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Borderline Exhibition-Opening Reception Introduction

Curated by: Mahsa Farhadikia, Mandy Palasik, Brandi Sjostrom, Naomi Stewart

Artists: Janna Avner| Michael Chang|Evelyn Contreras|Christian Franzen|Richelle Gribble |Gottfried Haider|Julian Lombardi|Ariel Maldonado|Mandy Palasik|Allison Peck|Gazelle Samizay|Weng San Sit|Joshua Thomen

January 22 – March, 13 2021

Angels Gate Cultural Center

San Pedro, California

Hi everyone. Thank you all for joining us tonight. My name is Mahsa Farhadikia, an la-based independent curator, art critic and a member of AICA-USA. Tonight I am here as one of the co-curators of Borderline exhibition to discuss some of the main thematic frameworks of the exhibition. My pronouns are she/ her, and I am a woman with long blond hair wearing a black jacket and there is a green wall behind me. My curatorial interests include emerging and marginalized artists, contemporary art’s dilemmas, gender studies, post-colonial subjects and contemporary curatorial approaches. The introduction I am going to read to you tonight is an excerpt from an article I wrote for the exhibition catalog. You can find the main text in Borderline exhibition catalog available on Angles Gate Culatural Center Website. 

Borderline exhibition starts with an ambiguous, playful metaphor. As inferred by its title, it plays with the references to a mental disorder of the same name, which as defined by psychologists occupies an in-between space in the spectrum of mental diseases. In its psychological definition, “The term borderline originally came into use when clinicians thought of the person as being on the border between having neuroses and psychosis, as people with a diagnosis of BPD experience elements of both.” Due to this definition, a borderline includes implications to an indeterminate and unsettled situation as well as to social categorization leading to hierarchization and stigma.  

Borderline exhibition questions the notion of a borderline as it associates to the notion of categorization. Classification and categorization are among the tools humans have used throughout history to understand the world. Specifically, the exhibition questions the objective approaches dominant in the western logic and their efforts to put the world as the subject of knowledge “in order”.

The exhibition’s theme is based on challenging the certainty which is a result of drawing borders and defining categories both in social contexts and in ontological ones. On a social level, categorization has been used to put people in groups such as: “members”, “nonmember”, “insiders” and “outsiders.” As a result, drawing borders seems to be one of the most fundamental stages in the process of othering. Accordingly, what seems to be the harmless and even “rational” act of categorization has led to extreme demonization, xenophobia, homophobia, and other types of phobia. On an ontological level and inspired by scientific discoveries such as theory of relativity, the previously objective approaches toward categorization have been replaced by more subjective perspectives in contemporary thinking.

In view of such a major scientific revolution, other areas of knowledge, including philosophy and art, have undergone fundamental discursive shifts as well. Accordingly, we live in an era that has emerged from the ruins of certainty and absolute beliefs. Postmodern mistrust in the metanarratives of modernity such as rationality and progress, along with more traditional grand narratives, is born out of the ideas of relativity and uncertainty. As a result, the legitimacy of putting concepts, people, and objects into discrete categories is being fiercely questioned by the naturally existing chaos and disorder of the universe and its philosophical implications brought to the fore by contemporary discourse.

The idea of an exhibition titled Borderline is shaped out of this philosophical and socio-political necessity to explore the subjective nature of predefined categories by raising questions about the nature of a borderline as a determinative element in creating spheres of meaning. However, choosing such a theme might raise questions such as: why do we need to bring into attention the importance of the blurriness and constructedness of the borderlines, the overlapping of territories, and the eclectic nature of realities, if they already exist on various levels? The answer is that despite the paradigmatic shifts, it seems that at least on the societal level (if not on a philosophical one), we are still prescribing skepticism toward certainty rather than describing it as our existing reality or portraying it as our lived experience. In fact, the borderlines outlining different social categories based on criteria such as gender, age and race, are surprisingly still among the most problematic realities of our time. Sorting people according to what are their “common features,” has resulted not only in extreme superficiality but also in hierarchizing of relations between the groups.

