Two of the five contemporary Iranian artists invited for a unique show of their work in Tel Aviv have pulled out after receiving threats. But for political -- and mostly artistic -- reasons, the show must go on.

By Ellie Armon Azoulay
HAARETZ/Worldcrunch
TEL AVIV - Two weeks before the opening of the groundbreaking “Tension” exhibition of contemporary Iranian art, two out of the five featured artists have pulled out of the show. "They were exhibiting in another country, and their exhibition there was shut down,” explained Yael Katz Ben Shalom, the curator of the exhibit at Tel Aviv’s Hezi Cohen Gallery. “They have received threats."
In another sign of the sensitivity of the exhibition is that only one of the remaining three participating artists, Mitra Tabrizian, agreed to requests for interviews. And even Tabrizian spoke only under the condition of speaking only about the works being presented rather than on other issues concerning her personal biography.
Nevertheless, the exhibition will place in the artistic limelight the political conflicts between different countries in the Middle East. The three artists, all of whom no longer live in Iran, examine concepts and images that transform into weapons in the power struggle between the countries. In itself, this is a small victory for art in the face of Iranian authorities' attempts of silencing these expressions on one hand, and the self-censorship of many expatriated artists on the other.
In an article published last year in the Pakistani magazine Nukta Art, the exiled Iranian artist Alaleh Alamir acknowledged the gravity of the censorship of art in Iran, including a list of banned topics such as the naked body, sex, or criticism of state authorities or Islam. Yet she stressed that self-censorship exercised by artists both inside Iran, and in the Iranian diaspora, is no less imposing.
Katz Ben Shalom, who initiated the exhibition in Israel, had worried about the risks of political sensitivities. She had managed to establish an artistic dialogue as a past director and curator of Artneuland, a unique art space and culture center in Berlin that hosts works of artists from Arab and other Muslim countries (including those participating in the exhibition in Tel Aviv), and fosters dialogue among Jews, Christians and Muslims.
Katz Ben Shalom chose to allow the participation of the two artists who had canceled their appearance by putting the names of the missing artworks without disclosing the names of the artists. "The absence of the works will be made manifest by their titles," she wrote in the text accompanying the exhibition. "Those titles that were supposed to comprise a complementary message to the images themselves, will now turn into signifiers of the absent that is present."
Ironically, a photo series of one of the absent artists is called "The Lost: The Lost Identity, The Lost Confidence, The Lost Memory, Freedom but not Quite". The act of removal of the works from the exhibition "only stresses the situation where art gains its autonomy, that moment where it deviates from the aesthetic discussion," says Katz Ben Shalom.
Iranians in exile, Ping Pong as sculpture
In the exhibition, Mitra Tabrizian, one of the most interesting living Iranian artists, presents the film The Predator, as well as photographs from the series “Border.” The film depicts an encounter in London between two men from some unidentified Muslim country, one is an author who has given up his life's work and the other is a soldier sent to assassinate him. The short film (28 minutes) addresses politics, immigration and globalization, and Tabrizian succeeds in reflecting the violent and racist way host countries treat immigrants and exiles, as well as minority members' comradeship in a foreign country.
In an email correspondence with Haaretz, Tabrizian says that this artwork was inspired after looking at the raw statistical numbers of Iranian exiles around the world in general, and in the UK in particular. "The UK has been a major destination for Iranians, hosting an estimated 42,492 of them," she says. "You always learn from others, as you cannot understand the self unless it related to the other."

Tabrizian's photographs from “Border” have titles that she says poetically communicate with the exiles' personal stories. For example, "Man with a Past", "Without Frontiers", "The Long Wait". While in the movie she features both actors and non-actors, in the photo series she points directly at the exiles themselves. "In 'Borders' I wanted to deviate from the usual approach of exploitation or victimization,” she explained. “Instead, inspired by contemporary Iranian cinema, often using non-actors and focusing on true stories, the work echoes film stills, each depicting a fragment of a story in which the participants 'play' themselves.”

Tabrizian didn't try to give this feeling a realistic representation, but rather created something that would be analogous to the concept of waiting in Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot'.
Katz Ben Shalom also emphasizes the notion of waiting, and sees it as a space of tension. According to her, "the line of tension passes between waiting and immigration – between the one who stays and dreams, remains as a potential immigrant and perhaps materializes his immigration in a virtual way, to one who has immigrated but also waits and dreams about returning."
Another artist featured in the exhibition is Babak Golkar, who was born in California in 1977, grew up in Tehran, and has lived in Vancouver since 1996. He's a conceptual and poetic artist who creates installations through the use of various media. His sharp artwork in the Tel Aviv exhibition, "PingPong", displays a version of a ping-pong table where the table and the net are round and the ball is made of wood. He created this work as a response to the political game in the Middle East.
The artist Alireza Ghandchi, who was born in Tehran in 1976 and now lives in Berlin, presents two photo series in which he's photographed with his body in extreme physical situations – tied up, mummified, injured and battered. All of these are staged in somehow Christian aesthetics and symbolism that brings up connotations of suffering, salvation and holiness. One example is the appearance of Jesus' stigmata expressed by his perforated feet.
The exhibition is on display until August 13. Asked what she thought when she was invited to display in Israel, Tabrizian replied: "My first reaction was 'absolute reluctance', for obvious reasons, considering the situation with the Palestinians. But then came the surprise – all the works that Yael Katz Ben Shalom was interested in were either about Iran or the recent work with the Muslim community in London. That the show is about Iranian artists, I thought was an interesting, daring and controversial decision (by the gallery), wanting to do a show like this in this political atmosphere."

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