From Tehran to London: New Painting from Iran

The noise and bustle of Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport at five in the morning is a little overwhelming, especially after six peaceful hours snoozing on a flight from London. Only a few years old, but some design flaws are already showing in this sleek building, particularly in the way incoming travellers find themselves in irritatingly long queues. A glass wall brings welcoming family and friends frustratingly close, and as you inch slowly towards the exit you can read improving signs that remind how ‘Respect for Islamic Dress is Respect for the Rights of Women’. Another enormous queue outside siphons off into taxis, and by the time I am on the road to Tehran, dawn has broken.



This was my introduction to Iran early last month as I went to select paintings for an exhibition in Soho. My friend, Aras, had visited her family last summer and returned to London with tales of the great art she had seen in Tehran’s galleries. We were soon thinking about how we could get some to London, and soon after gallerist Jill George had offered her premises for a show. All that remained was to actually see what would be going up on the walls. I was staying with a friend in downtown Tehran, and rolled up as he returned from the local bakery with breakfast. Glasses of hot tea washed down freshly-baked flatbread, cream cheese, honey and fresh walnuts as I enjoyed the calmest moments in four days of running from galleries to studios to artists’ homes to look at paintings.



One question I was asked whilst there was: “What do you like about Tehran?” and this is not an easy one to answer. There is little impressive architecture, and the city is polluted and overcrowded, with something like twice the population of London in a smaller area. But what makes Tehran one of my current favourite cities is the sheer warmth of its people, whose hospitality, charm and generosity belie the general media image of their country abroad. This was my third visit there, and still people looked surprised when they heard of my plans. If having a small exhibition of contemporary Iranian painting helps to undermine such assumptions – and I know I’m reaching for the stars here – then it’ll be even more worthwhile.

After breakfast, we drive across town to Azad Gallery in Yousefabad. This small artist-run basement room has been showing exceptional art in Tehran since 1999 under the Directorship of Rozita Sharafjahan. I wanted to see good painting, and Rozita knew exactly which artists I should consider. Various canvases were assembled from painters Marzieh Bagheri and Azadeh Balouchi, two young women who have been out of college for barely a year and already producing exceptionally confident and accomplished work. I wanted everything they could provide, but had to settle for two from one and three from the other. I was driven by painter Samira Eskandarfar to see her work in her flat: she proudly told me that Tate Modern had just decided to buy one of her video works that day. I saw the studios of Khosro Khosravi, Mohammad Tabatabaie and his wife Masoumeh Bakhtiary, and was struck by how little room they had to produce their magnificent images, and how modestly they wore their abilities. Hamed Sahihi brought canvases into Azad Gallery for me to choose and the resulting selection has only one guiding theme to link the paintings: quality. Everything I have selected – and of course, how could I say otherwise? – can hold its own with the finest market-approved painting from anywhere else in the world, and given that it is the first time most of these painters have shown in London, prices are very cheap.

It was not easy to whittle down all the excellent art I saw to the seven artists who make up the exhibition and, needless to say, Aras and I are already tempted to investigate another show with some of the many accomplished and talented Tehrani artists we could not include this time. Time will tell if we can do this, but a trip around the Tehran art world is a surprising and delightful experience that belies the general, woefully negative impression of Iran that still persists.

By David Gleeson - Guest Blogger & Aesthetica Magazine contributor.

To read more about Middle Eastern Art, read Contemporary Art From the Middle East a feature on Golden Gates, which ran in Paris last October.

From Tehran to London: New Painting from Iran is at Jill George Gallery, 38 Lexington Street, Soho, London W1 until 18 June. Admission free. www.jillgeorgegallery.co.uk

Image Credits
(c) Mohammad Mehdi Tabatabaie
Untitled 2008)
Triptych, oil on canvas
120 x 220 cm

(c)Azadeh Balouchi
Utopia Ophelia (2009)
acrylic on canvas

(c)Eskandarfar
She Was Alone (2009)
oil on canvas

DREAMLANDS at the Pompidou

One of the most engaging shows this summer, Dreamlands recently opened at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The show considers, for the first time, the question of how World’s Fairs, international exhibitions and theme parks have influenced ideas and notions of the city. Duplicating and reduplicating reality through the creation of replicas, embracing an aesthetic of accumulation and collage that is often close to kitsch, these self-enclosed parallel worlds have frequently afforded inspiration to the artistic, architectural and urbanistic practices of the 20th century, and may even be said to have served as models for certain contemporary constructions.

