Haggerty Museum’s ‘Persian Visions’ Casts Iran in a Different Light

Thirty years after theIslamic Revolution, “Persian Visions: Contemporary Photography from Iran” brings the work of 20 photographers to Milwaukee (at theHaggerty Museum of Art through Jan. 17, 2010). Despite cultural sanctionsimposed by the United States,the show, organized by a professor from the University of Minnesotaand the curator from the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, is the first of itskind to tour the States since the Revolution. For most Americans, exposure to Iran is purelynegative, limited to the rants of its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, andGeorge W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” rhetoric. “Persian Visions” facilitates an“unofficial” cultural dialogue that transcends the mutual, “official” enmityand provides a normalized view of the Islamic Republic from within.

Split between thenortheast corner of the main floor and the second level of the Haggerty Museum, the predominantly figural worksaddress themes of identity, loss and war. Many photographs deal with memory,bridging the past and present through re-photography. The motif ofre-photographed or appropriated images in “Persian Visions” is pervasive, asuperimposition of the past onto the present that creates a continuum betweenthese two disparate places across the divide of the Revolution.

In Arman Stepanian’stextural C-prints, weathered photographs of the deceased are framed by thedistressed surfaces of gravestones. Farshid Azarang’s Scattered Reminiscences (1-12) comprise three older, pre-Revolutionportraits and two contemporary ones, and chart the aging of two women.

Four small photographsby Kaveh Golestan, a photojournalist killed by a landmine in Iraq while on assignment for the BBC, are amongthe few that overtly address war in the Middle East.In Baby, a woman in a surgical maskholds up the charred body of an infant for the camera. In Ice, two men stand over the corpse of a child. The graphic natureof Golestan’s photographs is mitigated slightly by swaths of red the color ofdried blood. Ghostlike, these four photographs of the maimed and murderedpredate his own death by a year.

Bridging the distantpast to the present, Sadegh Tirafkan traverses the ruins of Persepoliswith a pair of monitors and two stillimages. Tracked by the camera, he moves both to and from a central point, hismodern dress in sharp contrast to the bleached remains of Iran’s ancientempire.

Upstairs, ShokoufehAlidousti, one of two women represented in the show, uses her chador to createnegative space in Self-Portrait 1-4.The corners of the frames fragment herface; in her hands she holds family photographs. Veiled in her public garb, shere-photographs snapshots of her private life.

From a Westernperspective, it is difficult to grasp the artists’ risksinextricably aestheticand politicalwithout understanding what is proscribed by Islam and Iran’stheocracy: criticism of the regime, representation of the living and nudity, toname a few. The 20 photographers, most of who reside and work in Iran and allsurvivors of the Revolution, must address issues of modernity and identitywithin these constraints. Though a counterpoint to Western cultural hegemony,the photographs of “Persian Visions” belie the exoticness of contemporary Iran; itsuniversal motifschallenge the viewerto see beyond the obvious political and cultural disparities.