The Daily Star (Lebanon)
May 27, 2011 Friday
The multifaceted artistic life of Iran
by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
When Abbas Kiarostami’s feature-length film “Shirin” premiered at the
Venice film festival in 2008.
BEIRUT: When Abbas Kiarostami’s feature-length film “Shirin” premiered
at the Venice film festival in 2008, critics praised the veteran
Iranian director’s visual eloquence but complained that his work had
veered so far from narrative cinema that it seemed more suitable to
exhibition galleries than movie theaters.
“Shirin” revisits a 12th- century Persian epic about an artist and a
king vying for the love of an Armenian princess. In Kiarostami’s film,
the action plays out entirely off screen. All we see, as viewers in an
audience, is a languid sequence of static shots showing another
audience staring back at us.
That audience, it turns out, is watching a cinematic adaptation of
“Khosrow and Shirin,” imagined by Kiarostami but never made. We see
faces illuminated by the glow of an unseen screen. We hear lines of
dialogue, sound effects and swells of sentimental music conveying a
rollercoaster ride of adventure and romance. We see close-ups of one
woman’s face after another, tears flowing every so often from their
eyes.
The film is a mesmerizing rumination on femininity. It is also a love
letter to the 112 Iranian actresses whose faces appear on screen (with
the French film star Juliette Binoche making a fleeting cameo in the
crowd). More than that, “Shirin” tests a radical experiment in telling
stories without images while honoring the space, time and ritual of
cinema. Kiarostami reflects one audience in the image of another,
leaving the film alluded to in both the title and the soundtrack to be
conjured in the minds of viewers on both sides of the screen.
“Kiarostami’s women cast a genuine spell,” wrote The Guardian’s Andrew
Pulver. “But as the fixed shot grinds on, it ends up exerting a strain
on the viewer. The truth is that Kiarostami’s filmmaking has become
more and more pared down over the years, and he has in recent times
acted more like an installation artist than a feature filmmaker.
‘Shirin’ might be happier sitting on a video monitor in the Pompidou
center on 24-hour loop.”
The Beirut Exhibition Center – located just inside the entrance to the
city’s newly minted waterfront district, on a patch of reclaimed land
that was once a monstrous Civil War-era garbage dump – is a far, far
cry from the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The organizers of the most
recent exhibition to fill the space, however, certainly got one thing
right: Kiarostami’s “Shirin” is looping all day, every day in a
black-curtained room of it own.
In many ways the centerpiece of “Zendegi,” a show featuring a torrent
of works by 12 very different artists from Iran, the piece is
installed as a video work and supported by a series of the auteur’s
gorgeously austere photographs of trees in a wintery landscape.
“Zendegi” (“life” in Farsi), is the second exhibition at the Beirut
Exhibition Center assembled by Rose Issa Projects in London. (With the
exception of the Musée Sursock’s Salon d’Automne, all of the
programming in the space so far has been tied to a commercial
gallery.)
The first, titled “Arabicity,” opened last September with a bold
sampling of contemporary artworks from the Arab world by nine artists
with a penchant for pattern and decoration. “Zendegi” is the Iranian
rejoinder to that show.
While “Arabicity” was an already existing exhibition that had been
curated for an arts festival in Liverpool, the current show is new,
and a number of works have been commissioned specially for it. The
result is a fresh take on an art scene so vast, vexed and scattered
that one appreciates all the more the curatorial choices, aesthetic
preferences and long years of experience that Rose Issa brings to
Beirut.
Like “Arabicity” before it, “Zendegi” skips around among styles,
genres and generations. Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian was born in
Iran in the 1920s, and makes dazzlingly complex mosaics from shards of
reverse painted glass and mirrors.
Maliheh Afnan was born in the 1930s, to Persian parents in Haifa, and
produced “A House Divided,” a mysterious work of frazzled gauze over
illegible script, for Beirut, where she lived during two key periods
of her life in the 1950s and the 1970s. The piece hangs in a room with
several other works that give an enigmatic twist to the concept of
veiling, the most moving of which is “Contained Thoughts,” an
arrangement of glass jars holding cryptic scrolls like secrets,
talismans or messages in proverbial bottles.
On the other side of the spectrum is Najaf Shokri, born in 1980, who
mines archival territory with a wall of portrait photographs the
artist found in a file of identity cards discarded outside an
administrative building in Tehran. The portraits, edged by
bureaucratic stamps and scrawls, echo Kiarostami’s film in their
sequencing of 50 women’s faces, all born in the 1940s. They also bear
witness to an era in Iran’s history that was more generous toward
different ethnicities, styles and feminist attitudes.
One of the most striking things about “Zendegi” is the consistency
with which Iranian artists experiment with heritage, craft and
sardonic humor. Bita Ghezelayagh’s “Three Drops of Blood” blends felt,
embroidery and silkscreen techniques in a series of floor pieces
inspired by a short story – a prison narrative – by Sadegh Hedayat.
Taraneh Hemami works in ceramics, wax and decorative beads to create
pop-inflected pieces about martyrdom, emigration and the passage of
time that hover somewhere between melancholy and sarcasm.
The show sounds a few false notes with Farhad Moshiri’s paintings of
pots, Mohamed Ehsai’s calligraphic paintings and Shadi Ghadirian’s
portraits of veiled broads with kitchen tools instead of faces. All of
these works are overexposed.
Farhad Ahrarnia, however, is a find. Representing him here are four
dramatically different but consistently intriguing bodies of work, the
best of which consists of digital photographs of T-shirts reading “I
Love Palestine,” “Palestine Is Mine” and “Free Palestine.”
Ahrarnia had printed the pictures on canvas first, and then overlaid
the images with embroidery grids. Then he began stitching some of the
squares, but only sparingly. A few bits of red appear, like scars.
Bits of green slowly creep in, like moss, taking over an edifice of
ideas, slogans and sentiments that has been sitting around, static and
trod upon, for too long.
“Zendegi,” curated by Rose Issa Projects, remains on view at the
Beirut Exhibition Center, inside the entrance to BIEL, through May 30.
For more information, please see or
www.beirutexhibitioncenter.com
www.roseissa.com.