This multidisciplinary exhibition brings together more than 300 works: modern and contemporary art, architecture, films and documents drawn from numerous public and private collections. Designed as an experience both playful and educational, it will offer the first comprehensive exploration of its theme, inviting visitors to think about how the city is imagined and how this imagination finds expression in concrete projects.



World’s Fairs, contemporary theme parks, the Las Vegas of the 1950s and 1960s, 21st century Dubai: all these have helped bring about a profound transformation in our relation to the world, our conceptions of geography, time and history, our ideas about the original and the reproduction, about art and non-art.

The dreamlands of the leisure society have shaped the imagination, nourishing both utopian dreams and artistic productions. But they have also become realities: the pastiche, the copy, the artificial and the fictive have become facts of the environment in which real life is led, and they serve as models for understanding and planning the urban fabric and its social life, blurring the boundaries between imagination and reality.



From Salvador Dali’s Dream of Venus pavilion for the New York World’s Fair of 1939 to such manifestoes as Venturi and Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas and Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York (which reads Manhattan through Coney Island’s Dreamland), the 16 sections of the exhibition will trace the history of a complex and problematic relationship.

Dreamlands continues until 9 August. www.centrepompidou.fr

Q&A with curators Quentin Bajac Curator at Musée National d’Art Moderne, Chief of Photograph Cabinet and Didier Ottinger Deputy Director of the Musée National d’Art Modern


How did you undertake the process of curating art with architecture and film?
As you know we have at the Pompidou a long tradition of ambitious multidisciplinary exhibitions, which mix all the different techniques, from architecture to painting, from photography to sculpture or installation works. Dreamlands definitely belongs to that tradition even if it is probably one of the exhibitions organized at the Pompidou in which the animated image (slideshows, film extracts, videos, digital imagery) is the more central.

How did this exhibition come about and why did you select the space of the Grande Gallerie? What are the highlights of the exhibition?
The fact that many contemporary artists (from Gursky to Pierre Huyghe, from Martin Parr to Mike Kelley), worked on subjects which were related to that topic (the influence of Pop culture and entertainment architecture on the urbanistic changes of the 20th and 21st centuries) was definitely important for us. We realised that these changes and these questions were central to works of artists from very different origins (Western, African, Asian) and of very different generations (from historical Pop artists (Ruscha, Leirneir) to very young ones (Liu Wei, Cao fei). The idea was to organize a show that would very closely (and we hope subtly) mix aesthetic and social issues. Some of the pieces included in the show (Malacchi Farrell, Mike Kelley, Pierre Huyghe, Kader Attia) are pieces that need space.The big gallery of the Pompidou, in which we usually organize these major thematical shows was therefore the obvious exhibition space.

What was your criterion for selecting which artists to include?
It is always, as in all exhibitions, a balance to find between of course the interest of the piece(s) we are showing and the way such piece(s) can interact with others. The exhibition is not only about showing interesting or thrilling or exciting isolated pieces but also about establishing links and relations between these pieces. In that respect we wanted to have as many different techniques and media as possible, in order to enhance the diversity and we hope the interest of the show.

Dreamlands explores ideas of escapism in theme parks, and in the 21st century we are now seeing unprecedented levels of escapism in the digital realm through programmes such as second life. How do you see the effects of these new developments evolving our notions of reality?
It is true that these new developments have had a big influence on our perception of reality and have tended to confuse the viewer. The exhibition, and I am especially thinking about one of the last room of the exhibition –the one devoted to Dubai- is also about that phenomenon; Dubai in recent years has based a lot of its communication campaigns on that impossibility of exactly knowing if the images they are proposing are real or fictitious. The use at the same time of real documentary images and digitally manipulated ones has been one of their key techniques of communication in recent years.

