Persian Miniatures: Our tears are sweet, our laughter venomous
Eastern Connecticut State University at Willimantic
Aug. 23-Oct 8, 2021
Curators: Julia Wintner & Afarin Rahmanifar
Simin Behbahani (Iran’s Lioness of Dissent)
Our tears are sweet, our laughter venomous.
We’re pleased when sad, and sad when pleased.
We wash one hand in blood, the other we wash the blood off.
Despite the massive decades-long presence of US troops all over the former Persian empire, we have learned little about the old center of power Iran. In a piercingly bitter-sweet show, Julia Wintner (aka Yulia Tikhonova) and her co-curator Afarin Rahmanifar offer us insights into culture, gender, and art history from a region Americans usually experience as a strategic gameboard, involving oil and imperial alliances. Featuring 14 Iranian-American women artists, the exhibition strikes deep into the heart of diaspora art, with its shifting visual vocabularies and defiance of national boundaries and stereotypes.
Knowing that the Koran bans depiction of living forms, I was curious to explore the legacy of portraiture in an Islamic society. If the human face and form are treated as sacred, does that circumvent the prohibition? If seeing a portrait is a spiritual experience, then perhaps the portrait itself is like a prayer or pathway to the always superior form of God. Some argue that “inverisimilitude” was a technique that did not violate the Koranic injunction of imitation of living things. Others, like scholar Priscilla Soucek, point out that ancient texts often include human figures, perhaps deemed permissible because they were depicted in idealized form, rather than as individuals.
No doubt that would make the rulers shown in many iterations of the 10th century Shahnameh epic poem happy: they do flaunt their heroic form. This very heroism becomes a preoccupation for Afarin Rahmanifar whose art work in the exhibition deliberately turns the spotlight on the lesser known female figures in Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh: Persian Book of Kings.” (See some illustrations by Hamid Rahmanian in an innovative version of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh “The Epic of the Persian Kings” based on illustrations from thousands of Iranian, Mughal Indian, and Ottoman manuscripts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5ChKJvjsow&list=TLPQMjkwOTIwMjGT2ZajelqQKg&index=1 )
Her marvelously fluid forms spiral upward, as though traveling on wafts of incense. Bright colors, dappled patterns and sensuous limbs flow in renditions that remind us that the female powers behind the throne must oten squeeze into tight spaces, slipping around solid obstacles. Meanwhile, the lack of modeling, depth and realism direct our attention to non-Western art traditions where boundaries between folk and official art, court aesthetics and craft codes blur. Rahmanifar writes about her work as “a journey of appearing and reappearing, disappearing and reappearing. I strive to show the female body as a vessel moving through this journey [of appearing, disappearing and reappearing] taking in new experiences for the mind to process” Meanwhile, women who must walk the streets of Tehran fully covered post modern versions of themselves on Instagram. Leaders have banned Facebook and recently imposed a hijab dress code for Instagram, but they are having trouble keeping up with the proliferation of platforms and selfie codes that link youth across national boundaries.
The metalwork sculptures of Roya Farassat also have a floating, drifting quality that belies her steel materials. “There is definitely a connection between my metal sculpture that draws inspiration from the shapes of objects that were used traditionally in the Safavid period, such as spherical ornaments, metal ewers, kettles, wine bowls and silver inlaid jugs,” she says in the exhibition’s catalog. Indeed the light and shadow of her cut-outs make you want to experience this work in the strong light of Persia. The tension of strength and light alerts you to Farassat’s deployment of traditional punched-out patterns within a modern aesthetic rendered in hard, unpainted steel. “As I cut, hammer, bend and weld on metal, I make wall installations with tactile forms that twist and turn, stretch and tear into sketchy lines. They have become linear maps for birth, growth and decay,” says Farassat. Historical savvy, folk art sources and modern materials counterpoint each other in confident work that tolerates no easy categorizations of immigrant artists.
Minoo Emami draws on craft traditions to create startling sculptures based on prosthetic limbs. Like the show’s opening poem “Our tears are sweet, our laughter venomous,” art cannot ignore the legacy of war that has severed limbs and smashed lives over eight years of fighting by Iran and Iraq. The somatic canvas, suppressed in different ways within Islamic codes of modesty, here emerges in memorable form in a series begun in 1997 called “Peace March.” “With the portrayal and utilization of used prostheses, I transform the harsh realities of war into objects of beauty. This collection of work then, is both profane and sacred,” the artist comments.
Emami has rescued stories, humanity, and gruesome souvenirs with these sculptures. Above quietly realistic feet, the decorated leg prosthetics rise in a variety of ornamental garb. One jeweled beauty features a mosaic surface, largely in a cerulean livery that seems directly borrowed from Persia’s blue heavens. Many fragments make a whole that still bears the marks of each tile’s individuality. Other sculptures from the series use patterns from textiles, mirrors, calligraphy and woodcuts. Emami interviewed women (who remain anonymous) to understand their lives during the war, and their own special relationship to artificial limbs that have become as much testimony to the carnagescape of civilian injury, as aids to mobility for the survivors. Here again, the US-based artist has intelligently interwoven current events, craft traditions and the enduring spirit of ordinary women.
How do diasporas affect American visual vocabularies? These artists are refining a language to speak of the experience of being throttled along a journey to freedom. Samira Abbassy wrote that she “became a fictional historian reinterpreting stories about a homeland I barely knew.” In work that curator Wintner called “peacefully iconic and painfully urgent” Abbassy reinterprets traditionally dressed women in historical garments as facing multiple directions with several eyes or heads divided — as though keeping an eye on the past could anchor a mysterious yet promising future. In “Bound by her Fate,” an ominous three-eyed girl is muzzled by braids of her own hair, which then frame her necklace hung with pendants of female heads. The star of “Ghosts of Her Migration” has a resolute expression but the base of her portrait erupts in flames, while invasive hands pluck out her hair from the side. The poise of the figures offers a counterweight to the adverse forces that threaten to erupt from the canvas. The multiplication of eyes and heads challenges us to occupy varied points of view, as if the world only becomes real when seen through many eyes or glimpsed over a shoulder.
With “Compulsory Halo” Arghavan Khosravi offers a version of women that encompasses pain and hope. The artist comments “I’m reflecting on my life experiences and memories from Iran. And in Iran, human rights issues, and women’s rights issues in particular, are in a really horrible situation…. But I am not interested in just showing Iranian women as victims.” Khosravi underlines the agency and activism of women working for change. The collaged work has incorporated a prayer rug, behind and within a woman in a pose that resembles Renaissance veneration of the madonna figures. But here the traditional halo is controlled by puppet strings wittily escaping through a hole in the “ceiling.” Beneath Mary’s sumptuous cloak, a nude mannequin body with wooden joints contradicts the high nobility of its source. Again in a humorous juxtaposition, the cloak envelopes part of the prayer rug. This Virgin has a blob of bubble gum over her mouth: could this be a silencer rather than a wryly empty speech balloon?
This stunning show at the Eastern Connecticut State art gallery in Willimantic engages and elevates the human spirit, while acknowledging the massive forces arrayed against Iranian women. These artists show us their spiritual journeys and how creative tension with the homeland infuses art made in the US. The diasporic soul refuses to be nailed in place. As Rumi wrote in “Only Breath” … “I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all… My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. “