Exhibition Review #3: "Traces of Being: Iran and the Passage of Memory"

Pantea Karimi, "Holy Vanity," 2009

“Traces of Being: Iran and the Passage of Memory” – currently showing at the Morono Kiang Gallery in downtown Los Angeles – features the works of four contemporary Iranian-American artists (Pantea Karimi, Hushidar Mortezaie, Amitis Motevalli, and Fereshteh Toosi). An intriguing examination of identity, memory, and hybridity in the contemporary art world., the exhibition was curated Shervin Shahbazi, who himself is Iranian-American. As detailed in the press release for the show, Shahbazi asked the participating artists to “create work based on their personal memories of Iran–or lack thereof—and, in the process, reflect on two different memories: One they would like to save and one they wish to delete even though purposeful forgetting is humanly impossible”. Moreover, in curating the exhibit, Shahbazi sought to expose the viewer to a deeply-personal, often quirky look at Iran, a nation that most Americans know only for its political strife and/or domestic turmoil. “[I] didn’t want to have something cliché and straightforwardly political,” he told the Los Angeles Downtown News. “If you see the exhibit, you will take away something and learn something new.”

The four featured artists utilize radically different tactics – both artistically and theoretically – to explore the questions posed by Shahbazi. Motevalli’s contribution, “Houri,” greets the viewer, as it hangs facing outward in the gallery’s front window. Light streams through the window, casting an eerie glow on the 72 photographic transparencies of the artist’s middle school photo, featuring Motevalli wearing heavy makeup and dressed like an American pop star. As critic Knight note, the work forces the viewer to confront the intersection of Eastern and Western cultural influences, as it “disturbingly melds a publicity-style head shot of a wanna-be pop star with the false Western myth of Middle Eastern martyrs being greeted by virgins in paradise.” Similar dynamics are at play in Mortezaie’s section of the show, a collection of fashion-based works. Most prominent are his plywood figures, dressed in traditional Iranian garb overlaid with Western media images and corporate logos. Recalling paper dolls, the figures are symbolic bodies on which the forces of globalization and cultural imperialism play themselves out.

The exhibition’s two standout artists are Karimi and Toosi. Karimi presents a series of watercolors and serigraphs – exemplified by “Holy Vanity” (2009) – which combine traditional Farsi calligraphy with contemporary western media images. Karimi uses these two mediums to her advantage, creating complex, layered works where image and text bleed into one another. Crucially, Karimi intentionally blur or decontextualize both the images and the calligraphy to the point of illegibility. Thus, “Holy Vanity” functions as a representation of her tangled, “illegible” identity formed from her experiences and memories of living both in and outside Iran.

Toosi’s untitled piece (at right) is the exhibition’s most eye-catching work. Taking up a corner of the gallery, it is a virtual universe of composed of foam spheres covered by knitted Afghan blankets and yarn Ojo de Dios (God’s Eyes). As Toosi points out in her description of the piece, both the Afghan blanket and the God’s Eye are traditional handicrafts that have been divorced from their cultural context and subsumed by middle-class American. The fact that the artist knitted these objects out of traditional Iranian yarn adds yet another level of complexity; in the words of the artist, the installation reflects “the obfuscation of culture,” presenting a universe where Iranian and American cultures are literally woven together into a new, hybrid state.

Beyond simply providing a window into the Iranian-American experience, “Traces of Being” is fascinating in that it grapples with the notion of (cultural) identity. The artists’ works (and their accompanying narratives) do not celebrate multiculturalism; instead, they are defined by a fundamental sense of confusion, of being caught in-between. In his research on hybridity in contemporary art, Nikos Papastergiadis argues that hybridity is used by diasporic and indigenous artists to mark their rejection of being “defined in terms of an exotic alternative or as a belated supplement whose incorporation could serve to both expand and reaffirm the parameters of the mainstream.” Refusing to fit in within any nationalist school or formalist movement, these works challenge the supposed “binary that separate[s] the containment of meaning within an artwork and the establishment of a framework for making meaning within culture."

I see the works in “Traces of Being” as furthering this postmodern, hybrid movement in art. Reflecting the complex identities of the artists themselves, these works revel in their state of perennial “translation,” combining American and Iranian influences only to collapse into an indeterminate, hybrid state of being. Refusing to fit neatly within the artistic traditions of either culture, the works demonstrate the artists’ continual struggle with their own hybrid, Iranian-American identities. In the end, perhaps the title of the show says it all; if the multicultural artwork represents a state of being, then these artworks are traces of being – traces of Iran and traces of America combining to form a complex, multiethnic identity.

Sources:

Knight, Christopher. "Art review: 'Traces of Being: Iran in the Passage of Memories' at Morono Kiang Gallery." The Los Angeles Times. October 2, 2009.

Papastergiadis, Nikos. "Hyrbidity and Ambivalence: Places and Flows in Contemporary Art and Culture." Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 22, No. 4, 39-64 (2005).

Scott, Anna. "The Iran You Don't Know." Los Angeles Downtown News. September 18, 2009.