May 2014. Setting up the exhibition Unedited History: Iran 1960-2014, at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, (then at MAXXI, Rome). Unpacking surrealistic, iconoclastic collages by Bahman Mohassess (1931-2010) with a view to presenting them as the first works the visitor sees in the exhibition. A storm of hybrid figures, severed heads and fantastical animals. The very least I can say is that a huge part of my life flashes before my eyes as I look at this whirlwind of collages. A monograph on Bahman Mohassess is to be published by Zamân Books in September 2019.

L’article Bahman Mohassess est apparu en premier sur PARIS PETROLEUM.

February 2017. Display at the Tate Modern, London (UK): Iranian Photobooks: from Revolution to War. I was honoured to present these “photobooks” published in Iran between 1979 and today, in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern. The display includes both leading independent photographers (e.g., Kaveh Golestan, Bahman Jalali, and Alfred Yaghoubzadeh) as well as state publications that use photos by the same photographers, but packaged differently to reflect political and national concerns. We find ourselves immersed in conflicting accounts of the 1979 Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, with this display offering a way to interpret them. In collaboration with my fellow curator Sarah Allen whose perspicacity I salute.

L’article Iranian Photobooks: from Revolution to War est apparu en premier sur PARIS PETROLEUM.

There is no document of culture
that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. 
Walter Benjamin

How is it possible to resign yourself to watching Baghdad and Iraq pass from being the cradle of mankind to the grave of history, from the Mesopotamian dream watering its land to the conflicts of the last few decades, relentlessly burning it? How do artists of all backgrounds (Iraqis, but not only) set forth on the trails of a heritage that is, if not erased, at the very least riddled with missing spaces? In this tragic context, how are we to re-think the fate of the national heritage, when the museum-city has seen its vestiges first moved to European museums, and then reduced to ashes?

THE GOLDEN AGE OF BAGHDAD
Iraq Museum, Assyrian art halls, lower floor, 1970s (Faraj Basmachi, Treasures of the Iraq Museum, Ministry of Information, Baghdad, 1975-1976)

Baghdad Mon Amour is intended as a collective investigation taking as its starting point the plundering of museums which became so widespread after the attacks and invasions first of the US army and then of the Islamic State terrorist group – creating a systematic dismantlement of the heritage. BMA is keen to explore the museum as the metaphor of a culture surviving somewhere between dream and nightmare, a culture which is showing itself to be all the more alive because it is resisting its programmed destruction – condemned not so much to extinction as to reinvention. Contrary to what might be thought, this surviving symptom does not date back to the Gulf War, but passes by way of the history of the avant-gardes in the 1950s and 1960s, and through the post-independence period of the 1930s – when the idea of the National Iraq Museum (also known as the “Baghdad Museum of Antiquities”) came into being and was implemented.

AFTER THE LOOTING
Joanne Farchakh-Bajjaly, photographic report on the looting of the Iraq Museum, April 2003. © Joanne Farchakh-Bajjaly

So everything started with the national museum, a pivotal resource in the making of modern Iraq from the 1930s onward, and the permanent symbol of an “antique modernity” to be reinterpreted by artists: the museum presentation of Islamic, Sumerian and Assyrian influences acts as a symbolic platform for the project of a new nation. It was also within this boundary that the forming of an artistic avant-garde would be played out. It featured such renowned artists as Jewad Salim, Lorna Salim, Shakir Hassan al Said and Dia Azzawi, who were keen to take part in this national movement of modernisation and, in a cross-disciplinary way, studied art, archaeology and architecture. They managed to create a hybrid aesthetic, inspired directly by national collections of antiquities, while at the same time ushering in an at once complex and straightforward dialogue with European modernism (reference to Picasso, for example, recurred regularly, but more in the form of a visual and ironic citation than an “influence” in the strict sense of the term).

PETITE RENAISSANCE IN PARIS
View of the exhibition “Baghdad My Love”, Institut des cultures d’Islam, Paris, 29.03-29.07 2018.
Photo © Marc Domage

We may well wonder if the history of the Iraqi national collections does not reveal a template of its kind, in both post-colonial and postmodern terms – the template of a form of modernisation understood as a process of formal hybridisation, or even formal self-conservation. In this respect, the national collection of modern art (presented in the 1960s in the Gulbenkian building in Baghdad before being transferred in the 1980s to the aptly named Saddam Art Centre) is all the more significant in that its works explicitly reinterpret the iconology and mythologies taken from collections of antiquities. This is a heritage intent on crossing borders (beyond the frontiers of the nation state and the post-colonial state), which is cosmopolitan and multifaceted, in the face of foreign and colonial domination (which certainly did not fade with the Independence of 1932) and faced more broadly today with the destruction of the heritage. Over and above past and present military invasions, many contemporary artists in Iraq and outside the country have devoted themselves to this protective impulse, be it in the form of allegory, parody, “archaeology in reverse” or reediting archives. The artists brought together in this volume and this exhibition, be they surveyors, archaeologists, archivists or poets, express a concern for a heightened sense of urgency since the American invasion of 2003; but also for a renewal of the critical and methodological tools for re-thinking how this heritage can be passed down. The looting of these collections has in fact given rise to as much illicit speculation as real scientific and heritage programmes involving Iraqi and non-Iraqi figures (in particular in British and American universities). So databases, whether compiled by customs and excise or academic, private or public bodies, are growing in number, paradoxically offering a new life to all these artefacts: theft and destruction are turned into systems of recollection and other areas of extreme circulation. The cross-border spirit of Mesopotamia and that of the Internet meet up, for better or for worse, creating an anachronistic space to be navigated in which artists are our compass.

