Persian Visions:
Contemporary Photography
from Iran
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
Yaya Dehghanpoor
Untitled
no date
color photographs
35 x 23 in.
In a time when pronouncements from the White House and the United States press attempt to justify military action against Iran, the personal and political expressions in "Persian Visions: Contemporary Photography from Iran" become all the more poignant. In the current climate, this exhibition that has been curated for United States venues becomes a quiet intervention, an entreaty for sanity, an all-too-rare conduit for certain Iranian secular and intellectual voices. It is a wonder that this exhibition exists at all, especially since no corporate sponsor had the courage to fund it, and the works themselves were even threatened with deportation by U.S. Customs. While current viewers of this already somber exhibition receive the works with an undeniable gravitas, the displayed photographs do not convey urgency; indeed, most were created a few years ago in the relative peace following the Iran-Iraq war.
The balance of pieces included in "Persian Visions" engage concepts of mediated looking, identity constructions, and the creation of beautiful images. These twenty Iranian photographers have much more in common with the international scene of art fairs and biennials than with radical Islamic stereotypes cultivated by the U.S. news media. "Persian Visions" offers an alternative to the hysterical corporate-state-sponsored images of raving clerics, oppressed women, and gun-wielding revolutionaries. This exhibition visualizes what critical thinkers know, but what is rendered invisible in the U.S., that Iran is a complex society with its own psychodynamics and conflicting viewpoints and certainly not the monolithic rogue state situated on the axis of evil. Despite prevailing anti-Iran sentiments, this exhibition pleasantly reminds us that Iranian artists study abroad in premier institutions, show in European and U.S. galleries, and represent their country in prominent international exhibitions. Their endeavors have been a part of the decade-and-a-half tide of identity art in which unique perspectives from numerous points on the globe (though they may nod to Western art critical discourse) have been successfully parlayed on the market as vestiges of avant-garde originality. With its unassuming conceptual play and media awareness, an untitled photo-collage (n.d.) by Yahya Dehghanpoor would be equally at home in Chelsea, Mitte, or any international art city. The collage is a grid of twenty-one color prints floating in clear glass, all of which show five horizontal and parallel electrical wires against a blue sky with white clouds. The black lines read as musical staffs, each print a measure, and the changing clouds as a Cagean chance composition. The piece seems less surprising when one learns that Dehghanpoor was educated in San Francisco, exemplifying the worldliness of these artists. Other works possess equal conceptual rigor but situate subjects firmly in Iran. Sadegh Tirafkan's "Persepolis " (1995-98) combines photographs and video. Mounted on the gallery walls, flat screen televisions uncannily read as framed photographs, especially as they are similar in size to the prints included in the installation. On two video screens, "Persepolis" shows a man strolling through this archaeological site. The images of this man walk toward each other on the same path but from opposite ends, as each finishes at the other's starting point. Though they seem to walk in contemporaneity while presented along with unrelenting audio of historical debris crunching underfoot, of course, the figures never intersect. An intersection with two other men and a chador-clad woman is staged in the accompanying prints. "Persepolis" employs a meaningful subtlety lost on those not patient enough to allow the work to reveal its paradoxes. These lens-based mediations, along with the twenty-four-hundred-year-old site (an early marker of occident-orient conflict), become metaphors for an Iranian history and identity. This history has been markedly reframed in recent decades and is undergoing insistent remediation in the U.S. Strikingly direct imagery is presented by Kaveh Golestan, a photojournalist who died in 2003 while covering the U.S.-led war against Iraq. Golestan shows a war-torn hell on earth with ruined buildings and strewn corpses. Expressionistic red-tinged blurs add artistry, and in the case of Baby (n.d.)