Borderline exhibition also adopts the literary theory of intertextuality to explore the eclectic, multi-coded nature of phenomena. As Julia Kristeva the Blugarian-French literary critic defines it, intertextuality means each text is a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. While intertextuality has been mainly used for discussing the notions of influence and inspiration in art and literature and consequently to address issues of authorship and plagiarism in these fields, Borderline exhibition takes concepts such as influence to address a whole different issue. In fact, the curatorial framework of the exhibition, approaches intertextuality as a philosophical paradigm shift that undermines the borders between texts and exposes their eclectic, polyphonic nature.  Thus, intertextuality, in its very core, delves into the structural relationships between texts and shows how each text is inherently made up of other texts, or in other words, how each text opens to “infinite play of relationships with other texts or semiosis.” Consequently, there is a close relationship between intertextuality as a literal theory and Postmodernism and the Borderline exhibition particularly aims to scrutinize the postmodern aspects of intertextuality such as: relationality, eclecticism, and interconnectedness of texts, not in the context of literature, but as they apply to arts in terms of form, aesthetics, material, and concept.

The exhibition contains three different and at the same time overlapping sub-themes, namely: identity, medium, and space. While we do not claim absolute comprehensiveness with these sub-themes, we believe these are among the most critical areas, on both artistic and societal levels, in which the function of borderlines has resulted in exclusivity, othering, and hierarchization. Works have been selected for this exhibition with an aim to raise questions about the “either/or,” black /white, and in one-word dichotomic approaches. The installation of the exhibition itself is a metaphorical representation of the fragility, temporariness, constructedness, and arbitrariness of the borders between the categories it defines. Therefore, instead of installing the pieces in a traditional curatorial order – which means placing each piece in the space allocated to its respective sub-theme- the pieces literally break into adjacent spaces, this irony is supposed to encourage viewers to question the certainty of thematic borders. This layout also creates a visual equivalent to the interconnectedness of territories and uncertainty of the borderlines that define them. Moreover, by “breaking” the homogeneity of the categories that we have already defined for the viewers and disrupting their specified spots, we address the inherent, uncertain and eclectic nature of the conceptual spaces of the exhibition. In fact, the presence of a piece within the thematic section to which it did not originally “belong” is a visual allegory to the situation that Gerard Genet, the French literary theorist, defines as “the actual presence of one text within another.”


 
 

Curators’ Foreword

Curators’ Foreword

The idea for an exhibition titled What If Not Exotic? took form at a time when international art markets in general, and western art markets in particular, were filled with works of art that present predictable, marketable images based on cliché assumptions about the local lives, identities, and socio-political concerns of artists labeled as “Middle Eastern.”

For the past two decades, with the establishment of new art markets, many new brands with titles such as “Middle Eastern Contemporary Art” have begun to take shape. This general and inaccurate title, ignores the region’s varied history, art, and culture in order to present a reductive and homogeneous concept, suitable for market consumption. The subjects and symbols included in this type of “Neo-Orientalist” art are often like display windows that reflect the market’s demands: some of the main features it represent, include sociopolitical issues presented as repetitive slogans, the insertion of Orientalist elements, and the depiction of exotic spaces.

Due to its geography and the sociopolitical upheavals it has experienced in the decades following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran is one of the countries that has been a suitable context for the formation of different variations of Neo-Orientalist art. For the last two decades, due to the shifting cultural policies, as well as the active role of private institutions, Iranian artists (particularly younger artists) have seen increasing opportunities to access to the region’s new markets and to present their work on the international scene. These shifts have had a significant impact in shaping this form of art; the type of art that sees itself from the problematically simplified perspective of the western viewer and his expectations, and therefore–intentionally or not–becomes distant from its intimate source material. Meanwhile, longstanding Orientalist projections of western viewers about this historic region, and its recent socio-political tensions and human rights concerns, raised the western viewer’s curiosity. Moreover, Curators, critics, and theorists have also played an important role in shaping the conversations that introduced this dubious artistic trend as the primary representation of contemporary Iranian art.

