    |     |     | 01 Mitra Farahani 02 Mitra Farahani 03 Mitra Farahani 04 Fereydoun Ave 05 Mitra Farahani 06 Fereydoun Ave 07 Ramin Haerizadeh 08 Narmine Sadeg 09 Ramin Haerizadeh 10 Nikoo Tarkhani 11 Ramin Haerizadeh 12 Nikoo Tarkhani |
IRANIAN BODIES
Opening Reception: Friday 19th February at 8pm
Curated by Edward Lucie-Smith and Janet Rady.
Fereydoun Ave, Mitra Farahani, Ramin Haerizadeh, Narmine Sadeg, Nikoo Tarkhani.
Iranian contemporary art, with the exception of the cinema, has only swum into western consciousness fairly recently. Because of the political tensions between the West and Iran, it is still largely misrepresented and misunderstood. Before looking at the specific cases offered by this exhibition, there are some general observations to be made. The first is that Iran possesses an extremely ancient culture, going back some three thousand years. The art of the present day has deep roots in that culture – to an extent often missed by western observers. The second is that Tehran, the largest city in the Middle East, with a population of nearly 8 million, has a lively indigenous art world. Most of the leading Iranian artists still live in their own country, at least part of the time and are proud to do so. The third is that, despite the Iranian Islamic Republic’s reputation for moral repression, the Iranian art of the present is often paradoxically very much concerned with the human body, and is frequently subtly infused with sexual connotation. The present show is designed to illustrate that fact.
Its contents will come as no surprise to anyone who has either visited Tehran, or who has any acquaintance with earlier Persian art and literature. Safavid miniatures from the time of Shah Abbas (1588-1629) often illustrate erotic subject matter. Hafez, Iran’s best-loved poet (ca. 1320-1390), as the entry on him in Wikipedia notes, “took as his major themes love, the celebration of wine and intoxication, and exposing the hypocrisy of those who have set themselves up as guardians, judges and examples of moral rectitude.” Striking features of today’s Tehran cityscape are huge propaganda murals. Many celebrate the tragic heroes of the bloody Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. They are linked to an age-old Shia cult of martyrdom, but the protagonists are represented as if they were Hollywood film stars, looking out from the billboards on the Los Angeles Sunset Strip. With their handsome features and swimming eyes, these handsome young men seem designed to appeal to men and women alike.
The exhibition offers the work of five artists, two men and three women. The work of the men, Fereydoun Ave and Ramin Haerizadeh, demonstrates clearly how firmly rooted Iranian contemporary art is in Iranian popular culture. Fereydoun Ave’s series of digital prints, Rostam in Late Summer Revisited, refers to one of the heroes of the great Iranian epic, the Shahnameh or Book of Kings, written by the poet Ferdowsi around 1000 a.d. As Iranians know, Rostam's symbolic attributes of manly strength and martial valor reappear today in the wrestlers known as pahlavans, who are practitioners of a traditional Sufi cult of physical exercise. This cult of wrestling permits a greater degree of male nudity than is usually permitted in Iran, and encourages an admiration of the male body.
Ramin Haerizadeh’s Men of Allah series, with its lubricious, effeminate mullahs, based on self-portraits of the artist, is inspired by a kind of Iranian folk theater called Taaziye, popular in the 19th century and still current today, where women’s roles are played by men. In one scene, much liked by the Iranian public, Ghassem, the brother of Imam Hossein, the founder of the Shia branch of Islam, is married to a chador-clad female who turns out to be a bearded man. The result, in Harizadeh’s hands, is a sly satire on clerical manners and morals. It is worth noting that Iran is the only Islamic nation with a strong theatrical tradition, which often relates, as here, to an equally strong tradition of figurative art. This tradition embraces images of effeminacy as well as images of strength, as is witnessed by the numerous portrait miniatures of seductive page-boys from the time of Shah Abbas.
