In anticipation of the opening of Siah Armajani: Follow This Line, Pittsburgh-based Iranian contemporary art scholar Golnar Yarmohammad Touski looks at the recent history of the country Armajani left behind when he moved to Minnesota in 1960 and the cultural and political realities faced by Iranians working internationally in the cultural sphere today.
In the late months of 1979, shortly after the Iranian Revolution, my father was issued a new passport. It was stamped in red ink with the words “The Provisional Revolutionary and Islamic Government of Iran,” while the rest of the booklet was printed in French and Farsi, and bears the seal of the fallen monarchy. It is a quickly put-together document to give passage to a young man on his rushed trip to a homeland going through radical change.
Iran’s 1979 revolution, as historian Ervand Abrahamian succinctly put it, “erupted like a volcano because of the overwhelming pressures that had built up over the decades deep in the bowels of Iranian society.” Mohammad Reza Shah, the last king of Iran who claimed to be a true successor to 2,500 years of continuous Persian monarchy running all the way back to ancient Persia, “was sitting on such a volcano.”1 In the political environment of late 1970s, when postcolonial nation-states were emerging, little room was left for such a monarchical, imperialist mindset. Additionally, the Shah stayed in power as a result of the 1953 coup led by both the CIA and MI6, and the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, a nationalist figure loved by Iranians. The Shah, who replaced his father, Reza Shah, with the support of Anglo-Soviet allies in 1941, consolidated his rule after the coup and quashed the nationalist movement. The revolution was a culmination of nationalist, communist, and socialist-minded activists and more conservative, religious forces. But it was just as much a battlefield of the Great Powers’ contention.
My father’s passport offers a politically dense and peculiarly eclectic snapshot of a regime hastily putting together its nascent identity. It depicts a state unlike its 19th- and early 20th-century predecessors, whose educated elites spoke and wrote in French and identified with western European academia. Upon the advent of multinational corporations, the revolutionary regime sought to join the predominantly English-speaking, economic globalization forces. The Islamic Republic (IR) envisioned its existence among poles of religiosity, the global capitalist economy, and revolutionary zeal. On the one hand, a long history of colonialism in the Middle East region mandated that such revolutionary zeal was anti-West from the outset, and on the other, the IR aspired to join the constellation of global nation-states. The result was a contradiction that continues to challenge the regime’s anti-West image.
In early years of its existence the Iranian regime waged a crusade on any cultural product that bore the influence
This continues today, as a recent tweet by artist and scholar Barbad Golshiri attests. A contributor to the catalogue for the upcoming retrospective on Iranian-American artist Siah Armajani, co-organized by the Walker Art Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he wrote:
Thanks to @realDonaldTrump, as one of the writers of the book “Siah Armajani: Follow This Line” I can’t see the exhibition at @walkerartcenter and @metmuseum. Neither can I order the book since I’m in #Iran.
Long blacklisted by the multinational Financial Action Task Force, the country is not part of the global banking system, which makes it impossible for scholars to purchase books and cultural products online. Even if Iranian scholars manage to afford buying books by means of relatives or friends abroad, cultural products of any kind will be subject to governmental auditing at points of entry. Depending on whether they comply with the IR’s sociopolitically banned content policies, said products may be confiscated or censored even before making their way to the recipient. As such, Iranians have little access to a history of their own, which attests to Iranian contemporary artists’ presence in the liminal space between the two countries’ narratives of sovereign identity.
Few in the US know how the Iranian-born Armajani ended up in Minneapolis, that he was raised in an Iranian Christian family and went to a Presbyterian missionary school. Few in Iran know that as a student he joined the National Front party (Jebhe-ye-Melli) to protest the Shah and that his father sent him to Macalester College in St. Paul to save him from imminent dangers of a tumultuous time.2 Since then, Armajani’s bridges have been sites for public passage and contemplation. The art he believes in belongs to all sectors of the public, rich and poor—a kind of art that not only brings people together but creates a democratic idea of the public.3 His sculptures address political atrocities in Iran and critique contemporary American politics just the same; but decades of propaganda and altering narratives of Iranian art practice and culture, both in Iran and in the US, obfuscate an otherwise nuanced account of Armajani’s contribution to both societies.
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Siah Armajani, Prayer, 1962.
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Siah Armajani, Prayer (detail), 1962
To all these cultural barriers for Iranians add a history of economic boycott by both the EU and the US. Recently implemented economic sanctions on Iran caused the exchange rate between the US dollar and the Iranian rial to skyrocket, and consequently the possibilities of international travel, education, and cultural exchange for Iranians gradually disappeared.4 Under current conditions, traveling has become a luxury most cannot afford and life for Iranian citizens has receded to daily subsistence.
An Iranian artist based in Tehran, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that within two days of the recent US sanctions going in effect basic materials of art production, such as canvases and acrylic paint, practically vanished from the market. “If I can’t access means of art practice, my career is effectively over,” the artist said. Not only that, with food staples becoming more and more expensive, the artist cannot see a way to survive via selling artworks, much less traveling to exhibit abroad.5
Likewise, the situation is hardly promising for those of us living and working in North America. In April of 2016, I was stopped for a routine security check at Heathrow International Airport on my way back to the United States. The officer asked if I had visited any of the following countries in the past five years: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. I found the question funny and resisted the urge to state the obvious: I am Iranian. I would go back for a visit. I may have visited or will visit any of these countries; I am a scholar of Middle Eastern art. With the Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban in effect, leaving the US for international students can cost them their education as they may not be able to return to their programs. In such circumstances, traveling to research local archives is not an option.
