Human Flower Project
Friday, October 08, 2004
Iranian Artists Find Taproot in “Persian Gardens” Show
Group 30+ “Persian Garden 2004” (detail) Installation
Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art displays 17 famous gardens alongside new imaginary works in a seach for the Iranian spirit.
You may associate walled gardens with medieval monasteries, but the idea is far older than the good herbalist brothers of 12th century Europe, and far more Eastern too.
Last month, Tehran’s Museum of Contemporay Art opened Persian Gardens, an exhibition that explores Iran’s ancient garden tradition and that tradition’s endurance, in film,video, performance and installation pieces by contemporary Iranian artists.
Curator Faryar Javaherian writes, “The Persian garden is deeply rooted in Iran’s most ancient past and dates back to the beginning of agriculture and irrigation. The Persian garden is the elaborate product of a creative people living in a hostile environment, devising a poetic realm for sacred rituals and royal ceremonies. It is also a magnificent expression of the idea that water could be drawn from the innermost layers of the feverish desert earth, running underground for long stretches to emerge from a fountain in the middle of a garden.”
Today’s works reflect an elegiac mood. Some like Ahmad Mostafa Nadalian’s webart piece Paradise 2004 satirize the geometric formality and religiosity of the Persian garden legacy. Even the dizzying beauty of inscribed walls, the splendor of hyacinth and tulips (both natives of Iran) can’t shut out the crackle of technology and frivolity of secularism.
The show runs through November 3.