The images offered by the three women artists are even bolder than those offered by the men. Aficionados of contemporary art who know little or nothing about Iran are always surprised to discover how many gifted women artists the country produces. Yet the Iranian artist with the biggest international reputation is undoubtedly Shirin Neshat, who remains true to her roots though she has now lived for many years in America. Another reaction, when westerners discover that women create a good deal of the most interesting art now being produced in Iran, is to assume, despite this, that women artists are constantly inhibited by a struggle against the conditions Iranian society imposes on them. The truth is that Iranian art made by women does have a strongly feminist streak, but that this feminism is different from its western equivalent. In particular, women artists living and working in Iran do not want to give up their roots in Iranian culture, and are offended to be thought of as being victims perpetually preoccupied by victimhood.
The three artists featured here have been chosen to illustrate the boldness of their approach. Nikoo Tarkhani deals with the female body, and her sometimes fragmented nude self-portraits powerfully convey her sense that women in a contemporary Islamic society are struggling to piece together a contemporary identity. They can be compared, in this sense, with the very different self-portrait images of Ramin Haerizadeh. Mitra Farahani, who is a film maker in addition to being a painter and a maker of graphic works, tends to focus on the naked male body, which she treats on occasion with a boldness that easily exceeds most of the treatments of this subject one sees in the West. The sculptor Narmine Sadeg seems to refer to the strong tradition of puppet theater in Iran. The Iranian director Behrouz Qaribpour has become internationally famous for his puppet opera presentations, and recently received a major Italian award for his work. The puppet plays are closely related to the Taaziye school of live theater. The word Taaziye means ‘elegy’, and productions are typically presented in connection with the Day of Ashura, when Shia Muslims lament to death of the Imam Hossein. They can be thought of as the equivalents of Christian Passion Plays, yet, like the Passion Plays of the Middle Ages, tragic subject matter does not exclude an element of robust humor. It is noticeable not only that Sadeg’s figures can be swung about at will on the rods that pierce and support them, but also that her nude males have conspicuously small genitals. As a result they seem like images of powerlessness - a retort to Fereydoun Ave's images of strength.
Iranian contemporary art is constantly in dialogue with the society that surrounds and supports it. Like art in many Middle Eastern and Far Eastern societies, it invites the spectator to read visual images on several different planes, both linear and temporal. This gives a resonance and depth that is now often lacking in western equivalents.
(Edward Lucie-Smith)
Werkstattgalerie
Eisenacher Str. 6
D-10777 Berlin
Nähe Nollendorfplatz U1-U4, Bus M19, 187
Opening Hours: Tu-Fr 12-20h, Sa 12-18h
Phone: +49.30.21002158
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    |     |    | 01 Grant Vetter 02 Roni Feldman 03 Roni Feldman 04 Grant Vetter 05 Casey Vogt 06 Casey Vogt 07 Jon Barwick 08 Jon Barwick 09 Ryan Peter Miller 10 Elizabeth Ferry 11 Elizabeth Ferry |
curated by Edward Lucie-Smith and Roni Feldman
19th March-16th April 2010
Opening Reception: Friday 19th March 2010 at 8 pm
BERLIN COLLECTIVE presents Artist Talks moderated by Marc Glöde and Sophie Eliot Sunday 21st March 2010 at 5 pm
Jon Barwick, Roni Feldman, Elizabeth Ferry, Ryan Peter Miller, Grant Vetter, Casey Vogt
The six young American artists in this show have formed a group that they have named ‘Cacophonic’. Forming groups is, of course, the traditional way in which young artists band together in order to get a hearing. Think, for example, of the Futurists at the start of the 20th century and of the Surrealists who followed them. Roni Feldman, a member of the group and my co-curator, says that their work is a reaction to a decade that began with planes crashing into the World Trade Center in New York, and ended with an equally resounding economic crash – a period of “complexity and dissonance, marked by a clamorous rise in technology, especially the technology of information, as well as by wars and other forms of disaster.” He and his colleagues engage with a world of conflicting values, in the visual arts as well as in politics, and welcome the uproar that results. “We are wary of didacticism.” He says, “and recognize that a work of art is, first and foremost, a unique sensory experience. The balance between content and physical presence in our work reflects an enduring optimism in the face of the odds that we believe is typical of our generation of American artists.”
