Muse/News: Color Festival, Archive Dives, and Cultural Preservation

SAM News

“Support Seattle Art Museum’s year-round cultural programming at this lavish gala,” says The Stranger in their “Top 63 Events in Seattle This Week” round-up, recommending The Colors of Holi Gala at the Seattle Asian Art Museum this Saturday night. You can also celebrate the festival during the day at the free Holi Family Celebration

A recommendation from 425 Magazine: Ikat: A World of Compelling Cloth, an exhibition exploring over 100 dazzling textiles, opens next week at SAM. 

Alison Sutcliffe for Tinybeans shares “25 Things to Do with a Baby in Seattle,” including mentions of the tranquil setting of the Seattle Asian Art Museum and the fresh air and sculptures of the Olympic Sculpture Park.

Local News

The Seattle Times’ Jerald Pierce with “6 exhibitions you need to see for Women’s History Month.” 

Theron Hassi for UW Daily on the Art as Activism show at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, which “highlights four local Iranian artists and their responses to the crisis enveloping their home country.”

Whitewall interviews Wendy Red Star on her artworks created for bus shelters in Boston, Chicago, and New York City. Red Star also mentions her commission for SAM, Áakiiwilaxpaake (People Of The Earth), which is on view now in American Art: The Stories We Carry

“She takes us along in her pursuit of history and knowledge in an effort to gain and share access to that which has been taken, stolen, lost to time, or hidden away in high-walled institutions.”

Inter/National News

Robin Pogrebin for the New York Times: “To expand the scope and reach of its collection, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is creating a new center dedicated to the study, acquisition and care of art from continental Africa and the African diaspora.”

Francesca Aton for ARTnews reports that Ghanaian artist El Anatsui has received the Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. 

Via Eileen Kinsella for Artnet: “Winterizing Monuments, Digitizing Archives: How Ukraine Is Fighting to Preserve Its Cultural Heritage a Year Into the Russian Invasion.”

“[World Monuments Fund’s Kateryna] Goncharova stressed the importance of cultural heritage preservation, saying: ‘Restoring a monument that was destroyed gives people a reason to withstand whatever the circumstances we have to face, whatever challenges may come. It gives us something to look forward to. So continue believing in Ukraine, continue believing in our future.’”

And Finally

Kung Fu Nuns of Nepal.

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Associate Director of Public Relations

Photo: Robert Wade.

#SAMPhotoClub Family & Community Spotlight: Alborz Kamalizad

SAM Photo Club is almost over! With Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue closing at SAM this Sunday, January 22, we are accepting the final photo submissions to the third defining theme and motif of these legendary photographers’ artistic careers: family & community.

To incentivize you to get your last-minute submissions in and join SAM Photo Club, we’re featuring some of the family & community photos taken by SAM’s two staff photographers: Alborz Kamalizad and Chloe Collyer. Outside of photographing all SAM events, exhibitions, installations, programs, and more, Alborz and Chloe are also working professionals. Browse through a few photos taken by Alborz of their family and community below, then discover which of Carrie Mae Weems’s photographs on view in SAM’s exhibition resonates with him.

Family & Community, 2021–2022

My family emigrated from Iran when I was three years old. This made me young enough to easily assimilate into American culture. But even though the bulk of my cultural connections are American, there is Iranian culture swirling inside me as well — culture that is usually easy to ignore while walking through an American life.

With a project I’m calling Rebuilding Babel I have friends engage with artifacts of my familial culture. These objects, which are mostly meaningless to them, render the images inaccurate to who they are. Instead, these photos of friends portray a relationship between my own American and Iranian selves.

The current humanitarian crisis in Iran, as people fight for freedom and equality, has underscored both my connection to and separation from the culture I was born in.

Untitled (Woman with Daughter and Children), Carrie Mae Weems, 1990

Walking into the space where The Kitchen Table series is displayed at the Seattle Art Museum feels like walking into the middle of someone’s psyche. It’s intimate. It’s a real testament to the need to experience photography in person. Moving your body from image to image while they transport you through time cannot be experienced on a screen.

Alborz Kamalizad (he/him) is a visual artist who moves between photography, animation, documentary filmmaking, and illustration. He was born in Iran, raised in the US, and currently works as a staff photographer for the Seattle Art Museum. As a visual journalist and photographer, his work has been featured by Los Angeles’s NPR affiliate, Mother Jones Magazine, the United Nations, The Nature Conservancy, MasterClass, and the Getty.

Participate in #SAMPhotoClub by sharing your own family & community on Instagram and tagging us through Friday, January 20. Once the window for submissions closes, we’ll share a few of the photographs we’ve been tagged in on our Instagram Stories.

– Lily Hansen, SAM Marketing Content Creator

Photo Credit: Untitled (Woman with Daughter and Children), Carrie Mae Weems, American, born 1953. Untitled (Woman and daughter with children). Kitchen Table Series. Gelatin silver print. 1990. 40 x 40 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

“Woman, Life, Freedom”: Shirin Neshat’s Tooba

Tooba (2002) is a 12-minute video installation by Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat. Projected on two opposing screens, it centers around the image of a woman inside a tree, within a walled garden in the midst of a desert landscape. The woman disappears into the tree as a crowd of men approach, in what appears to be a kind of pilgrimage. As with much of her work, Neshat uses the grammar of traditional narrative filmmaking (her cinematographer Darius Khondji regularly works with Hollywood filmmakers like David Fincher and the Safdie brothers) to tell an allegorical story with poetic open-endedness. The combination gives Tooba the spiritual yet earthly feeling that is present in much of her work.

