Raad o Baargh: 16 Artists From Iran
Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Paris, France
'Raad o Baargh' (2009), installation view
In a recent episode of Marketplace Middle East on CNN, the names of top-selling Middle Eastern artists and the prices of their most lucrative sales at auction jazzed across the screen to synthesized background music. ‘Oil revenue prices dropping from US$140 to circa US$40 is having an impact clearly in some sectors of the Middle East but there is huge disposable wealth still there’, insisted the Fine Art Fund’s CEO Philip Hoffman. ‘I see the art market in the Middle East, growing quite substantially.’ Like Charles Saatchi, whose exhibition ‘Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East’ is currently on at the Saatchi Gallery in London, Thaddeus Ropac insists that interest in organizing a similar survey show, though considerably smaller, stems from the desire to defy clichés and testify to the cultural heterogeneity of a region saddled with misconceptions. However, the enduring market around socio-political exoticism and the potential to dip into new pockets of wealth cannot be denied.
Mahmoud Bakhshi Moakhar, Tulips Rise from the Blood of the Nation’s Youth, from the series ‘Industrial Revolution’
The exhibition title, ‘Raad o Bargh’ (‘Thunder and lightning’), immediately calls to mind the RAAD missiles Iran has allegedly provided Hezbollah and the media’s misinformation campaign on the ‘Axis of Evil”. Aside from its very evident allusion to Sturm und Drang , it also evokes the political call to revolution ‘esteghlal o azadi’ (independence and liberty), used in 1979 by the ideologically disparate liberal, Marxist and Islamist opponents to the pro-American, British-backed Shah.
Behrouz Rae, Untitled (2008), from the series ‘In Bimester We Trust’
These references introduce a triumvirate of recurrent issues – the interplay between place, time and the individual; the relationship between the personal and the political; the dialectic of ‘global’ and ‘fringe’ – which are addressed either pointedly or indirectly by all 16 artists in the exhibition. Ala Dehgan’s neoexpressionist works on paper (2008-9) are diagrams for a new mythology whose pantheon of ambiguous gods, indistinguishable as good or bad forces, intervene mischievously to upset the hermeticism of all those who attempt to avoid the junction between personal and political. Behrouz Rae’s Study for Reconfiguration Number 3 (2008) and his series of small mixed media compositions, ‘In Bimester We Trust’ (2008), trace the absence of the individual through a suspended wandering in and out of space and place. Ali Banisdar’s The Charlatans (2009), an abstract expressionist reiteration of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-4), is similar in approach to Cecily Brown’s rabbit paintings (1997-2002) but rooted in the tradition of Persian miniatures.
Ali Banisdar, The Charlatans (2009)
In an exhibition that brings artists together for their national origins, it is impossible to avoid threading a common spirit that unites their practices. In Shahab Fotouhi’s video, Direct Negotiation (2008), a cat paws at the screen of a back door, yet it is unclear if it is desperate to be let in or simply sharpening its claws in readiness for its prey. Like a playful prod on the shoulder whose source only vanishes upon turning around, all of the works in ‘Raad o Baargh’ emit a distinct aloofness that feigns indifference and disengagement.
Emily Verla Bovino
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