Jon Barwick constructs mixed-media paintings that acknowledge the hyper-paced, technology-driven, media-saturated society of the Twenty-First Century. The multi-layered compositions reflect the complexities of the information age, and capture the singular moment of everything happening at once. Imagery for these works originate as drawings and doodles but are scanned, photographed, printed, or redrawn before reaching the final composition. By maintaining a dialogue between the hand-drawn and computer-generated, Barwick creates visual metaphors for our day-to-day interaction with technology. The resultant fields of color and imagery are at once beautiful and overwhelming. They present a sublimation of information.
Roni Feldman applies the blurred, ethereal nature of airbrushed acrylic to paint multitudinous human features. He forms tensions between individual and crowd, abstraction and representation. Using varying degrees of matte and gloss black paint, the imagery may be invisible at first glance, but as viewers pass before them, the figures refract revealing an elaborate composition. In them, whirls of figures celebrate, mourn, protest, consume, dance, and embrace alongside others that drown, burn, and dissolve. Feldman’s crowds evoke the power and ecstasy of unified intention alongside a potential descent into mob mentality. The compositions recall the idealistic pursuit of 1960's psychedelia, van murals, and other airbrush art forms, but in Feldman’s work, airbrushed paint is like a thin veil that separates utopia and dystopia, civilization and chaos.
Elizabeth Ferry blurs the edges between the corporeal and ethereal. Ranging from simple grids to elaborate stacks of folded fabric, Ferry composes color and form into rhythms that perpetually, illusionistically reconfigure themselves. Through carefully cued light and site sensitivity, they shift from mundane materials to enigmatically charged visual sensations. For example, at first glance Ferry’s grids appear as formal white structures set upon a wall painted with bright colors. However, a move from side to side reveals that the edges of the structure are painted with discordant dashes of fluorescent hues that refract upon the wall. Subverting the fast pace of everyday transactions between people, places, and information, Ferry applies abstraction and illusion to offer moments of sensitive reflection.
Ryan Peter Miller uses paint as both his material and subject. Each of Miller’s works expresses an inventive application of paint. In one work, he applies paint as multitudinous stacked units in a tower. In another work he casts acrylic paint as puzzle pieces. In a third piece, Miller casts a full body self portrait in white acrylic paint. For Miller, paint is raw material, loaded with turgid historical significance, that can be grouped and restructured into non-traditional supports. Miller calls painting a democratic process, reflective and responsive to history and culture, but with endless potential for evolution and re-contextualization.
Grant Vetter’s Rendition paintings are slathered with sinewy gobs of fleshy hues. The works effect the transcendent painterliness of Abstract Expressionism, but also the corporeal gore and almost forensic examination of mutilated skin. The word “rendition” implies a subjective experience or recollection, but is also defined as “deportation for war crimes” and “torture by proxy.” Although Abstract expressionism was often seen as a symbol of democratic freedom and individual expression, Vetter explicitly takes up the themes of trauma, subjection and oppression as it relates to the current War on Terror.
Casey Vogt creates ornate, mandala-like compositions that serve as a backdrop for politically-charged figurative scenes. The most recent figures explore Americans' relationships to drug use, the War On Drugs, and the pharmaceutical industry. The backgrounds are composed of masses of layered dots and myriad colors, recalling a pharmacopoeia of pills.. They act as a painterly and metaphysical contrast to the
socio-political narratives presented by the figures. With their euphoric colors and psychedelic compositions, Vogt's work proposes painting as another mind-altering substance.
Werkstattgalerie
Eisenacher Str. 6
10777 Berlin Phone: +49.30.21002158
Near Nollendorfplatz:
Tube U1-U4, Bus M19
Open: Tu-Fr 12-8 pm, Sa 12-6pm