Inside many Iranian critical circles; however, this type of art is not simply valued because of its exhibition of political elements or symbols that indicate a “national identity”. Instead, art scholars have seriously criticized these works for their reductive and simplistic perspective. This is because, regardless of what the artists claim, the works do nothing to critique or question the status quo. Instead, by reducing a complex situation to a simplistic sentiment, they are ultimately further establishing the very means of reduction. This concern is at the heart of the exhibition What if Not Exotic? An in-depth exploration of contemporary Iranian art that bucks market expectations; featuring instead artworks that reflect the lived experiences of artists, and seeks to consider the varied and complex individuals, rather than the monolith of a singular brand titled “Contemporary Iranian Art”.

This exhibition is an attempt at presenting a realistic image of contemporary Iranian art–as an alternative to the common Neo-Orientalist representations of the “Middle Eastern” art in general and Iranian art in particular–in Western art markets. All the selected works maintain deep and significant connections to their sociopolitical context that fall beyond clichés and common expectations. In other words, they have not resorted to predictable and predetermined subject matters and visual elements to question their current political situation. In fact, these are pieces that have experiential aspects related to real limitations that artists face on a personal and professional level. Therefore, dialogue between these works and the artists’ lived context is a complex interwoven one that affects different aspects of the process: from the artists’ choice in media, to the size and the color palette, and from the style and formal language, to the subject matter. The exhibition is arranged in four main sections. In each section, a significant and emblematic aspect of Iranian art and life is examined: Public Spheres, Private Interiors,The Body; from defiance to deformation, and Memory; From Personal to Collective.

Public spheres refer to the places where individual desires and ruling order intersect. But in a public space where the expression of individuality as an active agent is reduced to the extreme, the experience of life is accompanied by a sense of alienation and passivity. This sense of bewilderment can be found in the present works both in subject matter and form, whether it is in their depiction of spaces in neutral colors or the angle of the camera. We selected works that go beyond a direct depiction of the contradictions between individuality and the prevailing rule of law, and instead show the bewilderment, alienation, and isolation of the individual in the public realm; a situation well described by Sohrab Sepehri the contemporary Iranian poet in his poem, “Us nil, us a look”.

When the public sphere becomes a space of control and surveillance, the private and interior spheres turns into a shelter where the individual can temporarily take refuge from social pressures. This form of escapism sometimes manifests itself in an obsessive attention to interior spaces in the form of still lifes and representations of human relations in the relatively safe confines of interiors. However, governing policies and social pressures are not only present in the public realm, but can easily bleed into the private space as well. Despite private spaces providing relatively safe havens where one can find refuge from ruling orders and experience the reprieve of intimate relations (such as Farzaneh Ghadianloo’s Thursdays series of photographs), even such spaces are not entirely free from the misery and irritations that exist in the public sphere. This fleeting privacy can indeed exacerbate one’s awareness of surveillance and control (such as Kathamandu series of photographs by Ali Nadjian and Ramyar Manouchehrzadeh).

Another way that contemporary artists practice escapism is by turning to a more personal past that has semi-universal elements. In these selected works the reference to the past is not achieved by inserting national-identity-related symbols (as is often the case in contemporary Neo-Orientalist works), but by using family photographs and personal artifacts as a means of memory akin to time travel, artists are allowed to explore their own lived experience even as it may unfold against a larger social backdrop.

The final group present in the current exhibition utilizes works that address the body as a means of experience. Here the body reacts to violence and isolation by becoming deformed and revealing physical attributes left by pain. Through technique and form, as well as elements representative of suppression, we are faced with the abject reality of a body that has been suppressed and tormented without any intermediary to comfort us. (Such as the human figure drawings of Shaya Shahrestani).

Although the present exhibition has no claims about being a complete all-encompassing representation of Iranian art, what it does claims to present is a more realistic version of a nation’s artistic dynamics where economic and political limitations can lead to a complicated, individualized, and extremely experiential effect on the works. Finally, if the juxtaposition of these pieces can present a meaningful alternative to the previous (and problematic) singular voice that has been heralded as “Contemporary Iranian Art”, then we can claim to have reached our objective of presenting multiple voices from among the complex phenomenon that is contemporary Iranian art.

