Iranian artists continue to grow in the UAE

A new exhibition at the Etemad Gallery in Dubai helps Iranian artists showcase their impressive techniques and important messages.

A work from Pooya Razi's Behind the Scenes series. Courtesy Pooya Razi / Etemad Gallery
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Over the past five years, the UAE's art scene has been a key conduit for Iranian artists to channel their works to the world and a haven for those looking to excavate the reality of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran without fear of reprisal.

The Etemad Gallery in Al Quoz, Dubai, is continuing this tradition and has assembled a fresh batch of talent from Tehran's ateliers in an exhibition that opens today.

Here's five of the lot that caught our eye.

Bahareh Navabi

Using Indian ink to create her works, Navabi's drawings are both portraits and still-lifes. There's something statuesque about her composition, and the bodies she draws appear to be in a state of bondage to their physical form.

Thin, exacting lines used to create the heads of her characters are offset by the heavy blackness of their bodies, and their form has subtle nods to the poses found in miniature paintings. Curiously, Navabi creates her work on tracing paper, allowing her to overlay several compositions and create relationships of chance between her dislocated characters.

Pooya Razi

Rows of faces stare back at us from the gloom of Razi's world. The artist is predominantly a canvas painter, but for his Dubai showing he is bringing a selection of new work on lightboxes, wrought in Vitrail glass paint. "Razi's works play heavily on chiaroscuro," says Jareh Das, the artist liaison at Etemad Gallery, referring to the tonal contrasts when light and dark are placed alongside each other. "The light emitted from the works is very dim, creating shadows around depicted subjects," she continues. "The artist explores shadows as paradoxes existing because of and wholly dependent on light."

Razi's movement towards working on lightboxes has offered the artist new opportunities for depth and inflections of light. There's a fine work here that depicts a heap of caught and hauled fish in eerily still strips of grey.

Arash Fesharaki

We might use words like primordial, subterranean or paleolithic to describe the fossil-like forms that curl their way through the works of Fesharaki. But few get it entirely right. These abstract paintings are busier than previous iterations of the artist's work, but still show her sense of balance between acrylic curlicues and long, snaking lines.

When Fesharaki exhibited in Tehran earlier this year, the writer Bavand Behpoor ruminated on the anti-meaning that the artist's work typifies. "What is there to be 'understood'?" he wrote in the exhibition's catalogue. "Absolutely nothing: the mathematics of these intertwining cords, pieces of an interwoven continuity, trace of hundreds of car wheels on snow, microscopic cells illuminated from behind, how should one listen to music?'"

Are they, as Behpoor suggests so wonderfully, what you draw on a window pane in a snowy day with your fingertips? Who knows. But Fesharaki's works are nourishing stuff for the eyes nonetheless.

Farniyaz Zaker

In Sadegh Hedayat's short story Puppet Behind the Curtain, the despairingly shy protagonist falls in love with his perfect partner - a soulless, speechless mannequin spotted in a Parisian shop window. He ships it off to Iran and is forced to keep this inanimate affair hidden from his jealous fiancée. The artist Zaker retells this story in her latest video work, seeing the unblemished "perfection" of the inanimate mannequin as an echo of the thinking behind the veil with its implications of purity and vulnerability.

"The film focuses on two women; one in the fashion capital of Paris and another in a remote village in Iran," says Jareh Das. "The Parisian strives to live up to the fashion pages while the Iranian has conservative values that see a young woman as a symbol of purity. Both in different yet similar ways represent unrealistic ideals of women."

We've seen a lot of work in recent years on the implications of the monolithic veil in Iranian culture. But Zaker's use of Hedayat breathes fresh life into this inquiry by finding connections between Iran of the 1930s and today.

Sahar Safarian

Safarian has explored conjoined bodies before, particularly on canvas. In this drawing, a tangle of faces are strung together by a nexus of cords. Their beatific expressions remain undisturbed, however.

"Many people think they are their jobs and define their identities based on what they do for a living," says Safarian, reflecting on the ideas in this enigmatic work. She explains that the image is an attempt to show the indefiniteness of our identities - that we are a mere tangle of identities, and wear a brave, resolute face despite this uncertainty.

Repetition is a key feature of Safarian's work, which often looks at the way people relate to their own society. But repetition should not be seen as a sign of banality, the images suggest. Rather, they are an expression of the masks of conformity that hide our inner search for some solidity of self.

Mise-En-Scene, A Group Exhibition of Emerging Iranian Art,opens at Etemad Gallery today and continues until July 28.