of identity, a structuring of attitudes at both a mass level (first definition) and an elite one (second), a discourse that is supposed to transcend everyday existence and provides narratives for the nations that produce and protect it. In turn, Said believes culture becomes a “protective enclosure” that can stifle criticism as much as promote it.²

Imperialism is defined as “the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory,” which is not simply an “act of accumulation and acquisition” since it is “supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations.”³ Imperialism  is possessive and constitutive of culture in both the dominating metropolitan center and the occupied territory, with culture driving the immense expansion of European and American domination over land. Land is the crux of the analysis, because in his method geography defines the position of the author involved. His method of reading, known as contrapuntal reading, “must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded.”⁴

Sundance 2014: At ground zero for U.S. film, a Persian wave

Sheila Vand plays a chador-clad vampire in "A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night." Courtesy Los Angeles Times and Sundance Film Festival.

by Steven Zeitchik, Los Angeles Times

The teenage girl Sepideh only wants to look at the stars.

A student of astronomy and worshipful devotee of Albert Einstein, she dreams of joining the young men who trek out nightly in the desert south of Tehran to gaze at constellations. But such ambitions worry Sepideh’s traditionalist Iranian family members, who issue her ominous warnings -- which, of course, only further fuels her desire.

“Reaching for the Stars," Sepideh says in a new Farsi-language documentary, also named “Sepideh,” that premieres Friday at the Sundance Film Festival, “to vent the frustration that society has given us.”

Sundance, which kicks off its 30th edition Thursday in the mountains of Utah, is largely known for unearthing new domestic voices. Modern indie (and quintessentially American) hits such as "Beasts of the Southern Wild” and "Winter’s Bone" were discovered there in the last few years, and over its history the confab has been the launchpad of filmmakers including Steven Soderbergh, Michael Moore and David O. Russell.

But at this year's edition all of that comes with a twist: Some of the most notable entries are from and about Iran.

"Sepideh," from the Danish-by-birth, Iranian-by-marriage documentarian Berit Madsen, explores a young girl's clash with parental expectation that, though intimately told, is emblematic of a larger generational struggle in the country.

Also premiering is "Appropriate Behavior," a kind of lesbian Iranian American "Girls" written, starring and directed by the tart young Brooklyn-based filmmaker Desiree Akhavan, who had previously become something of a viral sensation for her semi-autobiographical Web series "The Slope."

In a Gagosian Gallerist’s Personal Work, Cultures Collide

Andisheh Avini, Untitled,  2014, Silkscreen ink and marquetry on wood, 24 x 24 inches  (61 x 61 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, N.Y.

by Erica Bellman, T Magazine

Every so often, boxes bedecked with Iranian postage and customs stamps arrive at Andisheh Avini’s doorstep. He can instantly recognize the packages as containing handcrafted marquetry panels from a traditional woodworker in Iran, but, though he ordered them himself, couldn’t tell you what they look like. That’s because when he commissions the works a month before they arrive, his only instructions are their dimensions. The rest — the size and pattern of the decorative inlay on the lacquered wood boards, which are typically used for interior decor — is left to the maker, whom Avini has never met in person. This inscrutability is an essential part of the artist’s process.

The geometric panels serve as the foundations for some of Avini’s work, which explores the notion of memory through the filter of the Iranian-American artist’s cultural histories. Beginning Thursday, the pieces will make up a large part of his eponymous exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery. With silkscreen ink in shades of muted indigo, acid yellow, black and white, Avini overlays the wood panels with swirls and splatters (and, in one painting, a luxurious fringe of peacock feathers) that seem to emanate from their surfaces.

Persian carpets provide another kind of canvas for Avini, who layers the fibers with his abstract strokes. “As a child, I sat upon these rugs, which are filled with imagery and color,” Avini, who daylights as a Gagosian gallerist, recalls. “I have a three-year-old son, so lately I’m down on the ground with him a lot. It triggered my memory.” Avini’s carpets, however, are only vaguely reminiscent of their ornate predecessors — faint peacock feathers are overlaid with saturated, amoebic forms akin to Rorschach inkblots.

Do You Remember?

