Iranian Paradoxes

“What if they look down on me, because I don’t speak Farsi?” I remember asking my mother over the phone, in front of the Iranian Consulate in London. “Zahra” she replied to me in Spanish, “You would be surprised to know how many Iranians all over the world don’t speak it either… Calm down, you are not an isolated case”.

As peculiar as this scene may appear, it is very likely that something similar has happened a countless number of times to generations of Iranians born abroad or living outside Iran. My father’s country is filled with migration stories, which were not mainly triggered by the Islamic Revolution, but date from several thousands of years, such as when the Parsis sought refuge in Western India, after the Arab invasion. As an Irano-Honduran, recognising and befriending Iranians have been memorable experiences that involved pride, an ounce of anxiety and that everlasting feeling of melancholy. Growing up in France, I approached groups and communities with a relentless desire to belong… I secretly wished to blend in, so as to avoid justifying the circumstances of my geographical position, of the way I spoke or looked.

“Do you have a good psychologist?” a well-intentioned receptionist of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France asked me, after she made me explain why I was studying in the UK on a French subject whilst having a foreign name.

Like the French-Lebanese writer Amin Maaloof, I don’t think people ever “come to terms” with their identities, simply because there is no end date to self-discovery. For this issue, three Iranians I deeply admire have agreed to reflect upon the feelings of lack and abundance, which permeate their own personal stories, artistic processes and research expertise. While revising and reediting these texts, we all came to the realisation that the complexity of Iranian culture, the depth of memories and the transgenerational nature of trauma are realities which translation will never be able to fully comprehend.

Hamed Rashtian, sculptor: “I was keen to excavate an identity hidden in the past of the environment where I grew up”

Architecture, as a form of expression, entered my art practice progressively. A few years ago, I had the privilege of deepening my knowledge of three-dimensional artefacts from Iran’s post-Islamic era through the research of my mentor, Parviz Tanavoli. I became absorbed by the rich legacy of Iranian architecture, the monumental qualities of the buildings, their whole and coherent structures. When looking at these historical buildings, my attention and imagination were immediately drawn towards the inaccessible stories hidden in the body of these giant structures, with their coded information that adds to their mystery. In my eyes, the enigmatic quality of these buildings was, at the time, a metaphor of the region’s complex history. The Reverie series (2016) is a reflection on this inaccessible past. I continued making architecture-oriented sculptures as I engaged in auto-ethnographic research. I was keen to excavate an identity hidden in the past of the environment where I grew up.

Moving to Zurich, and later to Vancouver, dramatically shifted my perspective towards the notion of identity. The physical distance from the place I call home helped me realise how much I used to romanticise old times. I understood how I had unconsciously internalised an Orientalist gaze and projected it onto my own country and how wrong I was for finding my personal identity within appropriated and colonial knowledge. I became conscious of cognitive colonialism and recognised the influence it had on my artistic trajectory: I was a West Asian artist adopting an oriental lens while seeking to develop an identity and a career. I became aware of my complicity in perpetuating orientalism. However, I was working within a structure that was pushing me toward that direction, asking me to confirm everything orientalism saw in me. I was a practicing artist within the Iranian contemporary art scene, a dynamic and huge system of private commercial galleries, a variety of art collectors with rather small collections, a few curators, a dense population of artists… The oriental gaze western art institutions have on the Iranian art community has created a competition among artists on how to best appropriate our identity and our culture in order to get exposure in exhibitions in the West.

In my latest project, Same Old Story (2021), I put different anti-colonial movements in conversation with each other in order to create a topographical map that investigates power relations. My emphasis is once more placed on the architecture of the sites of these narratives, which I represent as empty and banal spaces devoid of the people that perpetuated colonialism. My drawings overlap to demonstrate the multiplicity of perspectives underpinning each narrative and, subsequently, history’s illegibility. This work also incorporates a six-channel sound installation, composed of audio archives relating to specific historical events. The multi-layered and simultaneous sound projection results in a fictional situation in which a variety of stories converge.

Today, I continue investigating narrative building through architecture. Living abroad helped me develop different forms of exploring my personal identity and, as I experience systemic racism on a daily basis, I become more self-conscious of the consequences of internalised colonialism, which I believe needs to be acknowledged and studied more widely.

Mohadese Movahed, painter: “I read somewhere that we are surrounded by our memories from places we have lived in or passed through”

It was a cold evening in mid-February on the streets of Regina, a prairie city in the middle of Canada. The memory of Persian gardens came flooding back to me as I was walking on snow and trying not to lose balance. Surrounded by the silence of snowfall, I heard the sound of water running down the pond and splashing out of the fountain. For a moment, I was transported back to the Shazdeh Garden in the Lut desert near my father’s land. I felt the warm breeze of summer on my face.

