'Unselfish Auto-Portraits' exhibits work of 20 young Iranian artists
By Bavand Behpoor
Special to The Daily Star Monday, May 04, 2009
Review:
TEHRAN: A shower of white foam pours from the mirrored open-mouthed figure of Behrang Samadzadegan's untitled piece, taken from his series "H&H = Heaven & Hell." The cycle provokes a cacophony of questions to the spectator. "What if the dwellers of hell were given a chance to represent what they are experiencing?
What if I had the chance to depict the hell I have internalized?" Such questions follow you through "Auto-portraits," a group exhibition of photo-based self-portraits by 20 young Iranian artists, accompanied by an audio self-portrait by sound artist Kaveh Kateb.
Curated by photographer-critic Ali Ettehad, the show was on display in Tehran's Azad Art Gallery in April. Self-portraiture characterizes a great deal of Iranian contemporary art, which in its commitments seems more of a movement rather than a category. It is striking how sharply this art differs from its mainstream European counterpart. No matter how seriously it is dragged into the art market or is faithful to the western audience, it remains obsessively attentive to the social life of a people who may altogether ignore it. One might try to defend this movement for how hard it tries to compensate for the lack of attention given to the complicated situation in Iran, and to provide a careful, cruel critique.
Ali Ettehad and Nikoo Tarkhani's contributions (both of which are printed on mirrors) could be gendered reflections of one another. Tarkhani captures herself enclosed within an ornate cage. Elaborately framed, standing before a work of dire contemporary architecture, Ettehad is enclosed within a hooded army fatigue jacket. Both artists clutch objects to their chests. Having pushed through the mesh, Tarkhani's hands frame a bowel that should be a camera lens. Ettehad grasps a toy police car. Behrouz Rae's untitled work is self-deconstruction in action. Fully intact when it was hung on April 3, the print began to slowly fade, so that at the end of the exhibition it was blank paper, albeit one redolent of the smell of Sex Appeal cologne. Ghazaleh Hedayat's work resembles a wallpaper sample, whose pattern is comprised of her own face. At first, this isn't obvious to the spectator, who has to come very close to the picture to see that it is made up of some 4000 of Hedayat's self-portraits. ("What if I am imprisoned in a mirror-worked oriental shrine which reflects my shattered image thousands of times?") The new current of young Iranian contemporary artists takes the revolutionary ambition more seriously than the revolutionaries themselves and tries to remember what the revolution is apparently eager to render unforgettable. Thus, it can be said that Iranian contemporary art has taken a personal interest in a political structure that takes no interest in it. The art looks into itself as a by-product of a discourse in order to make itself critical, thereby destabilizing the rigidity of the steely, frozen catastrophe around it. More an accomplice than a judge, the current's powerful core is its rejection of being a victim. All this expresses itself in variations on a theme of self-portraiture. The works Ettehad has chosen here show a striking similarity in attitude without sharing much resemblance in their modes of expression. All these bitter, confessional self-portraits - which the catalogue suggests are more related to society than the "self" - are imbued with a courage to cut through one's image to reach an insight into the over all situation. The selection is, surprisingly, less about personal unreachable "histories" than one collective history that has been so cruel towards the mutliplicity of individuals. The works go beyond a sense of narcissism and push aside what one understands of self-portraiture and use the image of the artist himself to neutralize any personal identity, as Samira Alikhanzadeh does by using pyramidical mirrors which depict those standing next the spectator, rather than the spectator himself. It seems the current movement of Iranian contemporary art develops against a hatred of Lacan and his famous mirror or void. It tries to escape the mirror-worked shrine, to break through the mirror, to liberate the one trapped behind it.
