Title: Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet
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 poetryhence 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. Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet brings together the work of a number of well-known artists, including 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, amongst many others?Shiva Ahmadi, Shirin Aliabadi, Mahmoud Bakhshi, Shadi Ghadirian, Khosrow Hassanzadeh, Shirazeh Houshiary, Farhad Moshiri, Parviz Tanavoli.
Subjects: Art, iranian, Iranian Art, Exhibitions