Strangers behind the looking glass

The inaugural exhibition at Tehran’s Mohsen art gallery deals with ‘being’ and ‘otherness’

THE DAILY STAR
Thursday, March 18, 2010

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Review

Mehdi Moghimnejad

Special to The Daily Star

TEHRAN: Suppose you meet a friend on a Tehran street and ask, “How are you?” Chances are your friend would simply say, “I’m doing okay” – or, as we’re likely to say in Farsi, “I’m alive.”

This “being alive” is a close approximation of Heidegger’s dasein – a form of “being there,” denoting nothing more than existing in the world, just like all the others who, like you, simply are.

With so many “beings” about, civil relations ensue, which may explain why relationships with others have been discussed by so many intellectuals – from Husserl, Martin Buber, Levinas, Sartre and Lacan to Sohrevardi and Ibn-e-Arabi.

“Being” and the attendant human relations – particularly the relationship between the artist and those they live among, in amity or animosity – were at the center of “The Other,” an 18-artist multi-media show that recently inaugurated Tehran’s Mohsen art gallery.

Curated by 27-year-old artist Ali Ettehad, this exhibition delicately investigated the range of possible encounters and the variety of artistic points of view that the works elicit.

Among the most distinguished works in this selection, Nikoo Tarkhani’s “The Image Through the Mirror” may be the only one that refers the spectator to a specific definition of “the other” in a defined discourse.

Tarkhani contrived a simple design for the piece. Her own portrait has been printed on metalized paper (not unlike gold leaf) and divided into two parts. The subject’s face is covered by multitude of pictures of other people.

In Lacanian discourse the “mirror stage” is the point when the child deliberately experiences its own body and can distinguish the line between “I” and “Other.” This line, however, begins to disappear in Tarkhani’s work. Here, the artist sees herself accepting the other’s gaze. Moreover, she is inseparable from those who have played a role her identity formation.

Tarkhani’s use of self-portraits and family pictures is a theme that also crops up in the work of Samira Eskandarfar, Jinoos Taghizadeh, Farid Jafari Samarghandi, Behrang Samadzadegan and Samira Alikhan Zadeh.

Barbad Golshiri’s “Middle East Impromptu” is a work that has a different point of view regarding “the others.” In this grey-scale video that seems to have been filmed by a closed circuit camera, the artist recites a long, impromptu monologue while his face has been completely covered and walled by a framework reminiscent of a cell.

It is unnecessary to focus on every word of Golshiri’s rant. The meaning of this work is concealed within its basic idea: Intellectuality is delusional, diminished into words. The artist seems at once to suffer and enjoy a lustful sense.

Here, Golshiri sees himself in a merciless battle with the other. This “Other” consists of complicated relations that, for him, exemplify the ideological atmosphere of Middle Eastern art and artists.

The artist tried to justify the ostentatious aspect of his work by saying he was cognizant of it. If we consider Golshiri himself as a part of the art of this region, then we have to admit that even he is not immune from his own sarcastic tone.

Nima Esmailpour’s “Americans Ask: Who Attacked Our Country,” on the other hand, engages with the political meaning of “the other.” The work puts George W. Bush’s famous declaration of September 20, 2001, alongside images of the events of September 11 of that year.

What matters here are the historical roots of the idea that the Orient and the Occident are polar opposites of one another. From the time Hellenic Greeks labeled foreigners as “Barbarians,” as Edward Said famously remarked, Western intellectuals and politicians have considered the Orient as “the other.”

These days, the delusional expression of this view has it that the Orient is a permanent danger and aggressor. This other is responsible for all disorders in this world. Today, the threat of nuclear weapons in Iran and North Korea, mingled with that of Islamic extremism, play the same role in Western geopolitical thinking as Eastern Bloc played during the Cold War. Sentiment in the Middle East vis-a-vis the US and Western imperialism simply reverses these roles.

With “Choose Your Background,” Amir Ali Ghasemi takes a decidedly more light-hearted tack. Part of a larger project involving photos documenting a street performance, “Choose Your Background” depicts a Tehran resident asking Berlin residents to choose one of the icons of Tehran as a background for a memorial photo.

In this witty piece, Ghasemi restores sweet memories of innocent transnational contact, while mocking the distance between countries that makes citizens look like tourists in their own homeland.

In “The Last Day in Saint Andrias,” Sohrab Mostafavi Kashani transforms citizens of a virtual city into real people, with whom we are familiar. The essential subject in this work is the complicated world of the videogame Grand Theft Auto, which makes such interactions possible. In these snapshots, Kashani’s aliens look much more realistic than their animated representations.

Hamed Sahihi’s short video “Thunder and Lightning” sees “the other” in an angel’s concealed figure. In “Duino Elegies,” Reiner Maria Rilke believed what impresses us is the appalling presence of angels.

Here, the heavenly creatures wait silently for the sound of thunder or a raindrop to be revealed. These angels must have something to say, a message. That is the etymological route of the word “Mal’lach” in Arabic and Hebrew, and also “Angelos” in Greek.

For the last word, it’s appropriate to point out an artwork whose outstanding quality lies in its nature. The music of Kaveh Kateb is not a soundtrack to accompany the works in this exhibition but a free-standing work of its own. Kateb’s is a work that could accompany the viewer back to the streets of Tehran, back to the simple everyday encounters that constitute our “being alive.”