Child of the revolution: Sara Dolatabadi and the esthetics of memory (an interview).

Motlagh, Amy

The perception that modern Iran's cultural production is characterized, like its politics, by revolution and ideological rigidity has prevented those outside Iran from seeing the rich tradition of visual art that has developed in modern Iran during the last hundred years. In this interview, Amy Motlagh discusses the work of the talented young Iranian artist Sara Dolatabadi (1978-), who was born and educated in Iran, but now lives and works in Tokyo. Dolatabadi's art and life offer an exceptional--yet at the same time, oddly representative--example of the plight of the modern Iranian artist.

Introduction

To invoke the phrase "modern art" is to bring to mind images like Picasso's Guernica, or the iconic splatter paintings of Jackson Pollock. "Modern Iran," on the other hand, conjures grainy televised news images of Ayatollah Khomeini waving to throngs of admirers, or perhaps, more recently, the crowds of green-swathed Iranians who flooded the streets to protest the outcome of the June 2009 presidential elections. But bring these two phrases together to say "modern Iranian art" and there is generally a blank. If the words "Iran" and "art" are associated at all, it is in terms of the stunning reliefs that embellish the walls of ancient Persepolis; or perhaps the vivid miniatures that decorated manuscripts of the Safavid period and spread into the larger world of Persianate influence, including the Mughal, Tajik, and Ottoman cultural spheres. It is unlikely that they would address some of the works Iranians are most proud of: Mahmoud Tanavoli's sculptures; the paintings of Parviz Kalantari; or the photographs of 'Abbas. For most Westerners, the perception that Iran's modernity came at the cost of its cultural and artistic integrity--an impression amplified by the 1979 Revolution and the Islamic regime's censorship of all artistic production--prevails. Even if they have seen the colorful, lurid, government-sponsored murals sometimes pictured in popular news magazines like Time or Newsweek--the paintings that decorate Tehran's buildings, expressing Iranian defiance of US imperialism or honoring martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War--these typically do not register as art at all, but as a manifestation of the religious zealotry that many believe created the revolution in the first place.

To some extent, these strong associations--of modern Iran with ideological rigidity, and pre-modern Iran with vanished cultural splendor--have prevented those outside Iran from seeing the rich tradition of visual art that has developed in modern Iran during the last hundred years. At best, those living in the metropolitan centers of the West may be familiar with the work of Iranians living or born in the diaspora, whose work often incorporates Iranian themes, but which may reflect primary training in the host country's artistic traditions rather than Iran's. The work of Shirin Neshat and Marjane Satrapi--two Iranian-born artists--is perhaps the most famous example of this phenomenon. Both women have distinguished themselves through their Iran-related art: Neshat, the noted visual artist who has lived and worked in New York for the last twenty years, creates work that directly engages Western stereotypes about veiling and Islam that the West brings to any encounter with Iran; Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis tells the story of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 through the personal lens of autobiography. Yet at the same time, both artists' work is undeniably cast in the Western traditions with which they are most familiar: Neshat's photographs and short films owe an obvious debt not only to Iranian cinema, but also to the critique of Orientalism expressed by US-based cultural critics like Edward Said, while Satrapi, whose illustrations occasionally nod toward an Iranian art form like the miniature, is most firmly grounded in the French bande-desinde tradition. (1)

Like Neshat and Satrapi, artist Sara Dolatabadi (1978-) was born in Iran, but now lives and works abroad. The comparison between Dolatabadi and these diasporic peers is perhaps inevitable, yet what distinguishes the Tokyo-based Dolatabadi from Neshat and Satrapi is not only that she received her artistic training in Iranian institutions, but that her work is not so easily defined as theirs--there are no overt references towards veiled women or religious symbols in her work, and her imaginative and changing style will not allow her nationality to define or limit its range of interpretations. At the same time, Japan--unlike the US or France, where Neshat and Satrapi live--is not typically counted among the primary sites of the Iranian diaspora. Unlike Los Angeles, London, Paris, or even Washington, DC, it does not have an active and defined culture or society of Iranian expatriates. Yet through Dolatabadi's work, Tokyo--where she moved for personal reasons--is insinuating itself into ideations of both Iran and the diaspora.

