Tehran Museum Hosts Exhibition Of Medern Arab Art
Tehran, 19 Safar 1438/19 November 2016 (MINA) – Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) is hosting an exhibition of modern Arab art from countries including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, underlining a regional cultural bond that has thrived despite the simmering tensions between Iran and its Arab neighbors, the Guardian reported.
TMoCA, which has the finest collection and boasting works by the likes of Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol, is displaying 40 pieces by prominent Arab artists alongside 40 paintings by Iranians.
Mohsen Noferesti, an official from TMoCA, said that Iran maintained its cultural ties with the outside world regardless of the political situation, IINA News reported.
“Even at the time of sanctions we hosted works from many parts of the world,” he said. The Sea Suspended show exhibits modern Arab art from the 1940s to the 1990s from places such as Egypt, Iraq, north Africa, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula.
Noferesti said the exhibition had been warmly welcomed in Tehran and visited by hundreds of people every day.
Karim Sultan of the Sharjah-based Barjeel Art Foundation, who curated the show in collaboration with the museum and the Tehran-based Mohsen Gallery, said art had the power to transcend politics.
“What we were really aiming for was more of a cultural dialogue, to open up a conversation about art and the artists,” he told the Guardian. “I’d say the exhibition would have had to take place regardless of the political situation because of the importance of art. Whatever the situation is, art has a way of moving over the situation, and a lot of people engage in a different kind of conversation, perhaps in a positive way.”
Sultan said various exhibitions and museums in the UAE, including in Dubai, had for some time featured works by Iranian artists.
The Third Line, a Dubai-based art gallery, represents Iranian Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, who had a major exhibition at the New York museum last year. The Sharjah art foundation has also displayed a major art show of another Iranian artist, Farideh Lashai.
“It’s not out of a vacuum that we proposed to do a show; it comes as a response in a long cultural conversation that is taking place,” Sultan said.
“The exhibition that just opened in Tehran was one that came out of an impetus to continue that conversation. Tehran is a very important city in the region and a museum like TMoCA is an incredible institution that has a lot of history.”
TMoCA, which was founded before the 1979 Islamic revolution under the supervision of Farah Pahlavi, the former queen of Iran, has hidden treasures bought before the revolution, thought to be worth more than $2.5 billion.
It includes Pollock’s Mural on Indian Red Ground, considered to be one of his most important works and estimated to be worth more than $250m, as well as important pieces by Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Whistler and Marcel Duchamp.
In 2012, the museum took around 100 works out of its basement for a first show of its kind as part of its Pop Art & Op Art exhibition, featuring works by Warhol, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein and others. That year Pahlavi gave an interview to the Guardian about the history of the collection.
Among the works on display in the modern Arab art show are the Iraqi artist Kadhim Hayder’s spectacular Fatigued Ten Horses Converse With Nothing (The Martyr’s Epic); the Saudi artist Mounirah Mosly’s The Land of Solidities; and the UAE artist Hassan Sharif’s Man. Other artists represented include Bahrain’s Abdullah Muharraqi, Palestine’s Asim Abu Shakra, Iraq’s Raffa Nasiri and Egypt’s Seif Wanly.
TMoCA is planning to lend some of its treasures to museums and galleries in Berlin and Rome in the near future.
Some works were due to go on display in Berlin earlier this year but the recent resignation of Iran’s cultural minister has delayed the plans. (T/P008/R07)
Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)