Aria Eghbal – Mahsa Farhadikia

 

 

Radical Women

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 was the last show exhibited at the Hammer Museum in 2017. The exhibition was part of the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a vast series of exhibitions showcased in various art venues all across Southern California focusing on Latin American art in dialogue with Los Angeles as a city with deep historical roots in Latin America. The exhibition forms around the connections and tensions between artists’ sexuality as women and repressive political systems dominated in Latin American countries at the time. The name “Radical Women” implies the extensive tendency towards radicalism in western feminist art during the same period of time, while the huge difference between Latin American women artists and their Western counterparts is that Latin artists had to combat in another battleground instead of gender equality. This larger battleground is nothing but the repressions, took place under ruling dictatorship regimes. As Helen Molesworth, The MOCA’s former chief curator, noted in the exhibition’s press release: “The lives of many of the artists featured in Radical Women were thus enmeshed in experiences of authoritarianism, imprisonment, exile, torture, violence and censorship”. Therefore the exhibition not only presents what these artists share with their Western counterparts in terms of gender equality, but it also explores the way they respond to their specific socio-political issues as Latin women artists in a critical period of time.

Being revealed is one of the most important trends in this exhibition. This includes different aspects, from personal and individual self-expression to more political commentaries. The act of revealing functions as a subversive strategy to the dominated discourse of repression and if one considers repression as a tool for dictatorships to hide what opposes their ideologies, then the process of revealing could be revolutionary by itself.
In an hour and a half, a series of four black and white photographs from 1975, Mexican artist Lourdes Gorbet was photographed while trying to emerge from a sheet of metallic paper stretched on a frame during a performance. While an hour and a half alludes to the famous Botticelli masterpiece, The Venus Birth, Gorbet appropriates the notion of birth in a modern and realistic way, quite different from the symbolic birth of Venus as the goddess of love, beauty, and inspiration. The artist has dressed modern and casually to symbolize herself as a modern woman artist who is looking to be visible in the real world of society as well as in the world of art. Here the act of revealing has a very basic function, which is as simple as being seen and legitimized as a woman artist.
Three years later, Chicana artist Yolanda Lopez, in a series of self-portrait photographs, mimics Venus while having a bunch of brushes in her hand and standing in front of a shell-like background. While her heroic, radical, and determined gesture addresses her ambitions as a woman artist to be discovered, her constant smile and humble outfit, beside the intentional amateur style of photographs creates an ironic atmosphere. This irony was created playfully to question the mythological symbolic value of a woman and substitute it with a more humble, real, and even funny woman artist for whom being valuable isn’t equal to being elevated to the level of a goddess. In contrary as the gesture shows, her demands in a patriarchal society are as simple as being visible and to be able to work freely.

In addition to revealing themselves as women artists, some other artists focus on the female body as a site for discrimination and repress. While revealing the natural mechanisms of the female body, such as menstruation, giving birth, and sexual excitements, was a recurrent theme in the radical realm of feminist body art and performance art of 70s, in a performance piece called Ritual in Honor of Menstruation (1981) , Colombian artist Maria Evelia Marmolejo expressed her female sexuality by addressing the similar concerns in a radical feminist way. Although Evalina’s menstruation ritual is not complicated, it is certainly allegorical. By uncovering her genitals and letting her menstrual blood drip on the floor, and by rubbing her pubic area against the wall to leave an imprint of her blood, she brings one of the most body-related female taboos to the public sphere. As the performance name signifies, this is not just a simple act of revealing a natural feminine mechanism, but is rather that of a celebration of feminine menstruation as a strong and authoritative gesture opposed to menstruation’s traditional implications of weakness and wickedness.
Far from nudism as a way to address discrimination and imbalanced power relations, Liliana Porter mediates on revealing the representational nature of body. She manipulates her own self-portrait by drawing a rectangle, half on her face and half on the background wall. She deploys a strategy similar to “alienation” in Brecht theaters: by adding an unexpected element, she disturbs the unity of represented female portrait as something real or natural. She seems to reiterate the representational nature of the female portrait by juxtaposing it with an unexpected element.

