NY to Host Tenets of Iranian Video Art

The art gallery of Mana Contemporary in New York, is to hold an exhibition of video installations by six video artists from Iran.

Slated for October 15-March 30, 2018, the exhibit is organized in collaboration with Aaran Art Gallery in Tehran and Mahmoud Reza Bahmanpour, managing director of Nazar Art Publication, a Tehran-based publishing house.

The show is the second part of an exhibition series of contemporary Iranian art titled ‘In Between’ and curated by Iranian contemporary painter Shahram Karimi, 60, according to the website of the host gallery, manacontemporary.com.

The first exhibition of this two-part series, ‘In Between: Contemporary Iranian Art’ was on view at Mana Contemporary from August 30-September 8, which featured artists whose works are not culturally explicit, but conjures cross-cultural themes.

The upcoming exhibit ‘In Between: So Far’ adopts a similar approach, yet with a focus on a ten-year span of video art (2006–2016). The exhibition offers six installations by six women that together serve to illuminate patterns, changes, and developments in Iranian contemporary video art.

Participating artists are painter, sketch artist and sculptor Jinous Taqizadeh, 46; filmmaker, architect and installation artist Bahar Samadi, 36, based in Tehran and Paris; and Iranian-Swedish installation artist Mandana Moqadam, 55.

Other installation arts at the exhibit are by Tehran-based filmmaker, animator, painter, photographer and video artist Samira Eskandarfar, 37; painter and filmmaker Bahar Behbahani, 44; and installation artist, painter, author and video artist Shirin Abedinirad, 31.

  Focus on Research

‘In Between: So Far’ seeks to recognize six women whose works helped shape the rules of video art in Iran. The exhibition is the result of a focused research on the artists who use video to demonstrate a concrete artistic individuality, independent from cinema and other art genres.

Compared to cinema, video art in Iran is still a new phenomenon, emerging in the 1990’s. Examining the trajectory of Iranian video art, the main question posed in this exhibition asks: “What is the nature of contemporary video art as has developed in the new millennium in Iran?”

In a note on the exhibit, curator Karimi quotes Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) as saying: “Art is the most intense form of individualism that the world has known.” He also adds a saying by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): “We possess art lest we perish of the truth.”

“What Nietzsche means by truth is the mordant logic of everyday life: a banal world of work and suffering,” Karimi explained.

“The world of the living, according to Nietzsche, is a world filled with horror and fear. Art, by contrast, is a refuge capable of redeeming life with its beauty,” he said.

“In distinguishing between the truth of living and the art of living, Nietzsche posits the aesthetic or artistic viewpoint as an alternative to logic. In other words, what makes life tolerable, with all its suffering, is the ability to interpret it artistically. Beauty thus conceived remains outside the ken of mere rational faculties,” Karimi said in his statement.