Iran Inside Out

October 2009 Reviews

PLOT: This World and Nearer Ones

Frank Haines

Daughters of the Revolution

Parrworld

Mona Hatoum

Rita Ackermann

Marina Abramovic Presents…

Edouard Manet Farhad Moshiri Shahram Entekhabi Shirin Aliabadi Abbas Kowsari When in… London Mickalene Thomas D’Orsay Comes to De Young

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"Iran Inside Out" at the Chelsea Art Museum set out to present "influences of homeland and diaspora on the artistic language of contemporary Iranian artists." That the exhibition opened as Iran was gripped in postelection turmoil meant that the show not only managed that but also furnished a far broader perspective on art’s intersection with politics.

There is nothing theoretical about how art might engage with politics for the 56 artists included here. Thirty-five of them live and work — though are mostly unable to exhibit — inside Iran. The rest are of Iranian birth or descent but live scattered throughout the world.

Dorothea Keeser, CAM’s president, explained that the museum had originally planned to bring half a dozen artists over from Iran for the opening and give them the chance to talk about the political situation in their home country. In the end, only one was able to make the journey — the erudite and inventive Farideh Lashai, whose video projection on painted canvases, I Don’t Want to Be a Tree (2008), with its complex references to Iranian legend and Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, was one of the most striking pieces here.

"We wanted to overturn some of the redundant stereotypes that are still embraced in the West," said CAM’s managing director, Till Fellrath, who curated the show with Sam Bardaouil. The surprising fact that Iranian sharia law permits 600 licenses a year for sex-change surgery provides the autobiographical subject of "Maria" (2007), a beguilingly forthright series of photographs by Newsha Tavakolian. (Tavakolian, a former truck driver, is now a café waitress.) In Abbas Kowsari’s only slightly less surprising photographic series "Women Police" (2007), actual policewomen rappel down buildings or aim their handguns out the windows of speeding police cars, their uniforms shrouded under full chadors.

The interplay of appearance and reality, or of reality and disguise, is a recurrent theme for artists in or from a country where so much, including most artistic expression, is suppressed. In the series "Islamic Carding" (2007), Shahram Entekhabi, who lives in Europe, took the postcards that London hookers display in telephone booths to advertise their services and overpainted them to grant their subjects proper Islamic modesty. Shirin Fakhim, who lives in Tehran, used a range of found objects and cast-off clothing to make a series of life-size "Tehran Prostitutes" (2008). They are caricatures, but they possess a haunting presence — and should draw attention to the fact that, despite the posturing of the Iranian state, there are perhaps 100,000 prostitutes working in its capital city.

Shirin Aliabadi and Farhad Moshiri’s photographic series "Operation Supermarket" (2006) is genuinely tragicomic: by borrowing the appearances of cleaning products’ packaging, but replacing their brand names with the words We Are All Americans, or trading the words Kellogg’s Frosties for Families Ask Why on a Tony the Tiger cereal box, they achieve some of the most eloquent pieces included here. In Reza Paydari’s photographic series "Purgatorials" (2005), people imitate the appearance and postures of Western icons from Sharon Stone to Jerry Lewis. When she was in her early twenties, the 30-year-old sculptor and performance artist Pooneh Maghazehe — a Shiite Muslim who grew up in Pennsylvania and now lives in Brooklyn — found she could pass as a Puerto Rican Sunday school teacher whom she called Lisa, touching on a whole slew of issues around identity and belonging.

"Iran Inside Out" was a triumph: broad-ranging and constantly provocative in both media and subject matter, with superbly informative wall text and catalogue. Most important, it offered an insight into a culture still largely concealed from us, and into a history scarred by tragedy. As Sara Rahbar, who makes starred and striped flags from traditional Iranian fabrics, expresses it in the catalogue, "We left our woes behind with only echoes of our previous lives remaining. ... Metamorphosing and transforming for the means of surviving ... thinking that we are moving forwards, yet moving backwards all along."