Why Iran spells art

Richard Holledge

• Last Updated: October 20. 2009 5:08PM UAE / October 20. 2009 1:08PM GMT

Shirley Elghanian is in no doubt. What she calls the fantastic art coming out of Iran has been inspired by “the situation” there.

“Prior to Ahmadinejad and his election in 2005 there wasn’t much attention given to artists,” says the London-based Elghanian, whose family fled Iran in 1979. “But when these artists started selling at unbelievable prices the authorities woke up and said, ‘What’s going on here? What are these artists doing?’ They clamped down on the galleries and then closed some.

“So what we find increasingly is that the work is an expression of the restrictions that the artists are experiencing. Because we needed to give this art an international stage so that it has the recognition it deserves, we set up the Magic of Persia Contemporary Art Prize as a charity to give them an opportunity to expose their inner feelings without censorship.”

MopCap, as it is abbreviated, has taken 18 months to come to fruition and absorbed the skills of 47 experts from the Iranian and international arts communities, who nominated more than 130 artists and 500-plus works. A jury chose a line up of six finalists whose work went on display at London’s Royal College of Art last week.

The winner was Mahmoud Bakhshi Moakhar, 32, whose striking Air Pollution of Iran used framed flags dirtied by the pollution of Tehran to hang as memorials to political prisoners. The work was sold for £50,000 before the announcement of the winner was made.

“My main inspiration comes from political and social issues,” says Moakhar, whose prize is the opportunity to stage a two-week exhibition of his works at the Saatchi Gallery next September. “They are direct answers to situations I observe and connections I make with the history of my country. I have a conflict about that because I have always looked to create works that are not concerned with political issues, but I have found it difficult to create artwork disconnected from my surroundings.”

In their different ways and disciplines the work of all six says much about the unresolved stress between the old and the new in Iran. All six have worked with the censor looking over their shoulders.

“Are artists repressed in Iran? Are they censored? Yes.” Fereydoun Ave is one of the nominators and well-established as an artist in Iran, Paris and the UAE ( his work is currently being exhibited at the B21 Gallery in Dubai). In Tehran he runs a space for experimental artists. It is a potentially subversive project in which he determinedly encourages all the emerging talent he can find.

“We are a stubborn and proud race,” he says. “And maybe we work better under pressure, by breaking taboos and finding ways to get past the censors. I don’t think art should be political but the authorities are forcing it to be.

“But just because we had a revolution does not mean we have to cut off ourselves from our roots. It is just a matter of finding a language.

“Art should be subtle, not just a poster. It should have many dimensions.”

The new language of Iranian art is reflected in the booming global interest it attracts. In London last May the Saatchi Gallery held Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East; the Hyatt Regency Hotel, London, is currently showing Iran Unbowed with works by Abbas Kiarostami, Farideh Lashai and Parviz Tanavoli; a display of challenging new media called Facts and Illusions is also on at the Royal College of Art.

However contemporary the works on show may be, traditional influences and values are still evident in the work.

One MopCap finalist, Vahid Chamani, 29, born and brought up in Tehran, directly confronts the gap between modernism and tradition by painting a group of warped and distorted figures who inhabit a time and space between apparition and reality.

“Iran’s present cultural situation is disturbed by the way we have somehow turned away from our traditional culture, but at the same time been left behind by modernism,” he says. “We have distanced ourselves from our beliefs and now stand too far from them to be able to join in the global stream of modern cultures. It seems like we have failed in reaching both of them.”

His female figures wear traditional clothes but sport earrings, necklaces and heavy make-up. He uses the traditional medium of ink combined with oil, although, he admits, “oil always wins”.

The sculptures of Sahand Hesamiyan draw heavily on the tiles and decorations as well as the architecture of ancient mosques.

The carpets and textiles from the Safavid Dynasty, which ended in 1736 have their contemporary resonance in the work of Farhad Ahrarnia, who combines digital mastering of images such as the covers of Time magazines printed on to cotton aida and embroidered with threads.

“I guess it has roots in quite a few different aspects of my childhood in Iran when I was surrounded by objects which were intensely detailed and repetitive in terms of the techniques used,” says Ahrarnia, who lives in the northern English city of Sheffield.

“When I moved here for the first time in early 1970s and then in the mid-1980s I became quite interested in folk art such as cross stitching. It is work that is not really considered as high art but it is very obsessively made. The idea of making something like that impressed me. I became interested in the way it was used as a way of restricting women especially and keeping them busy. There is something quite oppressive about needlework, not necessarily only in relation to women but in the politics of the commercial world and the way people are being exploited in factory-based work.”

He is careful not to be overtly political. “I am not keen to accept the image that my work is subversive or a reaction to a repressive regime. I think some of the other works in the show make a more obvious point about the situation in Iran but some make comments on Iranian culture, whether it is social or political, in a more subtle way.”

Is he looking forward to having his reputation enhanced by appearing in a competition like this?

“Let’s see what happens,” he says. “I don’t want to fall into the trap of just being seen as an Iranian artist. It can be quite limiting. I want to go beyond names and categories. Remember the Young British Art movement? It had a glamour because of the way it was marketed but for some of them it almost became a trap.”

It is unlikely that such glamour will turn the heads of this particular six. Abbas Kowsari, 39, whose entry, Shade of Water, a hauntingly beautiful series of people by the edge of Rezaiel Lake, north of Tehran, has worked for 10 newspapers, most of which have been closed by the authorities. Newsha Tavakolian, 28, a self-taught photographer who began working when she was 16, has worked for nine reformist dailies, all of which have been banned.

Her entry Mothers of Martyrs is a bleak collection of women holding pictures of sons who died in the Iran-Iraq War. The eyes of the young men are fixed forever by their deaths, their mothers’ by their unending grief.

“Art responds to the issues of the time,” says Kamran Diba, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran and one of the judges. “We have to see the works in the context of the 21st century and in the context of modernism and how they fit into the total picture with their relevance and aesthetic values.

“As judges we are keeping politics out of the art. Absolutely. The artists may have a political agenda but we are trying to separate the individual from the work. Political is transitional, art is permanent.”

For Diba, the symbolism of the prize is paramount.

“In Iran we don’t have the institutions in which to stage a thematic exhibition like this. There is not enough curatorial work. All we have are auctions which are nothing more than bazaars. Luckily now in Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and Doha we are seeing properly curated exhibitions.

“The problem for Iran is that it is very isolated. Artists have to rely on the internet for contacts and information. They cannot travel so there is a tendency for the art to degenerate.”

As if to prove his point – thanks to the closure of the British Embassy in Tehran – no visas have been granted to five of the finalists. Only one, Farhad Ahrarnia from Sheffield, could be at the prizegiving.