4.5: Contemporary Art and Culture in SWANA

Learning Objectives

• Provide insights into contemporary cultural innovations in SWANA.
• Consider the importance of art and film from SWANA recognized on a global scale.

 

Visual Arts in Iran

In February of 2012, the Oscars anointed the first Iranian winner, Asghar Farhadi for his film “A Separation” (2011). This award is especially auspicious considering Iran is the target of diplomatic and economic sanctions and under threat of military attack from Israel, the US, and the United Kingdom. The images of Iran in the mainstream media are of menacing power plants, anti-Semitic presidents, and bearded robed men. And yet, visual art and film from the region and from the diaspora has received overwhelming international recognition not only from the mainstream Oscars but also from revered film festivals.

In 1997, Abbas Kiarostami received the highest prize at Cannes, the Palme D’Or, Shirin Neshat received a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival for best director in 2009, and again Asghar Farhadi was given a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011. In other words, Iranians living under a repressive regime are producing some of the most highly impactful art of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

The ‘watershed’ moment for Iranian visual arts came in May of 2006 at Christie’s inaugural Contemporary Middle Eastern Art sale in Dubai. The auction brought in over 2 million US dollars while the following year saw sales well over 12 million US dollars. Middle Eastern art was delivering groundbreaking numbers and Christy’s new category of Modern and Contemporary Iranian and Arab Art solidified Iranian art’s critical status with dealers, curators, and collectors on a global scale. Iranian artists have brought in landmark sales, including Charles Hossein Zenderoudi’s 1981 painting “Tchaar-Bagh” which sold for over 1.6 million US dollars in April of 2008 and Parviz Tanavoli’s 1975 bronze sculpture “The Wall (Oh, Persepolis)” sold for a world record price of over 2.8 million US dollars in April of 2010.

Beginning in 2010, civil uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain and bloody civil wars in Syria and Libya have made corruption and human rights abuses in this region of the world visible to the international community, including the US and Great Britain. In Iran the protests and civil rights movement (now known as the Green Movement) beginning after the perfidious June 2009 elections has made it clear to the world that the Islamic Republic of Iran’s government is abusive and is under serious scrutiny by Iranians in Iran and within the diaspora.

Because of Iran’s oppressive political and social agenda there is a largely young and disenfranchised Iranian population finding outlet through various visual medias which leaves no shortage of work to be sold and recognized internationally. Iran’s “golden age” of art is largely attributed to the establishment and steady growth of Christy’s auction house in Dubai. The wealthy in and outside of Iran understand art to be an intelligent financial investment, as artist Parviz Tanavoli comments, “there is a lot of wandering money in this country which in the past was only invested in housing and the stock exchange. But this has changed now.”^[1] Another reason for the rise of Iranian art is that Iranian artists living, working, and consolidating the current civil rights movement of Iranians from within the diaspora, such as Shirin Neshat, are more recognized than ever. The art world began to take notice that Iran experienced profound shifts in the last century sparking artists both in and outside of the country to speak the language of those traumas. Neshat is an extraordinary example of an artist born of this trauma.

Shirin Neshat, in the circuits of contemporary art, is a household name. She arguably popularized a form of art that investigates identity, hybridity, history, and migratory processes. The relationship between ancient and modern in terms of identity, art, history and geography has been broached intensely in the photography and films of Neshat. Neshat first arrived as an artist in the mid 1990s with her photo series “Women of Allah”, in which she attempts to visualize questions related to hybridity, gender, memory, identity, and the self. Much of her work deterritorializes language and bodies, by writing Islamic women’s bodies (symbolized by the chador or full-length head/body covering) with the language of provocative and charged feminist Iranian poets such as Forough Farokhzad. The photograph “Speechless” (1996) was acquired by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in April 2012. The image combines four dominant symbolic elements: text, veil, gun, and gaze. “Speechless” is representative of Neshat’s concerns throughout the “Women of Allah” series. “Speechless”, claustrophobically frames a mournfully indifferent face, (not her own although she is featured in other photos), overwritten with Islamic text. The barrel of a gun peers out ominously from within her chador. The photo features the penetrating one-eyed soft gaze of the woman looking beyond the gaze of the camera. The image juxtaposes several powerful forces bearing on women’s lives in Iran, Islam, violence, and the chador/veil.

In the 1990s, her approach was fresh and confrontational and she arguably began a movement, amongst diaspora artists and others, concerned with questions of identity, gender, geographical divides, democracy, and political exile. Neshat’s presence and work has proven to be arresting. Neshat received the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 2006 while in 2010 cultural critic Roger Denson of the Huffington Post named her artist of the decade. Denson commends Neshat’s work for its “chronic relevance to an increasingly global culture” and for its capacity to respond “to the ideological war being waged between Islam and the secular world over matters of gender, religion, and democracy”. For Neshat to be named artist of the decade is indicative of how much her work has resonated with collectors, critics, and spectators.

 

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Director Shirin Neshat (second from right to left) with friends at the Closing Ceremony photocall at the Palazzo del Casino during the 66th Venice Film Festival (CC BY-SA 2.0; Genin via Wikimedia Commons).

 

 

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