Though Dolatabadi acknowledges the influence of both Iranian and non-Iranian artists on her style, her exhibitions, dis cussed below, do not only show a keen attention to the artistic, social, and political concerns of Iran and Japan, but also to the dehumanization and sense of statelessness that seem to plague a world that is increasingly considered successfully "globalized"-connected by myriad forms of media and transportation that make the distances between geographic spaces long isolated from one another seem easily traversable--both physically and imaginatively--in a matter of seconds; or at most, hours. Dolatabadi's work examines the consequences of this ease, and imagines ways of bridging the new psychic distances among individuals that globalization has ironically seemed to create.

This brief introduction makes no claim to comprehensively define Dolatabadi or to offer a comprehensive survey of modern Iranian art. However, it does aim to suggest some possible contexts for understanding Dolatabadi's oeuvre to date, and in the process, to shed light on a wider tradition too often relegated to the margins of modern art. I had the privilege of interviewing Dolatabadi in a series of written exchanges during the summer and fall of 2009. Though I came to the interviews with questions about diaspora and her relationship to an Iran from which she is currently separated (by choice, she reminds us), her replies helped reshape my understanding of her work, which both demonstrates the continuity of Iran's unique contribution to modernism and expresses a familiarity with the artistic traditions of the world beyond Iran. Conceptualized in a variety of media--wire sculpture, different paint media, photography, and installation pieces--Dolatabadi's work offers a counter to the stereotypical views of modern Iranian art, which tend to conceptualize it as an absence; or as derivative of Western styles; or else formed entirely in the crucible of the 1979 Revolution.

The palette of works like Simple Blue suggests the influence of Japanese art and society on Dolatabadi's work. Dolatabadi explains that the collection was inspired by the government-issued blue plastic tents used by the homeless for shelter in Japan. Yet, as she points out, she sees this blue as a symbol of a broader metaphorical "homelessness" that afflicts many in today's society: "Homelessness can apply to people who have been uprooted from their social or cultural identity.... Maybe because of [the] general wandering [in our time]." (2) The dominance of this vivid blue against black comprises the defining contrast of the work, and while these colors suggest Japanese color preferences (especially those of the ukiyo-e wood block prints and paintings so admired and reproduced in the West), the largeness of the style evokes David Hockney and Mark Rothko, both artists whose influence Dolatabadi acknowledges.

Seat, an installation piece inspired by her father, noted Iranian novelist Mahmoud Dolatabadi (born 1940), suggests the influence of Iranian forms. In a corner beneath a curving stair, Dolatabadi creates a place for thought: A simple white cushion is placed on the floor, and writing in Persian decorates the corner--as though someone sitting there were working out his thoughts on the wall. The connection between word and image is an important and enduring one in Iranian art and letters, on multiple levels. As art historian Lynn Gumpert points out, Persian calligraphy embodies a unique connection between word and image, combining the two in a unique form of visual representation that appeals simultaneously to our figurative and linguistic capacities. (3) In her work, Dolatabadi recognizes the influence of artists who have embodied this complicated relationship in their work, such as Mahmoud Tanavoli; she particularly admires what may be his best-known sculpture, Hich (Nothing). Hich brings the esteemed art of Persian calligraphy into three dimensions by casting the word hich as a piece of sculpture. In doing so, Tanavoli establishes a conflict between the literal meaning of the word--"nothing"--and the sculpture's palpable materiality. Similarly, works like Seat challenge us to imagine what is implied, but not there: the father whose seat and writing this commemorative work recalls.

Ordinary Fruits depicts a series of cocoon-like figures hanging suspended from a single line. Its title is taken from the poem "Strange Fruits" by Jewish writer and teacher Abel Meeropol (who wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Allan) that condemned lynching in the American South. (Most Americans know it through Nina Simone's hauntingly beautiful performance of the poem as a song by the same name.) Rendered in wire figure installations as well as in mixed media canvas works, these figures suggest the hybridity of Dolatabadi's art, both in terms of her choice of materials and in her style of representation. (4) The impulse of the collection is itself an act of what Gayatri Spivak (evoking an idea from Jacques Derrida's Politics of Friendship) has called "teleopoiesis": the "cutting and pasting" of one kind of cultural rhetoric into a foreign context, the consequence of which is a demonstrable affinity across cultural boundaries of language and artistic practice. (5) Here, Dolatabadi practices teleopoiesis in an effort to bring the critique of a barbaric practice in the American South to an analysis of, and protest against, the public executions reinstituted by the Islamic Republic upon taking power in 1979. Public hangings, discontinued by Reza Pahlavi in the 1920s, were re-initiated by the new regime as an exercise of power and instillation of fear. (6)