The most haunting part of the exhibition is where politically charged works are interspersed with earlier feminist works. In Chilean artist Garcia Berrios’s America I don’t invoke your name in vain from 1970, she takes a critical stance against Salvador Allende’s social democratic government in power at the time. A group of shadowlike people in black are emerging slowly from the canvas while their legs are being cut by the bottom edge of the canvas, reiterating the threatening sense that they are walking out of canvas into the real world. These faceless figures address the silent majority of people opposing dictatorships all across Latin American countries and their potential for prospective uprising and revenge.

In Gloria Camiruaga’s video: Popsicle (1982-84), sensual and political are intertwined in a playful way. Teenage girls sensually lick popsicles only to find plastic soldiers at the end. Aside from curators’ interpretation of the work as an implication of the militarized society under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, the video addresses the hidden violence threatening women in patriarchal societies in general, even underneath sweet and tempting sensual pleasures. By reciting “Hail Mary” while licking their popsicles, the girls imply how the interconnectedness between female pleasures and violence have turned into a sacred ritual of masochism. Finally, by showing innocent teens doing an innocent job in an ambiguous way, the work comments on the uncertainty of the terms such as “innocent” and “erotic.”

Radical Women, along with other LA/LA project exhibitions, provided us with a great opportunity to explore the invisible art of Latin female artists. Such exhibitions should and do bring us an awareness about how violence against women differs based on different socio-political conditions and how contrary to what history shares about the female sex being oppressed, violence does take stronger forms under dictator regimes. Putting such exhibitions in the context of the Trump era would also help feminist activists to have a fresh view about the importance of Latino women issues and the necessity of our support, especially in the current political atmosphere of fear and mistrust.

The Cold War Spaces

The Cold War Spaces exhibition which was on view from November 2017-March2018 at the Wende Museum of the Cold War explores some of the most significant themes that defined European state socialism after the Second World War. As the first exhibition at the museum’s new location in Culver City’s former National Guard Armory, Cold War Spaces provides us with the opportunity to explore the history through rare personal and daily objects, family photos and videos, and established works such as Socialist Realist paintings and sculptures. Thanks to the large collection of more than 100,000 objects and artworks, one witnesses a multifaceted picture of the Cold War, which can be both personal as collective and political. While the exhibition deals with pivotal moments in the Cold War, it also sheds light onto lesser known aspects.

The exhibition starts with “Border Space,” the works related to the notion of The Wall as the most important symbol of division between the two blocks. In this section, the museum’s Chief Curator, Joes Segal, infuses the artistic receptions of the border places with secret border guard training materials from the iconic Checkpoint Charlie. In one of the photographs, one sees the first East German soldier who jumped the newly made fences to escape to East Berlin only a few days after August 13, 1961, the day that construction on The Wall began. Another photograph shows a more recent image of cheerful people and soldiers celebrating the toppling of The Wall in 1989. Also included in this section are facial recognition materials (charts, diagrams, and handwritten notes) of the border guards, which reveal the tools of control deployed by an oppressive political system. The process of scrutiny was not only for people who wanted to cross the border to go to west, but in the opposite direction as well. According to a former border officer who wants his name to remain unmentioned, “Many Westerners regularly went shopping in East Berlin, or had a sweetheart there. People who overstayed their travel visa for East Berlin faced travel restrictions: they couldn’t cross the border with their own ID any longer. So they used other people’s papers.”

The exhibition’s focus on the lesser known aspects of the Cold War is nowhere more obvious than the section called “Secret Space.” As its title suggests, “Secret Space” is dedicated to the veil of secrecy surrounding many policies by the Eastern Block leaders. In addition to interesting surveillance equipment that belonged to the East Germany Secret Police (Stasi), and contemporary photographs of the remnants of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the most noteworthy work in this section is a painting by Stanislav Molodykh. This painting depicts the misuse of psychiatry as a regular tool in Brezhnev’s time for repressing the intellectuals who were opposed to the state’s policies and ideological beliefs. Molodykh depicts a dark and gloomy mental asylum, with a portrait of Christ on the wall representing the building’s former purpose: a church. Alongside the Christ portrait hang two other portraits: one of Lenin and the other of Brezhnev, symbolizing the efforts of socialist leaders to create something as holy as a religion out of Socialism. It also contains some implications for the not-so-innocent use of mental asylums during Brezhnev’s time (the painting was painted in 1982, the year Brezhnev died). Besides the political signifiers, we are also reminded of labels such as “philosophically intoxicated,” used by dominant political powers to condemn their opponents, as we view several men who don’t appear to be mentally sick in the painting. [There are more than two of them]

