Art
Eye on Iran
by Matt Nippert
Big-issue politics may be off the menu, but not national
and personal identity.
It’s not quite Basil Fawlty’s advice to staff at his Torquay hotel to not mention the war to German tourists, but an Iranian photography exhibition currently touring the country has done its utmost to avoid politics.
Mandana Mapar, the Brisbanebased curator of Ey! Iran (the title refers to what is virtually the unofficial Iranian national anthem), says recruiting Iranian photographers for the exhibition was complicated by artists who feel their work is often shoehorned – against their wishes – into simplistic critiques of the country.
“They already had experienced that their work had been taken away and almost shot out of a cannon in an explosion of negativity,” says Mapar of some of the established photographers she asked. “I was selfcensoring, they were selfcensoring, there was a triple layer of people going: ‘Who is the audience? What are we trying to let them know? And God forbid anyone gets the wrong ideas.’”
This selfcensorship has pushed Iranian art in interesting directions. Influences from the West aren’t minimised, says Mapar, but selectively transplanted. Many of the photos in the exhibition are abstract, subtle works that draw more from Jackson Pollock than the modern documentary approach.
Of course, even the best firewalls sometimes let controversy slip through. Walking through the collection, Mapar stops at an almost angelic work by Bahman Jalali, Image of Imagination.
“This is the one that almost got me in trouble with the embassy,” she says. The Iranian embassy declined to be involved with supporting the exhibition.
The woman at the centre of the image – a beauty from another time and place – was one of the Shah’s courtesans. Iran’s first photography studio was opened in the early 20th century and run out of the court, but after the 1978 Islamic revolution the studio was closed. Reactionaries objected to women being photographed without a veil.
While bigpicture politics may be off the menu, there’s plenty on display in Ey! Iran to show that vigorous discussion of local issues familiar to New Zealand audiences is partandparcel of life in Tehran. “Almost every artwork in the exhibition is like a Kurosawa film: there’s layers and layers,” says Mapar.
The growth of Tehran, from ancient city to bustling cosmopolitan metropolis (they have a Sky Tower equivalent, the Milad Tower, that’s more than 100m taller than Auckland’s version), is a common theme, as is the interpretation of national identity in an age of globalisation.
It’s easy to guess where Hossein Valamanesh spent the better part of two decades: his largescale photograph Longing Belonging features a lit campfire atop a Persian rug, situated in the middle of a eucalyptus grove.
Leila Pazooki, a Berlinbased artist who travelled to New Zealand to open the exhibition, uses video to capture life on Tehran’s streets. “The process of making this video is, for me, like artaction,” she says.
Many of Pazooki’s Iranians wouldn’t look out of place on Auckland’s Queen St – with one crucial difference. After Mapar translates the phrase “hamming up” for me, Pazooki responds to a question about whether young Iranians mug and make peace signs when presented with a camera. “Ah! No,” she says. “That doesn’t happen in Iran.”
Pazooki stalked everyday meeting
places to gather her footage: cafés, boutiques and that international staple of youth, malls. Another exhibit is a book of selfportraits shot in the bedrooms of the contributing artists. Frida Kahlo posters adorn many walls, and young Iranian men are clearly fans of Marilyn Manson.
Both Mapar and Pazooki grew up in Tehran during the 19801988 IranIraq war, a conflict that cost more than a million lives and saw hundreds of bombs and missiles rain down on the capital.
Of course, the experience of children
in war is not the same as for adults. Pazooki, for instance, remembers an end to curfews: “For me, when I think about the war, I remember after the air raid siren stopped I was allowed to play with my friends at midnight in the street. And it was fine! The parents talked about politics and we were allowed to do
everything.”
For the younger generation, removed from formal discussion of politics, other forms of discussion have emerged and politics can take many forms. Iranian émigré Marjane Satrapi produced a graphic novel, Persepolis, about her
childhood in Tehran and her high school years in Austria. Her work was turned
into an animated film that won the jury prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and also reached New Zealand screens this year as part of the international film festivals.
Though it deals with domesticity, Pazooki says Persepolis changed her world. “Every Iranian in Europe can live easier now after this film. Can you imagine? It’s so intense! Iran is a big country – and like every country the government is not the same as the people, and that’s what Satrapi’s showing, I think.
“It’s so political. She said it’s not political, and I know why she says that, but it is so political because she changed a lot of things about Iran.”