Dolatabadi asserts that in spite of the non-figurative nature of many of her series, "People are the main subject in most of my work. The displacement, confusion, and feeling[s of] loss in today's life ... [are what] I try to communicate ... to the viewer [to] provoke empathy." (7) With its abstracted images of cocoon-like bodies, Ordinary Fruits is a kind of bridge between Dolatabadi's figurative and non-figurative works. Breaking the Habits, which depicts human figures in various modes of reflection, expression, and exchange, may be her most explicitly figurative collection. Many of the paintings show a recognizably female figure (possibly the artist herself) communing with herself in a mirror. Oftentimes, as in Breaking the Habits 9, the canvas is divided into two or three frames in which the figure (and her reflection) are seen from different positions. In Breaking the Habits 1, a figure whose head and shoulders alone are pictured in the frame twists its head to one side as though in pain, its features effaced by patterned scratches of grey. In Breaking the Habits 11, a bride is pictured at the center of the canvas in a portrait-style pose, while another figure, perhaps the bride at another moment, has her back to the viewer, and looks over one shoulder towards the bride. Breaking the Habits 14 shows what may or may not be a human folded into itself in a painful expression of grief. Viewing the collection as a whole, the pattern emerges to focus on one feminine figure. Are the habits to be broken those of the woman, or those of humankind at large? Dolatabadi does not offer clear answers, leaving it to the viewer to determine whether we are to understand the series as a process of "breaking the habits," or of the inability of humans, individually or collectively, to ever fully do so.

In her most recent solo exhibition, Pejvak (God is Great) (pejvak means "echo" in Persian), Dolatabadi created a space in which green fluorescent lights lit up a darkened room where the phrase "Allahu Akbar" ("God is great"--a Muslim proclamation of faith) was repeated over and over again. In Tehran--both during the 1979 Revolution and this summer's "Green Wave"--dissidents chanted this phrase both at protests and every night from urban rooftops in a nonviolent protest against injustices being perpetrated by the regime. In 1979, the regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was being censured; today, it is the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose behavior in last summer's presidential elections led to widespread public protest and prolonged unrest. Pejvak explicitly engages the ongoing "Green Wave" in Iran, known in Persian as Moj-e Sabz-the opposition movement that supported Mir-Hossein Moussavi, the reformist candidate, in the contested June elections, and which has continued to protest the outcome of those elections in spite of violent persecution by the state. The work's title is suggestive on a number of levels, drawing our attention not only to the echoed "Allahu Akbar" which ironically draws together dissidents of the regime, but also the way in which the "Green Wave" is an echo of the 1979 Revolution--a movement that began with broad-based opposition to the dictatorial nature of Pahlavi rule. (8)

Works like Pejvak (God is Great) demonstrate that in spite of her geographical distance from Iran, Dolatabadi clearly remains emotionally close to its trials and traumas, even if that relationship is often recreated through memory rather than direct experience. Are artists like Dolatabadi, Neshat, and Satrapi, who center Iran in the work they produce and show abroad, best understood as Iranian artists or diasporic ones? We must ask at what point an artist ceases to be most appropriately associated with the nation of her/his birth, and belong instead to the nation to which s/he has immigrated. And perhaps more importantly still, we must ask what influence and relationship Iranian artists living abroad have on those living at home. Dolatabadi herself feels some ambivalence about being termed a "diasporic" artist, and wonders whether the term can be appropriately used to describe her. Pointing out that she left Iran voluntarily, and believes she will one day return, Dolatabadi echoes the sentiments of many of those who live outside of Iran but feel connected to it by birth or heritage. At the same time, it is tempting to view Dolatabadi, born in the year of the revolutionary fervor that changed Iran and its relationship with the outside world, as the child of that same revolution and the intellectual forces that helped create it.