In my work, empty ponds, fallen and wounded cypress trees, gigantic boulders, holes and cracks are the visual metaphors of a land being emptied of its inhabitants; some are leaving in search of a better future, some are forced into exile, and others are being wiped out by the authorities. Historical issues such as enmity, superstition and religious restrictions eat away at Iran’s identity and are carried across generations like a genetic disease. However, the culture of Iran continues to illuminate its way forward by preserving a restless glimmer of hope, despite the steady and darkening shadow of oppression.

I read somewhere that we are surrounded by our memories from places we have lived in or passed through. Growing up in the land of poetry, gardens and mystics, memories of my homeland travelled through time and space to appear in my work here in Canada. The experience of geographical displacement and the extremely cold weather revived, in particular, my relation to Persian gardens. Reminiscences of their beauty helped me cope with the sharp and frosted atmosphere of foreign woodlands. It was during my first Canadian winter that visions of tall cypress trees, geometrical basins, rills and other fragments of Persian imagery stoically emerged in my drawings and paintings. I started researching them, their functional and symbolic meanings, and their existential role in my memories. Exploring the history and symbolism of these paradise gardens allowed me to step into the heart of my own culture and discover my place within its past and present.

I imbue my imagination with past memories and present moments in an attempt to create a world that takes on a life of its own, quite apart from the ways memories are seen or experienced. This new world reimagines the narratives of the human condition living in the face of a society crushed by tyranny. My work narrates stories of resistance, resilience and solidarity with the suffering, the pain, and the despair of a land exuding three millennia of history, filled with so many tumults and struggles for freedom, yet surviving them time and time again.

Asal Bagheri, doctor in Iranian cinema and linguistics: “Emptiness and fullness are concepts that have been forever entangled”

Emptiness and fullness… Don’t they mean the same thing, after all? For the scale to tip in favour of abundance, deficiency must exist on the other side. I perceive such a perfect imbalance as the allegory of Iranian cinema, especially of post-1979 films, which, in the wake of the Islamic Revolution, continue to conquer the world. They have found their place in global festivals by adapting traditional spaces of Iranian architecture to the cinematic medium, such as the biruni – an external area designed for guests and foreigners – and the andaruni – the interior, private quarters, exclusively used by the immediate family. By negotiating, filling, replacing spaces and furniture, Iranian cinema has created an intermediate zone, where the subject matter is arbitrated by the artistic and the moral; by the public and the private; by the acceptable and the forbidden, by the welcomed and the censored… Emptiness and fullness are concepts that have been forever entangled.

Spectators experience Iran’s plenitude through a variety of formalist recurrences: looks; interrupted gestures; farewell scenes; children; cars; symbolic objects; off-screen spaces or on-screen ones; editing techniques like dissolves or diegetic music. In terms of content, situations such as love declarations; sexual advances; sentimental relations and eroticism emerge through syntagmatic patterns. Throughout the years, Iranian directors have become the true masters of rhetoric by applying stylistic techniques of classical Iranian poems and theatrical acting strategies to their representations of women. A woman’s fears, demands, desire, longings for independence, recognition and equality are Iranian cinema’s favourite and most recurring leitmotivs. In The Blue Veiled (Rakhshan Banietemad, 1995), images of a puddle in which a woman’s bare feet reach those of the man she loves serve as a metonymy to suggest her wet body and sexual desire. The slow unveiling of the moon, a catchy and joyous tune, the white colour of a gown tail, the undulating walk of two pairs of feet on a puddle, poetically, theatrically and melodramatically reveal a wedding night, a love scene and the loss of virginity.

As paradoxical as it may seem, the presence of women in Iran’s public sphere is copious and persists. In turn, the visual representation of women abundantly lacks; the female movie characters never measure up to the more complex reality and diversity of womanhood in Iran. However, female voices, in front and behind the camera, reverberate alongside awakened voices thanks to the power and efficiency of visual emotions. Whether it is fervently feminist or simply humanist, Iranian cinema has made the most of the paradoxical nature of the Islamicised modernism sought by the Islamic Republic. From perdition to revolution via resurrection, from underneath the imposed hijab that darkens our vision of femininity, it is mainly Iranian women who tirelessly negotiate the gripping representation of their identity by shifting this veiled obscurity towards movie theatres and by building up, as such, Iranian cinema’s own iranity.