Solace of Lovers

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• Qajar Lithographs (“One Thousand and One Nights”)

  “One Thousand and One Nights” is a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic between the 9th and 10th century. The frame story, however, is most probably drawn from the Middle Persian work “Hezar Afsan” (“A Thousand Tales”), written between the 7th and 8th century, a translation from Old Persian relied partly on Sanskrit elements.

  The book was subsequently translated from Arabic into Farsi by the Persian writer and translator Abd al-Latif Tasuji in 1843.

  Lithographs shown in this exhibition are from the 1889 edition, illustrated by the draftsman Mirza Nasrullah and published in Tehran.

• Nargess Hashemi
  

  © Private Collector

  

  © Bread & Salt Collection

  Nargess Hashemi was born in Tehran in 1979. Her Qajar series began in 2006 and 2007 and has travelled to many international exhibitions and is one of the collections that introduced her as a notable post-Revolution figure of contemporary Iranian painting.

  In this series, Nargess Hashemi takes figures from early Qajar court paintings, including the portrait of Fath-Ali Shah, his princes, women of the court as well as court musicians and acrobats, and places them in architectural plans. In this way, she begins her own approach to seeking identity in Persian painting. For Hashemi, studying the silhouette in Persian art, compositions, figures, portraits and the conceptual meaning of architecture marks the beginnings of an investigation into the concept of “home” and “the safe haven”, an investigation that she continues to the present day.

• Farah Ossouli, Francisco, Ahmad and I, 2019–2020; Fra Angelico, Ahmad and I, 2019–2020
  

  © Private Collector

  Ossouli’s video animations are titled “Francisco, Ahmad, and I” and “Fra Angelico, Ahmad, and I”, based on works of art created by the artists mentioned in the titles.
  “Francisco, Ahmad, and I” uses one of the most important pieces of Goya’s “Desastres
  de la guerra” (“Disasters of War”) series, “Qué hai que hacer mas?” (“What more can be done?”), to depict one of the most painful images of contemporary Iranian history.

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  The other name included in the title refers to Ahmad Shamlou, Iran’s political poet, and verses from his well-known poem “Khoftegan” (“The Sleeping”), which he wrote to commemorate the Warsaw ghetto uprising, are included on the periphery of this work:

  “Of those who stand
  With wide eyes staring at death,
  None are awake”.

  

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  In the other piece, “Fra Angelico, Ahmad, and I”, Ossouli depicts the silence enforced upon women by referencing “The Annunciation to Mary by the Archangel Gabriel” from Fra Angelico’s “Annunciation of Cortona”.
  The work also includes a quotation from Shamlou’s poem “Beginnings”:

  “I realised there would be no glad tidings,
  It was only a mirage along the way”.

• Ars Poetica

  “Ars Poetica” (1968) by the renowned Iranian director, musician and poet Khosrow Sinai (1941–2020) was a collaboration between Tabatabai as sculptor and puppeteer and Sinai as poet and director, which can be called the first Iranian conceptual cine-poetry.

  The movie is about a white dove trapped in a kingdom where the inhabitants lost their poetic soul and became soulless figures made out of scrap metals. The dove, which symbolises the free soul, tries not to turn into iron.

• Jazeh Tabatabai
  

  © Bread & Salt Collection

  

  © Bread & Salt Collection

  Jazeh Tabatabai (1930–2008) was a prominent Iranian writer, poet, playwright, theatre director, gallerist, painter, sculptor and patron of the arts.

  Tabatabai describes his art in his own writing as follows: “I do not paint the dreams of ‘One Thousand and One Nights’; I portray the desires and dreams of people. Under the dreamy cover of images of ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, I paint the a thousand and one pains and sorrows of people.”

  In his poems, paintings and sculptures, Tabatabai is the lover as well as the beloved, forever left alone in the mythical kingdom he created for himself.

  “I have no one,
  I am a bird without feathers,
  Lonesome and alone.”

  Jazeh Tabatabai

  In his works, he presents himself as various different creatures: a genderless human, a gazelle, a bird, Lady Sun and in many of his works as “Neither Bird, Nor Human”.