Our intrigue continues with “Public Space,” just across the most typical signs of public life in the socialist countries such as political leaders’ busts, commemorating flags, and pictures of official public events. There is a photograph of young East German punks in public transport by the same artist who photographed the state official events. The photos obviously surprise Western visitors, who have mostly experienced life in socialist countries through the lens of Western media and as something ideological and totally different from their own. The punk youth photos in “Public Space” are in significant dialogue with the counterculture photographs on view in “Private Space,” which are focused on the more intimate and psychoanalytic aspects of the subjects. In two photos showing a close-up view of the faces of a man and a woman, one can see obvious counter-cultural traits of the subjects. [Silberblick in the titles refers to the counter-cultural portfolio and the social niches and individual free spaces carved out by unofficial artists in the GDR.]

Although the idea of collectivity is a hallmark of Socialist systems, the exhibition presents pictures not only of this ideal, but also includes more individualistic paintings and photographs to represent those lesser-known non-ideological and humanistic aspects of living behind the Iron Curtain. In “Private Space,” the paintings focus on individuals. Four out of five paintings in this section represent women in a non-political, private sphere. A teenage girl from Uzbekistan, a woman reading a book from the Stalinist era, a young girl in Ukrainian folk dress, and a sad Soviet mother holding the letter announcing her son’s death at the front all hang next to the wall of photos of everyday people from the Soviet Union and East Germany. This shapes a significant contrast to the paintings at the other spaces such as “Work Space” and “Utopian Space,” which have more familiar pictures of collectivity and collaboration.

The success of the exhibition, which has been embraced by thousands of visitors, is based on the curatorial team’s great effort to create a groundbreaking, non-cliched picture of the Cold War that is not biased, nor relies on a limited narrative of history. Deep historical research, curatorial creativity, loans from other institutions, and the museum’s huge collection of artworks and artifacts all led to an exhibition which presents a unique picture of the Cold War.

The Iranian Don Quixotim

Don Quixote said: “It is obvious, you are not aware of the heroic adventures, I’m telling you these are ferocious giants. If you are afraid, go off to one side say your prayers while I am in an unequal and frightening battle with it.” And after saying these words without paying attention to advices by his squire Sancho, who was yelling at him: “Have some mercy! They are truly windmills, and not giants”, he gave spurs to his steed “Rocinante.” The giant-ness of the windmills was inscribed on Don Quixote’s soul in such a way that not only he could not hear his squire Sancho shout but he could not find out what they really were, when he approached the windmills. Just contrary, while he was galloping on, he was shouting: “Do not seek to flee, you ugly and vile creatures! Now it is only a single knight with whom you have to deal!”

Don Quixote is the title of a group exhibition organized by Behnam Kamrani at Aan Gallery. Behnam Kamrani, Babak Emanuel, Krista Nassi, Adel Younesi, Negar Farjiani, Peyman Pajouhan, and Pantea Karimi showcased their works in this exhibition. Don Quixote by de Cervantes, a 16th and 17th century author, is the narrative of a symbolic and ironic nobleman who is struck with an amalgamate of illusion, paranoia, and saving the world after reading some heroic and chivalric novels – at a time when these traditions are over – and places his emaciated body on a horse and sets out to “take revenge for the violence, try to do away with the cruelties, make up for the oppressions, hinder the assaults, and settle for everything.” This is a novel, whose psychological, philosophical, and social aspects are not limited to a specific time or place, but is a familiar and repetitive myth in our biogeography.