The city is often romanticised, on the other hand it often becomes grotesque – have you ever had your view of a certain place profoundly affected by an artwork pastiching it?
One of the things you can grasp by going round the exhibition is that you find, from one beginning of the century to another, from 1900 to 2000, always the same models which are copied over and over again. In that respect, there is a great stability of mythologies: Venice, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, Statue of Liberty etc. Does this phenomenon of reproduction affect in a positive or negative way the original - in other terms does it reinforces or exhausts the “aura” of the original to quote the expression used by Walter Benjamin in his texts from the thirties is a true question? The answer depends a lot on a personal experience and will probably differ from one individual to another just as the exhibition will probably affects in different ways the viewer: some will focus on the entertainment dimensions of these changes some will be probably be more conspicuous or even anxious about this phenomenon.

Images:
Manit Sriwanichpoom
Pink man in paradise : Sacré-cœur, 2002-2003
Photographie
80cm x 120 cm
Galerie VU’, Paris
© Manit Sriwanichpoom / Galerie VU’ // © Manit Sriwanichpoom


Yiu Xiuzhen
Portable City, New York, 2003
Valise, vêtements usagés
90cm x 140 cm x 30cm
Courtesy Alexander Ochs galleries Berlin/Beijing
© Yin Xiuzhen


Olivio Barbieri
Site specific, Las Vegas, 2005
Film 35 mm sur DVD, sonore
12 min 30sec
Courtesy Olivo Barbieri, Brancolini Grimaldi Arte Contemporanea, Roma
© Olivo Barbieri

Sensitivity Questioned at the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center

Jean Luc Blanc, Gregory Crewdson, Jim Drain, Ryan McGinley, Michael Robinson, Daniel Silver, Daniel Subkoff, Stephen Sutcliffe, Scott Treleaven, Dimitrios Antonitsis, Christos Delidimos, Kostas Bassanos, Manolis Bitsakis, Vassilis Botoulas, Antonis Donef, Eftichis Patsourakis, Theo Prodromidis, Panos Tsangaris

It is an interesting time for an exhibition in Athens like Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center’s Sensitivity Questioned. Considering it opened the day before an angry mob attempted to storm the Greek parliament and a bank was set on fire. Amidst all this anger, three people died. Perhaps it is a time to question sensitivity after all.

In the words of the curatorial brief, the exhibition wants to “articulate a new view of the ‘feminine’”. Uh oh. Now we’ve entered dangerous territory. If the attempt is to create new perceptions of femininity, then we are crossing a well-trodden path that is so well trodden, blood, tears and an ample number of burned bras litter the trail. It is interesting, then, that the female curator, Iliana Fokianaki has only decided to use male artists – 18 to be exact- inviting them “to approach their subject in ways that may perhaps strike the viewer as ‘feminine’”.

But what is femininity? According to the exhibition’s catalogue: “A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and it is confirmed only by other men. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is not manhood at all. ” Another supposition is that the word ‘sensitive’ is seen as a feminine one and that “the definitions of femininity and masculinity have been solid for centuries now.” It then explains that the exhibition’s aim is to instead seek the feminine, sensitive side of men and in turn redefine what it is to be sensitive and feminine.



Of course, from El Greco’s St. Mary Magdalene, Degas’s ballerina’s and – in the case of this show - Ryan McGinley and Gregory Crewdson’s intimate portraits of a young, wet, naked woman and a young, naked, couple in a wooded grove respectively, would it be wrong to suggest that men have long had the freedom to explore what is sensitive, or what they are sensitive to, through their art?

Maybe that is what Stephen Sutcliffe touches on when he pairs images of women wearing skirts and heels with men in suits with briefcases narrated by a reading of poster girl of female anguish and struggle in the face of a male-dominated world, Anne Sexton’s 1967 poem, Said the Poet to the Analyst, in a video facing the male/female divide head on. Emmanouil Bitsakis does something similar when he replaces a queen’s face with his own in an expertly rendered, tongue-in-cheek orthodox-sized icon nod to idolisation, nobility, tradition, and hierarchy.

