Art finds a way

Chris Michael

• Last Updated: October 24. 2009 4:20PM UAE / October 24. 2009 12:20PM GMT

Thirty years after the Iranian Revolution, artists have learnt to sidestep the rules quietly and find ways to express themselves. At Golden Gates, an exhibition of new contemporary Middle Eastern art that coincides with Paris’s week-long art fair, FIAC, this pressure seems to affect each Iranian artist differently.

Mahmoud Bakhshi Moakhar is a short, slight, soft-spoken and large-eyed guy. As he smokes a tiny Bahman (“Revolution”) cigarette, he speaks so quietly he’s difficult to hear even in the hushed Marais streets.

The authorities leave him alone, he says. “I’m OK, yes. But other artists are not. They’re younger and need help getting started. They put a lot of time, effort and money in, and it comes to nothing because the ministry doesn’t approve their work. It has been OK for me, but not for many others.”

Of course, many of the artists in Golden Gates are not Iranian. Also represented are Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey and the UAE. Huda Lutfi plasters images of Egyptian divas such as Umm Kulthum over mannequin busts, singeing and blackening the images “to convey the experience of how youth turns to ashes”.

Beirut’s Zena el Khalil, whose blog, kept during the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, was widely published and led to her memoir Beirut, I Love You, shows her work Queen and Kings, in which doll heads crown long, flowing dresses, granting the everyday inhabitants of her home city a glamorous grandeur. And Hale Tenger uses miniatures – a tiny parachutist landing on a pillow, a dragon nutcracker chomping on a globe – in an attempt to tackle personal and socio-political anxiety.

The curator, Daniela da Prato, hopes the show can bridge the gap in dialogue between western and Middle Eastern art. “My role is to give another perception of art in the Middle East – to show that the artists can relate and respond to global issues, not just the more stereotypical issues of women, war, censorship,” she says.

However, most of the works in Golden Gates do relate to those very issues. There is a gas mask plated in gold by Amal Kenawy, who lives and works in Cairo. There are Simin Keramati’s paintings You Are a Bad Girl (1, 2 and 3), in which seemingly ordinary women turn away from the viewer, rejecting the rules of everyday behaviour that supposedly separate “good” women from “bad”.

The show’s only Palestinian artist, Wafa Hourani, a friendly, personable young man in a fashionable keffiyeh-style scarf and a permanent grin, argues that there’s just no getting away from politics in Ramallah.

“It’s a headache,” he says. “You feel the pressure of the conflict all the time. You feel it at home, then you face it when you go out into the street. People are depressed, poor, many have lost hope. There is strength in conflict, though – it can inspire you and push you to create and to fight.”

His sculpture Darwin Was Palestinian shows an absurdly high version of the West Bank wall, and two figures, a man and his dog, stretching their necks to absurd lengths to see over it. It’s a welcome touch of humour – just one response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict he wants to emphasise. “There are five galleries in Ramallah and we have a community, we help each other, we help young artists get set up, we show,” he says.

“Our goal is to have 100 artists – because then we would really be able to show many different facets of what it means to be Palestinian, to show another side of the issues in our country. These artists will be able to fight for change, to really make a difference through their art.”

When the art here avoids the so-called “stereotypical” issues, such as Arash Hanaei’s paintings of toys found in the dark by a flashlight, they seem almost overly apolitical. As the only Iranian present at an exhibition of Iranian art in London a few months ago, Hanaei was so inundated by queries about his country’s fraught political situation that for Golden Gates he consciously decided to jettison politics completely.

The artists are eager for something more. “Yes, Daniela wants to show a variety, and that’s good. But it’s also a problem,” Lutfi says. Hourani agrees that the goal is to get past the catch-all category of “Middle Eastern” artists and to work on co-ordinated shows around specific concepts and ideas. “After all, there is no such thing as ‘western art’, so why should there be ‘Middle Eastern art’?” he asks.

Golden Gates: Contemporary Art from the Middle East is on until November 13 at 46 rue de Sevigne, Paris 75003.