--which depicts a woman holding up a headless toddler, seemingly in rigor mortis, as if it is about to take its first steps--alleviates an unviewable directness. Poetic subtlety is persistently employed by the exhibition's other artists. Though they work with relative artistic freedom, they still struggle for expression in a proscriptive state. Seifollah Samadian's video, The White Station (1999), may reveal a political expression through studied indeterminacy. His piece shows the black figure of a woman struggling against an unrelenting white snowstorm, waiting for a bus, and poignantly not boarding the one that arrives. The figure that fights the storm in a concrete and barbed-wire city could be nothing more than a subject of contemporary genre, but she also suggests a greater struggle against civil and economic oppression. Re-presentations of historical photographs may show otherwise prohibited imagery; distinctions between presentation and re-presentation reveal important psychological distances. The greatest impact of such distance is found in the work of Bahman Jalali. He juxtaposes early twentieth-century photographs of women with crimson expressionistic swaths that turn out to be details of extremist graffiti condemning representational imagery and painted on the sign of a former photo studio. That the women presented in this series are not veiled offers a striking counterpoint. One piece from the installed series of five, Image of Imagination 3 (2003), shows a naked woman (partially concealed by a balustrade and graffiti) who might go unnoticed in the West but in this exhibition's context carries illicit import. Shokoufeh Alidousti offers another series involving photographs within photographs. In her four black-and-white "Self-Portraits" (2003), the artist's black chador frames parts of her face. Alidousti deliberately conceals her eyes as if to stress the camera's gaze. The chador becomes a device that sets the family photographs that she holds in contrast. Ironically, the artist may be seen plainly in these domestic images yielding an attractive couple and their adorable children. Here, one wonders if it is the distance of a rephotograph or the legitimacy of the familial that gives this woman the social license to be seen. These works mark distinctive differences between the public and private presentations of the feminine self. Representations of chador-clad women abound in this exhibition. As elements in photographs, one cannot help but think about how the chador interrupts the gaze and the exposed female flesh that figures so prominently in Western photographic history, whether through pornography, formalist nudes, or feminist critiques. A different domestic expression is created in Koroush Adim's three gelatin-silver prints that comprise the series, "Revelations " (n.d.). A young woman is depicted wearing the light-colored and patterned chador appropriate for private spaces. Adim emphasizes the textures of walls, curtains, faces, and the veil through careful lighting and areas that are calculatedly focused. These details are also "truthful" descriptive elements that lend credence to the indefinite, spiritual shadows and blurs with which the figure seems to interact. A substitute gauze veil covers a woman's face and body in Ebrahim Khadem Bayat's Untitled (1997). Though this covering may stop the look, the images are awash in a haptic eroticism of cloth, hair and photographic grain. Set against a rich black, another untitled work from 1997 reveals natural wood patterns that complement a cloth that is both diaphanous and glowing with a silvery presence. Another shows a chair situated in a rocky landscape with an atmospheric mist. A mirror lies on the dark ground, reflecting a supernaturally white sky. Mirrors as optical elements with symbolic weight, appear in several works. Of course, mirrors are substitute lenses that, like photographs, reflect or alter visual reality. A particularly engaging use of the mirror occurs in Shahriar Tavakoli's My Family (Hallelujah 4) (2002). The artist, along with his parents and brother, sit among foods set for a festival. In this tableau, which also seems spontaneous, the floor and background are a black, photographic studio backdrop that offsets the detailed reality of faces and fruits. Like Diego Velásquez's painting Las Meninas (1656), a mirror reflects a certain reality: in this case, the rest of the home that is otherwise hidden by the backdrop. Tavakoli sets his father at the frame's bottom edge in order to establish the picture plane, but the central mirror expands the intimate pictorial space to reveal a large room with a chandelier. Another untitled grid construction by Dehghanpoor has thirty-five prints, each with a distinctively female, dark eye that collectively seem to "look" about. While the visual strategy is derived from Kurt Kranz's Bauhaus-era experimentation with photo-objects, Dehghanpoor activates this formalist exercise by situating in this matrix a mirror that reflects the viewer's gaze. She evokes differences of gendered looking along with the cultural norms of who may look and who is watched within Western and Islamic cultures.
"Persian Visions" reflects a situation familiar to the U.S.: the artists are from an intellectual and oft-secular elite; they work with relative artistic freedom and react to the political debate and oppositional views candidly presented in the press. These artists are out of step, however, with the minority theocracy that has consolidated power, that does not offer any governmental validation, and that engages in censorship. In this exhibition, the critical and curatorial lens that Americans might expect to magnify otherness becomes a mirror of a terrible clarity.
William V. Ganis
Persian Visions: Contemporary Photography from Iran is at Cornell University's Johnson Museum of Art from January 27 - March 18, 2007.