Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians

Description

Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet tells the story of the evolution of Iranian contemporary art by examining the work of 30 artists. This is art where the ills of internal politics remain astutely masked below a layer of ornamentation, poetry, or humor. What unites the disparate works into a coherent theme is the artists' coping mechanisms, which consist of subversive critique, quiet rebellion, humor, mysticism, and poetry--hence the publications title. The subtitle Contemporary Persians is also a reference to a strategy of survival, this one used by Iranians in the United States during the early 2000s; at a time when 'Iranians' were identified with hostage takers and terrorists, they adopted the identity 'Persians', which remained free of such associations. This title collects the work of a number of artists who are already well-known in the United States, including among others Afruz Amighi, whose work is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Monir Farmanfarmaian, who received a major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 2015.

About the Author

Curator and scholar Fereshteh Daftari received her PhD in Art History from Columbia University (1988). During her tenure at the Museum of Modern Art (1988 - 2009), she curated a number of exhibitions including Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking (2006), the first treatment of diasporic artists from the Islamic world by a major institution. Her curatorial work in the field of Iranian modernism includes Between Word and Image at New York University s Grey Art Gallery in 2002, and Iran Modern at the Asia Society Museum in New York in 2013. Additionally, with several exhibitions, she focused on contemporary art: Action Now, the first exhibition of contemporary Iranian performance art held at the Cité Internationale des Arts, in Paris (2012); Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish Artists at the University of British Columbia s Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver (2013); and Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, the Museum of fine Arts in Houston (2017) and soon at Asia Society, New York (2020).