Reflections on the Collective Memories of Iran’s Post-Revolution Generation

Still from Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Where is the Friend’s Home?’ (Khaneh-ye Doost Kojast?). Courtesy REORIENT.

by Pendar Nabipour, REORIENT

Every individual carries with themselves memories, which give shape and foundation to their identity, behaviour, and perspective; but what happens when memories and experiences are recognised not only by one person, but also by many? When instead of an individual, a group of people with a collective consciousness recall and recount the same memories they all have in common? And, during the process of recollection, what other phenomena occur, and – perhaps most importantly – why and how does such widespread collective recollection come about?

Not long after the 1979 Revolution and the demise of the Pahlavi regime and the Iranian monarchy, Iran was at the peak of post-Revolution chaos, immersed in an eight year-long war with Iraq (1980 – 1988). The new government set a very different tone for, and adopted a new strategy with respect to its internal and external policies, during a time when a new generation was growing up in a society that was learning to adopt itself to its surroundings. As a result of a bloody war, and the establishment of a new Islamic Republic, the lifestyle many Iranians were used to was radically altered.

In the meantime, the expansion of the population became a part of the national agenda, with rewards being given to families based on the assumption that more children would eventually translate to more soldiers in the future. As a result, a baby boom occurred, which occurred in tandem with sanctions imposed by the West, which wreaked havoc on the lives of ordinary Iranians and the economy. Everyday life was loaded with surprises, to say the least.

L-R: A woman producing clothes for soldiers; children carrying donations for the war effort; a popular poster of a young soldier; soldiers during the war. Courtesy REORIENT.

The Navigators

The 2014 winner of The Spectator’s Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for unconventional travel writing, illustrated by Carolyn Gowdy

Courtesy The Spectator

 

by Ruby Stockham, The Spectator

Tehran does not welcome pedestrians. It is eight o’clock on a July evening and the sun has plunged out of the air with alarming speed; the sky is the colour of wine, and the air is thick with the scent of heat and petrol. I have long forgotten where we are going. Dust-coloured buildings spill out to the horizon, many of them protected by barbed-wire gates. In this part of town it is so unusual for people to walk on the streets at night — I am told that only fools and prostitutes do so — that the pavements are unlit, and we rely on the rippling glow of the traffic to guide us. An ancient, sour smell drifts through the door of a butcher’s shop; at the entrance stands a pyramid of sheep skulls, the blank faces neatly assembled as though awaiting instructions.

I was met at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport two weeks ago by Maryam, an impatient and slightly scrappy young actress who has travelled in England and Europe with her theatre group. I stay with her at her parents’ home in Tehran’s affluent northern suburbs: here sycamores line the streets, scattering the sunlight over the ground in pale crescents. The family treat me like an old friend, and I am given my own room that is filled to the ceiling with dolls and cuddly toys. All the windows are kept closed, and the apartment is entered first through an automated gate, then a coded lift, and finally two front doors. There are layered rugs, and two fat Persian cats lie on mounds of bronze cushions in the hallway; it is as if the place has been discreetly decked out as a padded cell.

Maryam’s mother is sweet and ghostly, frail from an illness which makes her look twice her age. She does not leave the house, but hobbles daily into the kitchen to prepare huge meals for the family — fried rice, stewed lamb, beans and dried limes in thick sauces flavoured with rose attar. Her daughter, bone-thin, twists restlessly around the table and often skips off to her bedroom before the rest have finished eating.

In Tehran the elevator is king. People would rather wait several minutes for an empty one than climb a single flight of stairs. On top of this we travel everywhere packed into a boiling car with the soot-flooded air streaming through the windows. The most popular cafés are inside shopping malls. Life in this city takes place underground and inside, crouched in muggy stillness behind stacked walls and entry systems.

Iran’s Reinvention Through Modern Art

Rana Javadi, “Breaking into the Police Station. 32 Brahman 1357 (February 12, 1979)”, (1979), gelatin silver print, 20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61 cm). Private Collection, courtesy of Rana JavadiNicky, Asia Society and Hyperallergic.

by Hrag Vartanian, Hyperallergic

In the history of civilization, Iran plays one of the starring roles, not only because of its geography at the crossroads of many empires, its ancient and largely uninterrupted history to the modern day, but also because it is a dynamic multicultural civilization that has produced some of the world’s most outstanding art. Yet, within the last few decades the reputation of Iran has been tarnished and distorted by a fundamentalist revolution in 1979, and a former leader who used the insane denial of the Jewish Holocaust as a dangerous political football. What we’re faced with today when looking at Iran is a country in transition, slowly morphing from a nation lead by a very conservative leadership to a slightly more liberal one, but a nation, nonetheless, that is still hampered by extensive trade sanctions from Western governments that have largely failed to topple a regime they don’t like.