This exhibition had many features which made it stand out: Firstly, participation of three Iranian-origin artists who are residing abroad made the atmosphere of the works different from what we usually see in galleries. Focusing on technique, artists had created more refined and mature works, an achievement which undoubtedly is the result of the Western academic and professional world, which trains artists through accuracy and efficiency. The second strong point of this collection is the creation of works ordered by the organizer, not based on the works which are already created by the artist. This trend is the basis for professional curatoring activities and is often ignored in our country and leads to incorrect, inaccurate, and irrelevant choices or choices which are loosely tied to the theme of the exhibition. There number of artists who participated in this exhibition was low and each artist presented at least two and at most eight works. This caused cohesion and prevented visual dispersion of the works, even though the unprofessional handling of the gallery on the opening day and not preparing artists’ name tags on the works is something we cannot ignore. Babak Emanuel is an Iranian-origin US artist who presented four of his works in this exhibit which are considered outstanding and prominent in terms of technique and conceptual approach.  In two of his works, entitled “Dialogue One” and “Dialogue Two” he has shown Don Quixote dialogues on the surface of his steed’s packsaddle in an intertwined manner and relief print. In the other work, his squire Sancho’s dialogues are shown on his steed’s packsaddle. By sticking some cuts on the canvas, he has also activated the negative atmosphere and has established a proper connection to the main theme. These two works are unique in terms of cutting technique. In Babak Emanuel’s other work, William Shakespeare and de Cervantes find a common point in a number, despite all the differences in their styles. April 23rd, 1616 is said to be the day both authors passed away. An arrow and a feather are placed on top of the canvas as a symbol of the two authors. In another work by him entitled “This Is Not a Windmill”, this sentence is written in Spanish on canvas. On one hand, this sentence is a reference to the art historical work “This Is Not a Pipe” by René Magritte, and on the other the illusion-stricken mind of Don Quixote is depicted in the form of cobweb-like interwoven structures in a surrealistic or even horrifying atmosphere. In this work the artist’s manual designs are covered with a layer of paraffin and printing black ink as well and he has unburied the design by erasing parts of the work. The black atmosphere of the work alongside the non-typographical writing in big size and also erasing some parts and leaving other parts untouched, represents Don Quixote’s atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia very well. In Pantea Karimi’s small-sized works which were created by a combination of silk print, watercolor and pencil on cardboard Don Quixote comes to Iran and his steed is one of the horses in Iranian paintings and in an equivocal dialogue he touches on some events in the Iranian history. Karimi’s post-modern view in this series, namely the humorous meeting of the past and present, has served the purpose for the main theme of this exhibition. Krista Nassi has also replaced the common digital print with the Salvage technique and consequently the image sits well on the canvas. In a video by Behnam Kamrani, however, we are faced with Don Quixote’s steed in the beginning which looks like a local horse with the familiar accessories on a dry land and looks in a noble and sorrowful manner into the camera. Then we see Don Quixote with the stature of a black-clad man with local clothes on the horse. The hero, who is not an authentic hero, is mounted on the crooked, skinny horse and fantasizes his heroic journey. Negar Farjiani’s works, however, is not so relevant to other works in terms of style and the manner of expression. Peyman Pojhan’s installation is the most symbolic work in this exhibition. He introduces Don Quixote as the symbol for a template thinking which views the world through this framework: The Iranian rug, instead of being rolled, is formed into cuboid-like structure and a space filled with Farsi letters in different handwritings as a traditional symbol of speech embraces that: the main thinking in this work is incorporating symbolism and a non-human element mounted on the steed as a character representing Don Quixote which indicates his deep view. Of course, using the thread-bare Iranian symbol of rug has diminished the creativity and success of the work.

More than being a literary figure, Don Quixote is a cultural phenomenon. This is the view which has led to creation of comic characters such as “Dayi Jaan Napel’on” (Uncle Napoleon) in Persian literature whose conflicts with imaginary enemies and his suspicion towards the insiders and outsiders has turned into a theme for social comedy genre. This exhibition also aims to depict this theme in different angels and in the form of different media.

 

Mahsa Farhadikia