PETITE RENAISSANCE IN PARIS
View of the exhibition “Baghdad My Love”, Institut des cultures d’Islam, Paris, 29.03-29.07 2018.
Photo © Marc Domage

In other words, it is a question of bringing together the archives of historical museums and the museums without walls of artists who, by appropriating tools such as the inventory and the study of monuments and documents, emerge with works that are anxious but ready to dance on ruins: works that carry within them both the phantom-like and traumatic museum of Iraq and its dream of a reinvented museum.

Morad Montazami




Symposium Baghdad Mon Amour / Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 30 May 2018

L’article Exhibition Scenario est apparu en premier sur PARIS PETROLEUM.

December 2016. Exhibition Au-delà de la forme (‘Beyond Form’), Richard Serra and Mehdi Moutashar, Palais du Tau, Reims (France). A meeting of two outstanding artists in an unexpected context, on the initiative of the collector Didier Moiselet who, to his credit, crossed the line between conceptual minimalism and metaphysical geometry, between abstraction and hypervision, between letters and hieroglyphs – somewhere between Baghdad and New York. Huge respect from Zamân Books (an interview with Didier Moiseletto will appear in Zamân n°8).

L’article ‘Beyond Form’, Richard Serra and Mehdi Moutashar est apparu en premier sur PARIS PETROLEUM.

October 2016. A retrospective exhibition of works by Faouzi Laatiris, Catalogue déraisonné, Mohamed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rabat, Morocco. In the process of hanging the poster of the exhibition on the façade of the museum which, for Faouzi and me, has become our ship. Immense pride to be curator for this out of the ordinary, iconoclastic emancipated artist, spiritual son of Marcel Duchamp and Mahmoud Darwish. The exhibition is a follow-up to the first part, Volumes Fugitifs, in which Faouzi was in the company of the most outstanding of his former students from the Institut National des Beaux-Arts in Tétouan. Catalogue published by Kulte Editions and Yasmina Naji, in collaboration with Maud Houssais. Presses du Réel, 2016.

L’article <em>Catalogue déraisonné</em> by Faouzi Laatiris est apparu en premier sur PARIS PETROLEUM.

December 2016. Galerie Atelier 21, Casablanca, Morocco. In the company of artist painter Mohammed Abouelouakar who only exhibits once every 3 or 4 years, a real hermit whose paintings (here “playing cards”) revive old Sufi tales and other pagan or ecumenical, Arab, Russian or Byzantine inspired mythologies, now very largely eliminated from Moroccan culture. He is undoubtedly one of the most underrated artists in his own country, although he has the stature of the greatest – uncompromisingly impervious to fashion, totally focused on his vocation as a nomadic storyteller. God will recognize his own.

L’article Mohammed Abouelouakar est apparu en premier sur PARIS PETROLEUM.

December 2016. Collections of classical art from the São Paulo Museum of Art, Brazil. A very dear art historian colleague who is staying in Brazil sent me this photo via WhatsApp. The paintings seem to be floating, released at last from the weight of the walls and architecture, in this museum built in 1968 (year of revolution) by Lina Bo Bardi. The scenography leaves many a museum trailing behind, to put it mildly.

L’article The São Paulo Museum of Art, Brazil est apparu en premier sur PARIS PETROLEUM.

October 2016. Café Naderi, Tehran, Iran. I have come on a pilgrimage to hang out in the Lalezar district, the mecca of the Tehran artistic bohemian set. This was the café of choice for several generations of writers and painters, such as Sadegh Hedayat in the 1920s or Bahman Mohassess in the 1960s, where they smoked and talked (their photos are up on the wall behind me). No difficulty believing I’m here, even though tea has taken the place of whisky. I don’t want to wake up.

L’article Café Naderi, Tehran est apparu en premier sur PARIS PETROLEUM.

<font style="line-height:24px"September 2016. The exhibition Traité de Paix, San Telmo Museum, San Sebastian, in the Spanish Basque Country. A palpable hit, this multi-faceted exhibition curated by Pedro Romero, in which Velázquez and Marcel Broodthaers rub shoulders, and 17th century maps are hung alongside documentary photographs, and “imaginary” collections square up to national collections. Spellbinding. An unforgettable model. The catalogue in four languages (French, Spanish, Basque and English) is heroic. There is a reconstruction of the surrealist exhibition La Vérité sur les colonies in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, Paris, 1931. The anti-colonialist mise en abyme continues into the street: as you leave the exhibition, there are banners saying “France and Spain go home”. This is the Basque Country in 2016.

L’article The exhibition <em>Traité de Paix</em> in the Spanish Basque Country est apparu en premier sur PARIS PETROLEUM.

September 2016. Tehran Bazaar, Iran. A dear friend sent me this photo via WhatsApp. A shower of fluorescent colours on an underwear boutique which, from a distance, could be mistaken for a fairground sideshow. Anyway, fans of “Special Envoy” and other reports from the “Land of the Mullahs ” or “Iran, land of paradox”, really get value for money.

L’article Tehran Bazaar est apparu en premier sur PARIS PETROLEUM.