The Iranian Portland-based environmental artist Naeemeh Naeemaei tells me, “How can I discuss my difficulties as an Iranian artist while I have no secure position in either country?” Naeemaei’s artworks have been shown in two solo exhibitions in the US, and a book of her artworks, Dreams Before Extinction, was published by Perceval Press in 2013. Copies of her book were held by the Iranian border control, and she was denied entry to the US on both occasions. Naeemaei later entered the US as a dependent of her husband, who is a graduate student in Portland. “I’m still not allowed to work as an artist or to continue my education with this visa,” she says.6
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Naeemeh Naeemaei, Mom, Aunt, and I, 2009
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Naeemeh Naeemaei, Adam or Eve, to kill or to save?, 2009
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Naeemeh Naeemaei, Playmate, 2009
While Trump’s America continues to demonize Middle Eastern travelers, such circumstances are hardly new. Many other colleagues, curators, artists, and scholars have shared similar experiences of traveling to any country in the EuroAmerica zone or even other parts of the world. In the US, the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 already included the countries that later comprised the Muslim ban, albeit with a considerable degree of modification.7 Barbad Golshiri has been invited several times to the US. His art has been reviewed by reputable journals as well as the New York Times, and he has given talks at various American universities. But, like many Iranians, his status as a scholar and artist rarely supersedes his nationality. An encounter he had upon one of his trips to the pre-Trump US is particularly jarring. During security check he was asked if “they taught him to make centrifuges at art school.”8 One cannot help but wonder if the question was meant as a joke or if decades of mainstream media’s crafting of a thuggish image of Iran as American arch enemy with nuclear aspirations went so far as to characterize Iranian citizens as potential nuclear bomb-makers.
On the institutional level, Iranian art education and curatorial practice predominantly mimic the state’s systemic reductionism of culture, oscillating between a blueprint of the governmental official narrative of the arts and demands of the regional market. Independent curator Elham Puriya Mehr describes her career as one that is already overshadowed by the double blade of Iranian and Euro-American market and state-driven stereotypes. When teaching art at Iranian state institution Purya Mehr had to design courses of contemporary art under already existing titles as there was no course that addressed the contemporary art discourses in title or content; and even then, the content of the course was branded by one governmental official as “Westernized.” At private institutions and galleries in Tehran, Purya Mehr curated numerous nonprofit exhibitions as a tactic to show art outside of the mainstream art market. While the galleries were interested in nonprofit exhibitions to build a reputation, non-profit projects neither fulfilled expectations of high sales in the UAE, Dubai, and ultimately North Atlantic markets, nor did they deliver any other commercial benefit. As a result, many curators feel strong-handed by private art institutions’ agendas. Contradictions of the state’s revolutionary identity vis a vis its pursuit of global markets made working in the art community a tightrope walk for Purya Mehr.
Outside of Iran and in the international art scene in Europe and North America Iranian curators face with a different coercive institutional force, one that demands they work exclusively as curators of Iranian art under already existing stereotypes; a story all too familiar to those of us working in the field: Iranians as oppressed Middle Eastern women and despotic men. Beyond power games of nationality, exoticism, and patronization of Iranian women, curators find it increasingly challenging to work.9
In retrospect, looking at my father’s passport feels ironic and bitter. A student in the US in 1970s, he decided to return home shortly after this passport was issued. Like many leftist-communist–minded young Iranians back then, he hoped the revolution would bring equality and justice to his people. The passport image is just as much a snapshot of an emerging order as it is a frozen moment of my father’s presence. Only few years later, he vanished into the IR’s wave of incarceration and execution of political activists.
In the space of erasure, anything can be written—whether such erasure involves censorship of books, the entire history of a nation, or forcing certain national identities. In the US today there seems to be no recollection of a history of Iranian presence in the country pre-1979. The war of sovereign identities is and is not ours; it is ours because we bear the consequences, and it is not ours because a multitude of voices need to be redacted, deformed, and slaughtered by sovereign states to hold up various façades of “democratic,” “anti-terrorist,” “Islamic,” and “anti-West.” Cultural war, while not as readily tragic on the surface, contributes to omitting parts of history that challenge sovereign identities, paving the way for violence under the banner of stereotypes.
Notes
1 Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 155. Accessed August 25, 2018, ProQuest Ebook Central.
2“Return to Exile,” ArtAsiaPacific: Memory of Shozo Shimamoto Gutai Artist Honored, Accessed August 26, 2018.
3″“Interview with Siah Armajani,” ArtAsiaPacific (Vimeo), August 25, 2017. Accessed August 26, 2018.
4Jason Rezaian, “I Lived in an Iran Under Sanctions. Here’s What It’s Like.” Washington Post, August 2, 2018. Accessed August 10, 2018.
5Interview with Tehran-based artist and painter by author, August 2018.
6Naeemeh Naeemaei in discussion with the author, August 2018.
7 Glenn Kessler, “Trump’s Claim that Obama First ‘Identified’ the 7 Countries in his Travel Ban,” Washingtonpost.com, February 7, 2017. Accessed August 10, 2018.
8 Barbad Golshiri, email message to author, July 10, 2018.
9 Elham Puriya Mehr, in discussion with the author, August 2018.
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