The first exhibition of art books titled “Book as House’ will open on August 26 at Tehran’s Aaran Art Gallery.
The central theme of the exhibition is art book or artist’s book, a work of art that utilizes the form of books, and often published in small editions.
“Art books are not meant to be read. They are indecipherable objects, with an uncommon language. Images are words. Colors and textures replace narratives,” says the website of the gallery, aarangallery.com.
Art books allow for artistic freedom in creating an abstraction. Artists’ books have often employed a wide range of forms, including scrolls, fold-outs, concertinas or loose items contained in a box. The artist’s book is primarily a late 20th-century form with roots in earlier avant-garde movements.
They are often created to make art that is interactive, portable, movable and easily shared. Many artists’ books challenge the conventional book format and have become sculptural objects. They may be created in order to make art accessible to people outside of the formal contexts of galleries or museums.
The exhibition attempts to show the diversity in art books created in recent years by Iranian artists of different generations.
Event curator Foad Farahani, 33, said: “Art books are multi-dimensional, multilingual and multimedia. They are in fact ‘magical spots’.”
He described art books as “personalized structures like a house. One can enter and stay in, or pause at various spots and corners. Pages are rooms and halls. Forward or backward can one browse the place; there is no fixed order of the spaces.”
Farahani is a prolific painter and graphic designer who has held numerous solo and group exhibitions at the Tehran Museum of Temporary Art, Niavaran Cultural Center, and Imam Ali (PBUH) Museum in Tehran; Isfahan Museum of Contemporary Art in Isfahan; the Academy of Art and Design in Basel, Switzerland; and Moscow’s Golden Bee, Russia.
His works mainly include prints, drawings, posters, paintings, photographs and typographies.
Besides Farahani, the other artists participating in the exhibition are Mehdi Hosseini, Hossein Valamanesh, Saed Meshki, Saeed Ravanbakhsh, Milad Parvaz, Homa Delvari Sina Seyfi, Maryam Farshad, Behzad Motebaheri and Elmira Mirmiran.
The event will run through September 12 between 1 pm to 7 pm on all working days except Saturdays. On Fridays, the gallery located at No 5, Lolagar Alley, Neauphle Le Chateau Street, is open from 4-8 pm.