Interview

Amy Motlagh: Tell me about Ordinary Fruits--the series that evokes the memory of the public hangings that have taken place in Iran since the 1979 Revolution. You say in the description: "They can be as simple or as complicated as we are." Can you elaborate on this? And perhaps also say a bit about the conflation of an everyday ("ordinary") object for consumption--fruit--with the bodies of the executed? Sara Dolatabadi: Capital punishment still exists in many countries. In Iran this takes the form of hanging, and as far as I know it also existed in Iran prior to the 1979 revolution as well.

The project of Ordinary Fruits in my mind does not apply to Iran only, but of course I have been affected more by news of hangings in my country recently. Unfortunately, capital punishment is still practiced in many countries, and I hope my work encompasses this topic as a whole and is really not subject to borders. For example Japan, where I am currently living, also exercises the death penalty by hanging. Sadly though, capital punishment is still carried out in many countries and, regrettably, Iran had over 300 executions in 2008 second only to China. In Japan, less than ten people were executed the same year. I feel very strongly about this and I hope one day Iran will not be among the top three vengeful countries in the world.

The name Ordinary Fruits which I have used was derived from a song which Billie Holiday performed many times titled "Strange Fruit." This was originally a poem written by Abel Meerapol in 1939 to express his horror of the lynching of blacks at the time. I took this title and changed "Strange" to "Ordinary," to express the fact that now these executions have become more "ordinary" in Iran, which is very sad. The first sketches I did for this series, the hanging objects, looked like bags of potatoes, which are worthless and maybe thrown out in real life. But these objects were complicated people and this is really a form of irony in my work.

AM: Your birth date coincides with that of the revolution. In what ways do you feel that your life and work have been influenced by the memory of this event, which you cannot remember but must nonetheless be an important effect on your life and on your family's life. Many people view this national trauma as the effect of earlier violence committed against Iran's sovereignty. Does your art reflect this view--or any view--on the revolution?

SD: The revolution did not have a direct effect on my life as I was very young when it happened and grew up in post-revolutionary Iran. But I would see the effects of the revolution indirectly in my extended family and friends. When I was young, for example, my uncle suddenly left Iran, leaving his wife and children behind. They, in turn, tried to reunite with my uncle a few times before they finally succeeded. I would hear about acquaintances fleeing Iran by wearing animal skins to disguise themselves and risking their lives while doing so. I heard of others held in prison due to their political views. So I could feel the disruptions in families and friends around me. And of course, I knew that I should never speak in public about these troubling situations. These things certainly affected me indirectly, but fortunately I had a relatively normal childhood and upbringing in Iran. I guess my experiences affect my work, but I feel I am more concerned about current social and political situations, which may not directly be related to the revolution

AM: To what extent has the engaged position of the artists and writers that precede you--including, perhaps, your father, the distinguished Iranian author Mahmoud Dolatabadi--influenced your view of art and its role in redressing the wounds of a society? Do you feel a sense of responsibility specifically as an Iranian artist--rather than just an artist?

SD: Of course my father's work and companionship have also inspired me, but I think more in terms of outlook and content than technique.

I remember confiding in my father that I had lost my concentration in work, my father advised me to start and the process itself would bring focus and concentration back. And it did. It is my hope to become a bit more patient and consistent, as he was, in my career.

Every artist is affected by other artists in their career. I think I was affected by my professor, Hossein Maher, initially, as I worked with him for a few years at the start of my career and also Manouchehr Motabar. They influenced me mostly in a technical sense, as they were both painters too.

I think to a certain extent I do sense some responsibility, yes. Of course issues in Iranian society affect me and I feel a need to communicate them to my audience.

AM: In June 2009, I visited an exhibition called Iran Inside/Out at the Chelsea Museum in New York City. The exhibition showed the work of Iranian and Iranian diasporic artists. Many of the works--especially those by diasporic artists--were concerned with representations of Iran in Western media, which they feel are inaccurate. How concerned are you with this issue? Further, how would you categorize yourself: Do you consider yourself, living in Japan, to be primarily an "Iranian," or have you moved into what might be called the post-national state of "diaspora"? If these categories of identity are not relevant to you, which are? If they are relevant to you, what do you think the difference between these categories is?

