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Indepth Arts News:
"Shirana Shahbazi: Goftare Nik (Good Words)"
2001-08-03 until 2001-09-23
Photographer's Gallery
London, ,
UK
Shirana Shahbazi's stunning installation Goftare Nik (Good
Words)1 explores the physical landscape and human faces of
contemporary Iran, through a combination of colour
photography and large-scale painting. What little photography
there is, in Iran, has tended to be dominated by
black-and-white reportage. Shirana Shahbazi's images are, by
contrast, sweetly coloured, emotionally detached, and do not
appear to tell an immediately obvious story. Her photography
marries a Germanic-style cool observation, to pictorial
traditions as diverse as propaganda painting and ancient
Persian miniatures.
Like the scenes of singing and dancing and feasting in
miniature paintings, her photographs impart an epic quality to
modest scenes of social activity: people at home, at work, at
play, people at parties and weddings. When Shahbazi
commissions a street poster painter (still, in the absence of
large scale printing techniques in Iran, the purveyors of
cinema hoardings, political posters and street advertising) to
paint one of her photographs on a huge scale, she co-opts a
street vernacular which is simultaneously heroic and kitsch.
These paintings are returned to her installations, sometimes
re-photographed, sometimes incorporated just as they are.
The people in Shahbazi's photographs are treated as social
types rather than specific individuals - a young army conscript,
a Shi'ite fundamentalist, a female office worker, a middle-class
Westernized family, a bride and groom, a heavily made-up,
chador-clad woman. Collectively (her images are always
grouped together in dense arrangements) they create a
complex portrait of Tehran, its surrounding landscape, and the
people who inhabit it. There is a deliberate refusal to
romanticise or exoticise her images of Iranian life, which
distinguishes Shahbazi from many contemporary Iranian artists
and film-makers. She strips the imagery of the Orientalist
imaginary - the desert, the odalisque, the veiled woman -
down to its bare reality. The complexity of Iranian society
cannot simply be reduced, she feels, to the question of hejab
and the oppression of women, but has to be understood in
terms of competing forces of tradition and change. It is a
society where women can be apprehended for wearing
lipstick on the street, and yet more women than men currently
attend university, and a female politician is one of Khatami's
vice-presidents. It is a society in which the march of
Western-style progress (nowhere more evident than in the
frantically expanding city of Tehran) clashes continually with
the State's rigid religious controls. In avoiding an explicitly
political stance, Shahbazi is able to reveal Iranian
contemporary life with all its contradictions and ambiguities
intact.
Shirana Shahbazi was born in 1974 in Tehran. She studied
photography at the Fachhochschule in Dortmund, and at the
Hochshule für Kunst und Gestaltung in Zurich. Her recent
exhibitions include Heimaten at the Galerie für
zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, and Zurich - Urban Diary, at
Galerie Bob van Oursouw in Zurich.
Kate Bush
Senior Programmer
1 Good Words derives from the Zoroastrian credo of good
thoughts, good words, good deeds and refers back to an optimistic
religious morality Shahbazi sees as fundamental to the spiritual
traditions of her country.
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