Reminiscent of Angus Fairhurst’s furious markings on pages of British newspapers, Antonis Donef’s networks of line and shape drawn carefully onto pages from a Victorian encyclopaedia build organic shapes that feel rooted, earthy yet ambiguous, much like Daniel Silver’s painted portraits rendered in fluid tones of green. Panos Tsagaris delves into symbolism and the occult, a characteristically feminine trait in human behaviour intrinsically intertwined with nature, offset by the figure’s androgyny. Man and woman as one suggests a balancing of two opposites or the coming together of two halves.



Christos Delidimos’s dynamic contribution to the show is a streamlined selection of hand drawn imagery telling the story of man and the beast within. An installation of sorts, a nod to Athena in the form of a paper owl sculpture overlooks the scene created by three smaller drawings followed by a paper-built monster on a ledge, with a caged miniature nearby. Above, a tiny black and white scene and a large image of a solitary almost ‘anti-Adam’ skulking through a treacherous, forest-wasteland is punctuated with a drawing of a deer, speared high into the wall by menacing black poles. Echoing Homeric war, Delidimos paints a dark, poetic picture of a world without women, or a world in conflict.

Nevertheless, if that world without women is anything like Michael Robinson’s video of a domestic scuffle taken from American soap opera, Little House on the Prairie, with 80’s hit Hold Me Now by the Thompson Twins serenading the scene; it would be a hell of a lot more peaceful - or less passionate. But essentially, Robinson suggests a world without media-reduced abstracts would be a much better place for everyone.

At this point I think back to Theo Prodromidis’s black and white photo-narrative that welcomes visitors on the smaller, first floor exhibition space. Prodromidis’s lens longingly follows a beguiling woman through a park in London. She appears distant, out of reach, strange. Both tender and voyeuristic, the photographs expose a natural divide that exists between two people, let alone men and women. As we make our way further into the 21st Century, with all the changes that come with it, it is fitting the exhibition begins and ends with this piece. Where is that woman? Does ‘that’ woman exist? Where is the woman’s perspective in all of this? Will there have to be a masculinity questioned sequel that might allow women to define masculinity? (Not a bad idea).

Still unsure whether the exhibition manages to answer or support what it claims to set out to do, I turn to Daniel Subkoff’s intricate treatment of two books – Aleister Crowley’s The Book of Wisdom or Folly and Danto’s After the End of Art to sum it all up. Lines from pages have been painstakingly cut and joined to unite the two books. The top line reads: “For shame! Is it not the most transient of all the Wisdoms of the Cosmos that no two beings are alike?” It’s true. No two people can ever be the same. Even our own, personal views on femininity, masculinity, or sensitivity are subtly different.

This is how the show saves itself. Though by raising the issue of femininity it manages to shut female artists out, something any staunch feminist of 70’s calibre would have abhorred, the works of participating artists – and the placement of them - get you thinking about roles imposed on us as humans today, in relation to the roles we play within the societies we find ourselves in. In turn, we might consider who, or what, we perceive ourselves to be at this moment in time. Maybe that might bring us closer to understanding what we have become in order to contemplate how we will evolve. That’s something for all of us to think about – man or woman.

Proceeds from the exhibition will go to ActionAid Hellas to fund programs that support women in India, Cambodia and Haiti.

For further information visit: www.art-tounta.gr

The exhibition continues until 3rd July.

Guest Blog written by Stephanie Bailey. Originally from Hong Kong, Stephanie currently lives and works in Greece. She is the Arts Editor of Athens Insider, and contributes to Art Papers, Odyssey Magazine and Naked Punch.

Images:
(c) Dimitrios Antonitsis Las Vegas at Anapsyktirion Peristeriou - Ralls Rallis series, 2010, b/w photograph on aluminum, 200x300 cm

(c) Theo Prodromidis Untitled 2007 (Canary Wharf, towards the performance of an image), hand-processed b & w photographs, goldleaf, Perspex, wood dimensions variable

(c) Dimitrios Antonitsis Fisherman - Ralls Rallis series, 2010, b/w photograph on aluminum 100x70 cm