SD: Of course I too am concerned with the representation of Iran in the world. I think most Iranians would be, especially the ones living abroad.

I do not really consider myself part of the diaspora, as I left Iran at the age of 27. I was given an opportunity to move to Japan and I might have the chance to move back again. But I have returned to Iran twice a year to keep contact with my country and cannot imagine that I would never live there again, I am pretty sure I will one day return.

But I think that leaving Iran and being in Japan for about 3 years now has affected me. I think living in Japan has affected me in very positive ways, personally and in the progression of my work. However, I sometimes felt lost and lonely since I had left my home and country for the first time. But I think this is a very natural feeling.

AM: You say of the series Simple Blue that the "blue packages represent dispersed homelessness in Japan." Can you elaborate on what you mean by "dispersed" here? Also you say that "homelessness can apply to people who have been uprooted from their social or cultural identity. These are the ones who have lost their link with their familiarity and society. Maybe because of a general wandering this exists in the time that we

are all part of." How did you become preoccupied with this idea of homelessness or the displacement of the modern world?

SD: By "dispersed" I simply mean scattered, as the homeless in Japan can be seen to be in various parts of the country. In and around Tokyo, you do not only see them in central locations like Shibuya, or in a very manicured park near the Tokyo Metropolitan Tower in Shinjuku, but also in the outskirts of the city along Tamagawa river, for example. These are all very interesting places in Tokyo, all are places that a tourist would visit; the homeless have very good taste in choosing their location. The reason I was attracted to the homeless is that, unlike most in other countries, they seem very clean and tidy and seem to be content. They all used the blue waterproof fabrics for shelter, and I love that color.

I may have related to the homeless in Tokyo, as I also felt a degree of "homelessness" in Japan when I just moved. I felt secluded from the Japanese society as a foreigner. Even though I live in a central area in Tokyo, I felt apart from the general public at first. This may be mostly because Japan is indeed a unique country and has a very distinctive culture. People are very comfortable maintaining distance from each other. This isolation gives them privacy, and the Japanese seem very much at ease with it. But initially this was bothering me, and I was not used to it. In public areas like the subways or in the streets, I felt invisible because people do not smile at one another to acknowledge each other or avoid eye contact completely. But I gradually adjusted to my new home, and now I am used to it and I like it.

Also in this series I have taken the idea of homelessness in general to include having to move away from your home for some reason. Just as the homeless in Japan had to move to the streets from their home, many people move away from their country and leave their home in search of a better life in other countries. Of course, these two issues are different but in both situations people are uprooted from what is familiar and move to a place that is unknown and unpredictable.

AM: Tell me about the differences between the palettes of the Iran and Japan series. What differences do you see between the two cultures, and how do you try to convey these through your colors and materials?

SD: The main difference between my work in Japan and Iran is that the projects in Japan included various installations and some of my work has become more abstract. Japan and Iran differ greatly in culture; this is a very broad question. I think Japan is unique and this would be the case if we compare Japan with many countries. But what I wanted to mention about my work is that it became more and more social and political in Japan. I think I brushed on social issues in both countries in my work which I completed in Tokyo.

AM: Many of your series and installations, especially Seat, which you acknowledge is a tribute to your father, seem influenced by memory. How would you characterize the role that memory plays in your work?

SD: My memories have a major part in my art work, and particularly since I left Iran, this fact has become more and more evident.

Memory was in play in my series Ordinary Fruits, for example. I remember vividly one day when my friends told me that someone was hanged in a big square near our school in Iran. They occasionally hanged people in public then. Fortunately, I was not witness to this act, but I recall being deeply affected and saddened. And, even though I did not see this terrible incident, it influenced me greatly and this memory definitely played an important role in this project.

And of course Seat is a clear example of one of my works that is solely based on memories I had of my father working through the night. Maybe I was thinking more of memories of my family since I was away from them while in Tokyo?

AM: Could you say a bit more about how your life in Japan has influenced your art? How has the Japanese art world influenced you, if at all?