Asia Society’s Iran Modern is a fascinating exhibition that begins in 1948 and ends with the 1979 Revolution (with a noticeable focus on the latter decades), and the show is a must-see exploration of a period little known in the West but infinitely interesting for numerous reasons, including its non-Western responses to modernity, the prevalence of prominent female artists at a time when the same wasn’t true most elsewhere, and its pushing of boundaries in an era where its experiments in culture could be seen as cutting edge.

Islamic World Through Women’s Eyes

Mideast Photography at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“Untitled #2,” by Gohar Dashti, from Iran. Courtesy the artist, via Forbes.

‘She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers From Iran and the Arab World’: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, presents an ambitious and revealing exhibition.

 View Slideshow

by Vicki Goldberg, The New York Times

Middle Eastern women, supposedly powerless and oppressed behind walls and veils, are in fact a force in both society and the arts. They played a major role in the Arab Spring and continue to do so in the flourishing regional art scene — specifically in photography — which is alive and very well indeed. Some Middle Eastern photographers have taken their cameras to the barricades, physical ones and those less obvious, like the barriers erected by stereotypes, which they remain determined to defy. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, takes note in “She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers From Iran and the Arab World,” an ambitious and revealing exhibition of work by 12 women, some internationally known.
      

The curator, Kristen Gresh, says in the catalog that this show, which runs through Jan. 12, was intended to explore “the dualities of the visible and invisible, the permissible and forbidden, the spoken and the silent, and the prosaic and the horrific.” These approximately 100 photographs and two videos generally respond to that intention and open a wide window on what preoccupies women in regions that are read about here more often in news articles about riots and refugees. At times, the ideas in this show count more than the images, which range in quality from remarkable and convincing to the merely derivative in some cases.

      

In the Middle East, it hasn’t always been easy or considered respectable for women to photograph. Boushra Almutawakel, born in Yemen, recalled that a man once asked her what she did; when she replied that she was a photographer, he said sweetly, “It’s nice to have a hobby.” She was nervous about her first show, partly because it included pictures of herself, but only later did her mother voice disapproval: “Who shows pictures of herself?” She answered, “Mama, they’re art, they’re in a museum,” to which her mother replied, “Who sells pictures of herself?”

      

Iran poses particular difficulties to photojournalists, both male and female. Shadi Ghadirian, from Iran, said in a video that in her country a female photographer is a potential traitor. Many colleagues have been detained and imprisoned, and some have never returned. Newsha Tavakolian, an Iranian who has photographed for The New York Times, said in an interview, “We have a red line.” Where is it? “I don’t know. No one knows where it is.” Then, with a shrug, she added, “Everyone knows.”

Custodian of Vacancy: The Iranian Embassy in the USA

Iranian Embassy, shuttered for decades, was known for hedonistic, star-studded gatherings

Recent U.S.-Iran negotiations have sparked hopes of renewed relations and memories of swanky embassy parties.

Eric Parnes, Hospitality, 2013, archival print on cotton paper, 56 x 100 cm. Courtesy the artist and Ayyam Gallery.

By Tara Bahrampour, The Washington Post

Eric Parnes stood in the rain beside the austere white building on Embassy Row, its parking lot empty, its rooms silent and shuttered for more than three decades, and he pointed at where bacchanals once raged late into the night.

Here was the grand entryway where limousines dropped off diplomats, socialites and movie stars. There was the courtyard with its delicate blue-flowered tile work, and, just beyond it, the Persian Room, an imposing space whose high-domed ceiling glittered with hundreds of tiny mirrors.

The Iranian Embassy at 3005 Massachusetts Ave. was once “the number one embassy when it came to extravagance,” wrote frequent guest Barbara Walters in a memoir. As tuxedo-clad musicians serenaded, the flamboyant ambassador welcomed Washington’s A list with endless bowls of fresh Caspian Sea caviar and glasses of Dom Perignon.

All that came to a shuddering halt in 1979, when Islamic revolutionaries replaced the shah with a theocracy and the partying stopped.