  These types of “Neither Bird, Nor Human” creatures are among the oldest images to be found in Persian paintings. In post-Islamic iconography there is a winged horse with feminine features, Buraq, who carried the Prophet Muhammad to the heavens. And on the metal structures and Alam used in mourning ceremonies, there are also many such figurines representing creatures that will be carrying the martyrs to heaven.

  The works displayed in this exhibition are from the “Neither Bird, Nor Human” series, which the artist started in the early 1960s and for which he received the grand prize of the imperial court in 1964.

• Farah Ossouli, Leonardo, Forough and I, 2017

  Farah Ossouli, born in Zanjan in 1953, is one of the most prominent upholders of the Persian miniature heritage.

  Her personal interpretations of Persian poems and stories, and subjects like oppression, suppression, violence, love, hope and envy, have provided substance for her work over the years.

  By directly referencing famous works of European classical art in her works, she allows the viewer to make a connection to these familiar works of art at first glance while she portrays the suppression of women as well as of the humanity in her country and in the whole world.

  In the nine-panel piece titled “Leonardo, Forough and I”, Ossouli portraits a woman trapped within the frameworks of tradition and surrounded by instruments of violence as she breastfeeds a headless child. The title of the work refers to Leonardo da Vinci and Forough Farrokhzad, the standard bearer of modern feminist Iranian literature. In one of the layers of this piece Ossouli includes verses from Farrokhzad’s poem “Terrestrial Verses”, which deals with the subject of violence in society:

  “Pregnant women,
  Gave birth to headless infants.
  They had cradles for shame,
  Buried themselves in graves […]”.

• Mazdak Ayari

  Mazdak Ayari was born in 1976 and studied photography in Iran. He is known outside of Iran for his collection of photographs entitled “Family: Still Frames”.

  Ayari’s photographs are like personal documentaries in which he carefully observes and records everything that “occurs” in his surrounding world. His precise point of view sometimes blurs the boundaries between pure documentation and art, posing serious questions for his audience as well as for himself and possibly providing answers – although if he had already found these answers, the project he continues to work on so seriously would have probably been finished a long time ago.

  Ayari’s “Family: Still Frames” series is a collection of more than a thousand frames recorded from 1999 up to the present time. The current exhibition presents 20 of these frames together with “Diaporama” (photographic slideshow), a slideshow consisting of 600 images selected by the artist and the curators.

• Qajar Lithographs (“Tufan al-boka”)

  About 25 years after the invention of lithography in Europe, this new method of printing and the appropriate equipment were imported to Iran in 1821 during the reign of the Qajar dynasty, and several printing houses were established in major Iranian cities.

  The advantage of this technique was the reproduction of vignettes, designs and decorations, which were an integral part of the Iranian tradition of bookmaking, and more importantly of Nastaliq script, the predominant type of calligraphy used in Iran, in printed books.

  Bookmaking and publishing had a long history in Iran. In order to publish books, printing houses had used woodblock printing and woodcuts to decorate and illustrate incunables for centuries. Lithography eventually established itself as a faster and cheaper technology to mass-produce books.

  Due to the complex and expensive printing process as well as the fragile nature of these books, the print runs were limited to no more than 400 copies, making them exceptionally rare today.

  Works on display are illustrations from one of the most popular religious books of the 19^th century, “Tufan al-boka” (“The Deluge of Tears”), which was printed in 1858.

  These hand-coloured lithographs were created by Mirza Muhammad Hassan and depict different scenes from folk religious stories of Shia holy figures.

• Albert Gasteiger Khan

  Albert Gasteiger learned the Persian language in Vienna, and in 1860, on behalf of the Iran government, Jan Dawud Khan hired him as an engineer in road and railroad construction, and also as a teacher at Dar ul-Funun.

  Gasteiger served in Iran for more than two decades and received the rank of “Mir-Panj” (General), as well as the titles “Khan” (a Persian nobility title) and “Mohandes Bashi” (head of engineers), for his services in building roads and training Iranian engineers. From that point on, he was known as General Albert Joseph Gasteiger Khan both in Austria and Iran.

