For the past two weeks, Asia House in London has been home to Made in Iran, a group show of works by young Iranian artists.
Although the exhibition has been planned for months, it’s no coincidence that it opened at the same time as protesters were taking to the streets of Tehran. Eglantine de Ganay, who co-curated the show along with Arianne Levene, is anxious to emphasise that they deliberately included only apolitical works, but says that the art is driven by the same energy that informed the protests.
Rather than any didactic political message, the show throbbed with a kind of slick worry: aesthetically pleasing images, interwoven with or undermined by the constrictions of life in Iran.
It practically punched you in the face in the gallery from the start in the form of Shirin Aliabadi’s wall-sized photographs. Born in 1973 (making her the second-oldest of the seven artists in the show), Aliabadi chooses as her subjects women wearing hijabs yet slathered in make-up, flashing watches and licking lipstick-red lollies, the scars still showing from their new noses. (Tehran is apparently the rhinoplasty capital of the world.)
Women were a dominant subject in Made in Iran. But just as tangible was a fascination with western imagery and, simultaneously, a mockery of it. Some of the strongest works in this witty and emotionally charged, if slightly patchy, exhibition were by Behrouz Rae, whose mother had an opportunity to emigrate to the US when he was a child. She took it – and left him, too. His response, Gulliver, is a kind of diary series thrumming with what De Ganay candidly refers to as “issues of the mummy”. In each work, Rae has digitally inserted himself into a western setting, many of them described by his mother in her letters: standing in the sand on a beach in California, loitering in the background at the Guggenheim in New York, waiting in his mother’s Manhattan apartment for her to return from the shops. The pain of loss is moving; the works are obviously a form of therapy. But what they share in common with many of the other pieces in Made in Iran is that Rae could, at any time, decide to move back to the US, to reunite with his mother. He doesn’t. He chooses to stay in Iran.
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