The 34-year freeze between Iran and the United States has in some ways been colder than the Cold War, when the United States and Iron Curtain countries at least had diplomatic relations and embassies. Since the 444-day hostage crisis, representatives of the United States and Iran have had scant direct communication. Nuclear negotiations over the past few weeks have represented the most extensive overt diplomatic contact in decades and have set off speculation about the possibility of renewed relations between the former allies.

An Iranian in Paris

Asghar Farhadi’s The Past raises questions about what makes a film Iranian and how we should treat that category in the first place.

Image courtesy Sony Pictures Classics and Guernica.

by Tina Hassannia, Guernica

Earlier this fall, Iran selected Asghar Farhadi’s The Past as its official submission for the 2014 Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award. The decision marked a strong reversal in Iran’s attitude about the American awards ceremony, which it boycotted last year in protest against the U.S.-made anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims. The change comes primarily due to the new moderate president Hassan Rouhani, who, since his inauguration, has made efforts to soften Iran’s cultural policy. It may not be difficult to see why the government picked The Past, considering Farhadi’s name recognition after his film A Separation won the foreign film award two years ago (a first for Iran). Yet some, including hardliner conservatives in the country, have commented on the lack of “Iranianness” in The Past. While a few scenes in the film feature Persian dialogue and several of the cast and crew members are Iranian, it’s more accurately a French production, given the source of its funding, shooting locale, and setting.

The aesthetic and cultural discussion about the film’s identity is broader and more multifarious than the technicalities of its production or exhibition context, however. In spite of its European elements, can a film by a diasporic Iranian filmmaker still be considered to some extent, Iranian?

In the past few years many acclaimed Iranian filmmakers have started working more regularly abroad. Last year saw the release of Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone In Love (filmed and set in Japan), Bahman Ghobadi’s Rhino Season (filmed in Turkey), and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Gardener (a documentary filmed in Israel). The Past is, then, part of a growing trend likely brought on by the increasing tensions and limitations posed by Iranian authorities on filmmakers, even those who have long established careers at home. (The hope now is that Rouhani’s election may lead these filmmakers to again make movies in Iran).

The Floral is The Political

by Tara Aghdashloo, The New Inquiry

I’ve been following Shirin Neshat’s work for a long time. Initially, it wasn’t by choice: her Women of Allah series was unavoidable. Black and white, clearly confrontational, the images were everywhere, and helped turn the art market towards Iran and its women, and her progression into video art, films always came with admirers and detractors. Neshat was in London for some events, including a workshop and the London Film School as well as a double interview with Isaac Julien at the Barbican. We met over a glass of wine (for her) and an espresso martini (for me), to discuss her latest film with Natalie Portman, the politics of art, and homework.
 

Shirin Neshat, Speechless, 1996.
Courtesy Gladstone Gallery and The New Inquiry.

 Tara Aghdashloo: How has your understanding of your background and relationship to your subject matter – which is often Iran – evolved over the years?

 

Shirin Neshat: The development of the ideas of my work started from the personal to more social, and back to personal. It always relies on where I’m at in my life. To me art is about framing questions. Questions that are really important to the artist. What you question has to do with you and what you struggle with as a human being. These could be existential, political, or things that are from the unknown.

 

The evolution of my subject and my work reflects the way I navigate in life. If my father dies I think about death, and I make a work about death, like Passage (2001) that I made with Philip Glass. If I’m trying to return to Iran, around 1993-1997, and reconnect with it, then I make Women of Allah, which is a kind of nostalgic point of view of an artist living abroad. When I want to have a sharp knife and be critical about the government, then I make The Last Word, which is a trial. It’s a little bit like music. The artist goes up and down according to the melody and the emotions that drive them to do what they do.

 

TA: Do you think art is always political, even if you don’t want it to be?

SN: You could say for an Iranian art is always political. And you could say that about Andy Warhol maybe, but I don’t know. If you look at contemporary art and the likes of Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, it’s not political art. It’s actually very narcissistic and it is the artists’ interest in their own ego. Which a commentary about their own culture whether it’s American culture or Western culture as a whole. If you look at Iranian culture then yes, I could say that every Iranian artist, however they work, somehow it becomes political. Even if they paint flowers it’s political because they are making an effort to move away from the political, and that is a political act.