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“Hidden Wounds, Paper Bullets: Iranian Contemporary Art”
was featured free from December through Jan. 10.
Grand Central Art Center
125 N. Broadway
Santa Ana, (714) 567-7233
www.grandcentralartcenter.com
By Ferial Mosharafferialm@hotmail.com
My cousin Kamran and his wife Jill came into town before Christmas to visit family and friends. When he told me that they will be down in Orange County to visit an art exhibition, I was so happy to see them and a little embarrassed because I did not know anything about it. The show took place at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana. They have their own version of the Laguna Art Walk on the first Saturday of every month. Using the Islamic Iranian Revolution of the 1979 as a starting point, the exhibit brought the Iranian and Iranian American artists to showcase a side of culture otherwise unknown in America.
The exhibition was post-Islamic and therefore it seemed to mythologize the martyr as they did with a big wall with all martyrs' names. As I did some reading on this subject I found it interesting that when it was first used, the Greek word martyr meant "witness." Thanks to Christianity, witnessing moved to be a religious word when people tortured for their faith were called martyrs. Islam then changed its use to mean any death in the service of religion. The exhibit was not about politics or religion, but people. Elizabeth Little, the curator, notes that "Hidden Wounds” is about individuals, artists on display have been shaped by their homeland's ongoing religious battle for their heart and soul. The collection featured eight Iranian artists; most of them are living in the state now.
"When you can go to You Tube and watch Neda bleed to death on the streets of Tehran, how important are paintings referencing some 30-year-old event?” one asked.
Among the pieces were Makan Emadi’s cartoony paintings of hijab-wearing women in erotic poses, as well as Armenian artist Alina's multimedia installation The Mountain Comes to Me.
The sepulchral installations Names and Hall of Mirrors, near the gallery’s front entrance, are most powerful. Fabricated and installed by Matthew Miller, Names fills Grand Central’s walls with long, bordered lists of Farsi names. The artist placed dirt in the cracks where wall and floor meet, and as the dirt shifts, its gentle dusting of the floor and half-disappeared footprints become fitting metaphors for Diaspora and the impermanence of memory.
Equally moving is Hall’s sea of mirrored squares embossed with faces straight out of a family photo album.
Yari Ostovany’s tactile noir paintings Treatise Number 6 and The Martyr show dour figures surrounded by darkness and variations of the color red. I’m wary of the mythologizing of solitude and alienation. Likewise, the punk-rock black, white, and red propaganda poster images are powerful.
And then there was Aydin Aghdashloo’s stunning work. The famous darker, more realistic Crumpled Miniature, where the same angel Isa is creased and discarded in freefall.
Finally, there are two of Hadieh Shafie’s mixed-media pieces, which are overtly nationalistic: folded paper creates a wealth of origami martyrdom symbols in Tulips of the Revolution and Ready for Any Enemy Thrust has deconstructed Iranian flags covered by repetitions of the Farsi word eshgh (love). The artist’s remaining pieces are more metaphoric, even hopeful: In Beneath the Garden, eshgh is elegantly painted on the top half of the piece, hundreds of tightly wound scrolls packed below, part Wailing Wall, part mass grave.
I wish I could believe that, like Shafie’s painting Linked, simply repeating eshgh over and over again will create an impenetrable fence against the glow of oncoming horror, but it’s not going to happen until we all stop mythologizing martyrdom and call it what it is: not something holy or beautiful, but ugly, unspiritual and completely stoppable.
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