SD: From a superficial point of view, my work has become more general, simpler--which of course may be said to be an effect of this Japanese environment. But something important that has happened to my work while living abroad is that more and more, the work portrays the issues and disturbances occurring in Iran. I do not know whether the reason for this is my homesickness or being far from Iran, but whatever the reason, it allows me to see the problems in Iran more clearly and to better portray them. I see this new perspective as an important development in my work. Perhaps I am not truly a part of the diaspora, but, at the same time, I really feel that I have experienced this aspect of the experience for it to be true. It is also true that, although I grew up in Iran, I left Iran of my own accord. In spite of this, the experience has been a challenge for me.

AM: Could you tell us more about your training as an artist--both institutional and non-institutional? Have other artists (Iranian or otherwise) been important influences on you?

SD: I studied art in the Academy of Graphic Arts--meaning I went to the academy for the four years of high school and at that time, I began to work seriously with Hossein Maher in his atelier. I became familiar with sketching, printing, and photography to a good extent, and then when I went on to university, I chose to study painting. I cannot say that university was particularly useful to me because there were not many opportunities at the college of arts but, on the other hand, it did have good teachers. In any case, my serious training was not at university, but in the additional classes that I took outside of the university.

It is not easy to say which painters or artists have influenced me most. Many and no one! At each stage of my training, I was drawn to different artists. For example, when I was in high school, I really liked Modigliani and, when I began university, I was a fan of David Hockney, and I am always amazed by Mark Rothko. In my view, some of Rothko's works must be viewed from up close. Among Iranian artists, I particularly admire the sculpture of Tanavoli, especially his piece Hich.

AM: Do you see any continuity between your art and classical/traditional forms of Iranian art (miniatures, carpet design, etc.)?

SD: I can say that I regularly study books of Persian miniatures. Whether or not there is a direct influence from this on my work, I cannot say. However, in some of my figurative works, there is emotional and lyrical content that may be viewed as akin to that of the miniatures.

Of course, now, I am in the process of setting up an installation piece where I hope to make use of the spirit of miniatures. But, well, since this work has not been completed yet, I cannot comment on it.

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Notes

(1) See Lindsey Moore's "Frayed Connections, Fraught Projections: The Troubling Work of Shirin Neshat," Women: A Cultural Review 13.1 (2002): 2-17 and Iftikhar Dadi's "Shirin Neshat's Photographs as Postcolonial Allegories," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34.1 (2008): 125-50 for further discussion of Neshat's relationship to Iranian cinema. On Satrapi's visual references to the miniature tradition, see, for example, p. 77 of Persepolis (NY: Pantheon, 2003). The film version of Satrapi's memoir (Vincent Parronaud, dir., Persepolis ([Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]) develops and heightens many of these references to earlier Persian art forms.

(2) See <http://www.sara-dolatabadi.com/gallery/simple-blue/01 .html>.

(3) Lynn Gumpert, "Introduction," Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution, eds. Shiva Balaghi and Lynn Gumpert (London & NY: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 14-15.

(4) Though she does not mention any influence, this collection may be com pared to Japanese artist Akiyama Yo's cocoon-like ceramic sculptures in his exhibition Oscillation.

(5) Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (NY: Columbia UP, 2003), 45-47.

(6) Dolatabadi mistakenly suggests that public executions were practiced by the Pahlavi regime. Though the Pahlavis did not outlaw the death sentence, Reza Shah forbade public executions. Crimes punishable by death today in Iran include adultery and treason.

(7) See <http://www.sara-dolatahadi.com/gallery/breaking-the-habbits/01.html>.

(8) Although the 1979 Revolution was supported by populations comprising a variety of ideological positions on what kind of government should succeed the Pahlavi regime, the movement was rapidly overtaken by the religious faction that supported Khomeini's vision of a vilayat-e faqih, or "rule by the jurisconsult," that remains the articulating ideology of the regime today. Khomeini's idea, controversial even among Shi'ites, is wrongly regarded by many in the West as a "conservative" or "fundamentalist" interpretation of Islamic ideologies of temporal rule. In fact, it is quite radical, in the sense of being innovative in Shi'i thought. See, among others, Said Arjomand, Turban for the Crown (NY and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988), 104-05.