  Gasteiger Khan visited the Shah of Iran, Naser al-Din Shah, wearing local dress and a Tyrolean hat, and after learning of his capabilities, the king awarded him the title of “Engineer Officer” and hired him to teach at the military school in Dar ul-Funun.

  When he returned to Austria, Gasteiger Khan donated part of his art collection from Iran to the Tyrolean State Museum Ferdinandeum. Among the pieces he donated were a number of drawings and paintings from the Qajar era, some of which are included in the current exhibition.

• Parviz Tanavoli
  

  © Parviz Tanavoli

  

  © Parviz Tanavoli

  Parviz Tanavoli is an Iranian artist, author, historian, scholar and collector, who was born in Tehran in 1937. He is an internationally renowned artist and one of Iran’s most prominent figures in the Iranian art scene, a pioneer of pop art outside of Europe and North America as well as the most famous sculptor in the entire Middle East.

  In the 18^th and 19^th century, lithographs, which were brought to Iran from Europe as souvenirs, were used to decorate some of the most historic buildings and palaces of the Qajar era. Such images, often decorated with Persian mirror-work and plasterwork and installed on walls, eventually made their way into the lives of ordinary people; they were reproduced on walls, trays, plates and many other objects, to the extent that this became an integral part of popular culture in the Qajar era.

  In his book about the creation of astonishing decorations in 18^th and 19^th century-Persian houses by using portraits of European women, Tanavoli says:  “[…] the operation was simple, and was based on placing a ready-made object within a new environment, thereby giving it new life. Such an act was in principle not unlike the decision of the Pop Artists of the 1960s, a century later”. He chose the same approach to create a number of his works, such as the Farangi (European) Women series.

  In this exhibition, five silkscreens and a rug from the Farangi Women series are on display. For the silkscreens the artist made collages of himself and five of these Farangi women. Continuing this exercise in creating works of art using images of Farangi women, Tanavoli has also designed a collection of rugs. The first piece he created is being exhibited in this museum for the first time.

• Tarlan Rafiee
  

  © Tarlan Rafiees Personal Archives

  

  © Tarlan Rafiees Personal Archives

  

  © Image licensed under the Creative commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license

  Tarlan Rafiee was born in Tehran in 1980. In her work, which primarily falls into the category of pop art, Rafiee focuses on the art and culture of modern and contemporary Iran and its direct relationship with the lives and rituals of Iranians.

  In the present series she focuses on the “Divan” of Hafez and its role as a source of solace for Iranians at times of hopelessness.

  As much as Hafez is one of the most important authors of Persian literature, he is the most prophetic poet in the history of this country.

  Perhaps it is this capacity for individual interpretations of his poems, as well as his prophetic personality, that turned the “Divan” of Hafez into a source of fortune telling. Persians refer to this book at difficult moments in their lives, when they fall in love, when they are desperate and when they are fearful of the future.

  In this series of works, Rafiee recalls the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq and how reading a poem by Hafez was making the situation more bearable. In the depths of darkness in a basement, in self-made shelters, in the moments after the sirens went off when no one knew what would come next.

• Reza Bangiz
  

  © Bread & Salt Archives

  

  © Bread & Salt Archives

  

  © Bread & Salt Archives

  Reza Bangiz, nationally celebrated and renowned artist, university professor and holder of the first-class Order of Culture and Art of Iran was born in 1937.

  Bangiz found his own successful voice in the Iranian art scene in the early 1960s, for which he received the Royal Prize at the second Biennale of Tehran (1960).

  In his work, Bangiz depicts scenes with alleyways and bazaars that no longer exist or at least can no longer be found in Tehran. He narrates the traditions, occupations and stories of the inhabitants of old Tehran and probably stored many of these images in his mind as a youth or heard about them from old men and women who lived in pre-modern Tehran.

  His piece “Ashura” focuses on the traditions of mourning for the martyrdom of the third Shi’ite Imam. This silkscreen printed on canvas depicts performances and ceremonies, mourners carrying flags and banners and processions in nine frames, showing different scenes which take place during this special day in the Shi’ite holy calendar.