A bridge between past and present
The contemporary art of Iran
The Shahnameh or “Book of Kings,” an epic poem of some 50,000 couplets composed in Persia in the late 10th and early 11th centuries, tells of pre-Islamic kings and heroes. It is still regarded as Iran’s national epic. In the period of Mongol rule (1256-1353), illustrated manuscripts such as the envisioned the ancient pre-Islamic kings as the 13th- and 14thcentury Islamic rulers of Persia (modern-day Iran). “The visual identification between the sovereign, often himself not a Persian, and earlier Iranian kings was deliberate and significant, used to validate the ruling elite,” writes Linda Komaroff in
the catalogue she edited to accompany an exhibition of the same name that opened in May at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition and catalogue, which was published by DelMonico Books, highlight the fluid nature of time in Iranian art and the continuous dialogue of past and present.
More contemporary images than those of Iran’s centuries-old illustrated manuscripts, such as artist Shirin Neshat’s photographic series from 2012, continue the symbolic superimposition of the historical mode upon the contemporary. Neshat’s series recasts friends and acquaintances in the roles of patriots and villains. The torsos of the photos of villains, a smaller subset of the overall series, bear tattoo-like renderings depicting battle scenes. Neshat culled the scenes from lithographic imagery in an early 20th-century copy of the
It may seem like a subtle distinction, but what contemporary Iranian artists do with the older visual culture of Iran is, in a way, the inverse of what Iranian artists did up until the recent past. “Contemporary art in Iran is a way of using the past as disguising, let’s say, any kind of commentary on contemporary politics and society, like with the image that’s on the cover of the catalogue from the series done by the artist Siamak Filizadeh,” Komaroff, curator and head of Middle Eastern art at LACMA, said, referencing Filizadah’s print series from 2014. “It’s ostensibly about this ruler of Iran from the second half of the 19th century, but it’s really more about all of Iran’s leadership, whether they’re royal or not royal, and how they manage to muck things up. It’s a way of saying, ‘Nobody’s been particularly great for us,’ perhaps.”
The book follows the format of the exhibition, which was not conceived of as a chronological survey, although it contains works dating from the 16th century to the present, with an emphasis on contemporary works created since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The layout of the catalogue is unique. It opens at the center; the two halves of the book expose the internal stitching that, when opened, reveals what could be assumed to be a portal or gateway into another world — like two books in one. The text is on one side with its own spine, and plates on the other can be flipped through from left to right or from the reverse. “I asked the designer for something that was not traditional, non-narrative, nonlinear, and non-Eurocentric,” said Komaroff. “The topic of the exhibition is really about nonlinear time, and it’s a nonlinear approach to art history.” In a way, the printing attempts to bridge the gap between Western and Persian culture, in which writing flows from right to left, as opposed to left to right. The reader is immediately introduced to the ending of the on the left-facing page and its Persian equivalent on the right-facing page.
Given the continuous flow of dialogue between past and present, there is something cyclical in the nature of many thematic elements of Iranian art. But contemporary artists, according to Komaroff, use past incidents to critique the present, not necessarily to emulate it. For instance, a collage work by artist Ramin Haerizadeh from 2010 titled
depicts Haerizadeh himself kneeling before an elephant-headed king against a backdrop of headlines from 1979. One headline announces the departure of Mohammad Reza Shah, and one declares Ayatollah Khomeini’s arrival — an event more than
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