Detail: Iranian artists, including those in diaspora communities, visualize a society trapped between the present and the past in order to comment upon issues of gender, exile, history, and religion. Such is the case with the three contemporary artists represented here. Bahman Jalali's (1944-2010) career coincided and engaged with the dramatic socioreligious transformation of Iran in the late twentieth century. As a documentary photographer, teacher, historian, and artist, he employed the photographic image as evidence that can be rediscovered with the passage of time. Yassaman Ameri is a photographer and multimedia artist born in Iran but forced into exile, who now lives and works in Canada. Her series, of which six prints are displayed, was inspired by a group of late nineteenth-century photographs depicting prostitutes. She recontextualizes the women in fictive settings in order to afford them a new identity. Samira Alikhanzadeh is a painter and multimedia artist whose work also references the past, but only so far back as the first half of the twentieth century when Iran was transformed into a modern nation-state under the leadership of Reza Shah Pahlavi. The Shah undertook to bring both women and religious minorities into the mainstream of national life in order to create an ideal of modernity. In the pair of untitled pieces shown, Alikhanzadeh uses found images of women from this period and incorporates contemporaneous Persian carpets, which help to fix these young women in time and place.
This installation was made possible in part by the Art of the Middle East Council.