Any other business

It's been nearly a year since I posted anything on this blog. After the summer, I might have posted something about Tala Madani 's solo exhibition at EMΣT, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, part of their ' What if women ruled the world?' show, but my photos weren't good enough. I was also getting into the habit of posting about the October art fairs in Paris, but honestly, this time round, I wasn't excited enough to bother, and since then I've been lazy about gallery shows. But this weekend I went to La Halle Saint-Pierre , at the foot of the Butte Montmartre, to see their marvellous new exhibition of a selection of Iranian 'outsider' artists. I loved it. I've written before, on this blog, about outsider art being shown regularly in Tehran's galleries, in particular in relation to Reza Shafahi and Amir Kamand . Some of the artists in this Paris show were already familiar to me from Tehran, some quite new. I didn't have ...

  I have already written on this blog about Reza Shafahi . The latest news about Reza is that the Spanish magazine Apartamento , which published a joint interview with Reza and his son Mamali, along with photos by Mamali's sister Melika, has now issued a book devoted largely to his work. The launch took place in New York yesterday, Thursday May 18, 2023. Here's a link to Apartamento 's own coverage of the event.

  Kalam polo , rice with cabbage, is aromatic Persian comfort food for winter weekends. It's a typical Iranian main-course rice dish, assembled and finished in one pot. This version, with meatballs, is associated with Shiraz. The recipe is for eight. In the morning, or at least four hours before you cook the rice, you set it to soak. I've always measured rice in what recipes used to call an 'after-dinner coffee cup', so put eight of those, or just over 500 grams in all, in a big bowl, and wash the rice first in hot water, then cold, till the water runs clear. Add a fistful of sea salt - not a pinch, a fistful - cover the rice with fresh cold water and leave it to soak till you're ready to cook it. Make some little meatballs using about 400 grams of meat (not too lean or the meatballs will be dry), two onions chopped fine, herbs (e.g. coriander), maybe some turmeric if you like, and salt and pepper. Whatever: you can use your own usual meatball recipe, and just roll ...

I already explained, in a post about Iranian artist Mamali Shafahi's Heirloom Velvet project , that while Mamali continues to work with Ali Eslami on his five-part VR project, nerd_funk , he's also producing sculptural pieces influenced by his father's paintings.  In his latest exhibition, Night of Judgement/Daddy Kills People , at Parallel Circuit in Tehran, the new works are suddenly on an altogether bigger scale. As well as reliefs, there are gorilla 'totems' and large-scale free-standing sculptures, including a fountain and a rotating 'scorpion' throne. As usual, the works are fully installed, with a fluorescent grid design on walls and floors and coloured and UV lighting, and for the opening a live performance brought together a flautist, a sportsman and a flock of baby goats. Installations of this kind will soon be used to house Mamali and Ali's nerd-funk experiences, creating an immersive environment linked to the content of each VR chapter, thu...

A friend who keeps a sharp eye out for this kind of thing just sent me a YouTube playlist of apparently new videos by the Bodleian Library about some aspects of their collection of Persian manuscripts. They are brief, and leave you wishing they were longer. Digital Bodleian has a section on Persian manuscripts, which explains: The Bodleian acquired its first Persian manuscripts in 1602, the year it opened. These included a history of Gīlān – a province in western Iran - and a poetical work. The collections of Laud and Pococke contained a small number of Persian items, but it was with the collections of John and Thomas Greaves that the first Persian manuscripts of note entered the Library. MS. Greaves 1 (binding digitized only), a copy of Jāmī’s poem Yūsuf and Zulaykhā is prized for its beautiful lacquered binding and illustrations. John Greaves also made use of his copy of the Star Tables of Ulugh Beg – MS. Greaves 5 (sample only) – to publish his own astronomical and geographical o...

Installation view at Aliens vs Gorillas . All photos by Matin Jameie for Dastan. Another exhibition that opened up in the last couple of weeks, after Covid restrictions were eased, at Dastan in Tehran is Aliens and Gorillas , a solo show by Amir Kamand, curated by Mamali Shafahi. Amir Kamand, born in Tehran in 1960, is a sculptor now working mainly in polychrome wood. During his former career in plastic injection molding, metal machining and lathing, he was introduced to the use of wax and started to make sculptures with it, but soon decided that wood was a superior material. His works - colourful, vibrant and frequently funny - combine elements drawn from his own experience (e.g. as a former skier and boxer) and subconscious with references to icons of both western and oriental pop culture, cinema, poetry and literature. They have featured in three Annual Outsider Exhibitions and at Balice Hertling in Paris, and more recently in a large-scale solo installation at the Palais de Tokyo,...

Qaran Unhorses Barman, from the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp   ' Epic Iran explores 5,000 years of Iranian art, design and culture, bringing together over 300 objects from ancient, Islamic and contemporary Iran'. So runs a text on the V&A's dedicated exhibition website. Having seen the exhibition (which, Covid oblige , opened three months late) the other day, I wondered how many (or few) other countries could be the object of a show spanning 5,000 years of artistic production. The concept is ambitious, to say the least. While the press - or at least, the numerous online articles I've managed to find - has been unanimously enthusiastic, I'd be interested to know what impact this show has had on people with little or no prior knowledge or experience of Iran and its culture (or more accurately, cultures, with an 's'), its history and its present, including its buzzing contemporary art scene . I personally found the pre-Islamic sections, displaying some magni...

Installation view of Alternating Currents . All photos in this post are by Matin Jameie for Dastan. As I mentioned in my post about 'outsider' artist Reza Shafahi , despite the combined effects of sanctions and the Covid crisis, the art scene in Iran is buzzing at the moment. The easing of restrictions has brought a wave of gallery openings and the newly-renovated Tehran MOCA has delved into its reserves to put on an exhibition devoted entirely to Andy Warhol . If this is an indication of plans to show more of the collection, it can only be good news as many of the works in store have gone unseen for over 40 years. As I also hinted in that earlier post, Dastan, one of the few Iranian galleries still present at international fairs, has added a new multi-purpose art complex to its portfolio. Parallel Circuit is, according to Dastan's website, 'a multidisciplinary art complex in the center of Tehran, Iran, combining a full-scale exhibition space, artists’ residencies, stud...

Waiting Line, 2020 (detail; the full painting is 16 x 23 cm) Jean Claracq is a young artist whose work I first came across at the Sultana gallery in Paris and at a couple of institutional group exhibitions. Then, when I went to an open day at Le Houloc, a studio in the Paris suburbs shared by nearly 20 young artists (invited by the amazingly dynamic Célia Coëtte ), I had the good fortune to meet him and was able to visit his studio space there. He often works on a small scale, and thus sometimes combines contemporary content with references (direct quotations or not) to medieval manuscripts, portrait miniatures such as Hilliard's, the details (landscapes, perspectives, distant cities, forests, skies...) of renaissance art, and oriental painting of, e.g., Iran's negargari tradition. When I visited Le Houloc, as I take an amateurish interest in Iranian art, I was interested to see he was working on a small painting, at that time just sketched out, to be called Waiting Line  (a...