Originally, Neshat intended to film in Iran. In a making-of documentary she said, “we made many steps toward it… and then it was blocked [for] whatever reason.” The “whatever reason” is most likely the Islamic Republic, the theocratic regime that has governed Iran for the past 43 years. Any film, performance, or otherwise public artwork made in the country has to be vetted by its Ministry of Culture, which must be convinced that the work isn’t critical of the regime or its particular brand of politicized Islam.

It’s not hard to imagine why Shirin Neshat, whose work has repeatedly dealt with the gender apartheid inside Iran, would have a hard time getting a stamp of approval from the Ministry of Culture. The video itself is based on a novel of the same name by Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur, who spent years as a political prisoner inside Iran. Parsipur now lives in exile, as does Neshat.

Brought into SAM’s collection in 2015, Tooba was on view in Be/longing: Contemporary Asian Art at the Seattle Asian Art Museum until July 2022, which is about when I started my position as a SAM photographer. One aspect of my job is to walk the galleries and take photos of museum visitors looking at the art. As an Iranian-American, I get a thrill noticing people examining Iranian artifacts in the museum’s collection because there are so few instances in the US where Iranian and Middle Eastern culture are visible. 

I wonder what goes through people’s minds when they see “Iran” written on wall labels and how they reconcile that name with the typical images of “Iran” from our media: scowling men in foreign-looking religious or military garb, the leaders of the Islamic Republic. The Iran of today is cloaked behind those men and the opaque politics of nuclear negotiations.

That is until September 2022.

On September 13, Mahsa Jina Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, was detained for allegedly not complying with the regime’s compulsory hijab law—all women in the country must cover their hair and wear loose clothing that hides their bodies. She was reportedly beaten while in custody and died three days later. Amini’s death sparked a wave of country-wide civil disobedience, led by women who marched into the streets and defiantly refused to wear hair coverings. After eleven weeks of demonstrations, the movement shows no signs of slowing down. The number of women with free-flowing hair in public grows every day. To me, every one of them is an Iranian Rosa Parks daring to assert her own worth—often hand-in-hand with women who cover their hair but who fight in solidarity for the choice to do so.

This feminist revolution has also added a new wave of protest art to Iran’s history of guerilla art under the regime of the Islamic Republic. But the defining artistic work of this moment in Iran is probably the song Baraye, by Shervin Hajipour. A crowdsourced song whose title means “for the sake of,” Baraye has become the de facto anthem of hopeful revolutionaries in Iran. It is simply a list of what people are fighting for, taken verbatim from Iranian Twitter. The breadth of grievances—from the most basic (“for the shame of being penniless”), to the painfully specific (“for a girl who wished she was a boy”), to sweeping hopes (“for the future”)—demonstrate the intersectional alliance of Iranians fighting for change.

The song ends with the cornerstone chant of the movement: “woman, life, freedom.” Three words which when taken together, indicate that freedom for anyone is impossible without freedom for women. And so, if Iranians are successful, we may be witnessing what Shirin Neshat has called the “first female revolution” to overthrow a government. 

Predictably 25-year-old Hajipour was arrested, forced to publicly renounce the obvious intentions of his song, and delete it from his Instagram page. But that’s hardly a drop in the bucket of the regime’s violent crackdown on the protests. To date 450 people have been reported killed (including 63 children); over 18,000 people have been arrested and threatened with execution; at least 21 have been formally charged with the death penalty (up to 1,000 face further charges); and a propaganda machine makes paranoia and fatigue a feature of daily life in Iran

This is a government with no room for song (for women, literally).

And so Shirin Neshat ended up filming Tooba in Oaxaca, Mexico and kept the setting of the video nondescript. This gives her work a universality that it probably would have lacked had she filmed in Iran. Neshat’s adaptability as an artist aside, the decision on filming location should have been hers to make and not one she was backed into by a theocracy that has banned her from working in her homeland. As people outside of the country use their freedom to continue raising awareness over the long history of oppression in Iran, how many Shirin Neshats are inside the country right now—rather than making art, desperate to find a missing friend? How many Shahrnush Parsipurs will never make it out of political prison to write a book that would inspire the next Tooba? And how many more Shervin Hajipours will risk their lives to sing?

– Alborz Kamalizad, SAM Staff Photographer

Photos: Tooba (detail), 2002, Shirin Neshat (American, b. Iran, 1957), color 35mm film transferred to DVD, 12 min., Gift of Jeffery and Susan Brotman, Jane and David Davis, Barney A. Ebsworth, Jeff and Judy Greenstein, Lyn and Jerry Grinstein, Richard and Betty Hedreen, Janet Ketcham, Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation, James and Christina Lockwood, Michael McCafferty, Christine and Assen Nicolov, Faye and Herman Sarkowsky, Jon and Marry Shirley, Rebecca and Alexander Stewart, Virgnia and Bagley Wright, Charles and Barbara Wright, and Ann P. Wyckoff in honor of Lisa Corrin, 2005.141 ©️ Shirin Neshat, photo: Larry Barns, courtesy of Gladstone Gallery. Installation image of the Islamic galleries at SAM, photo: Alborz Kamalizad. Iranian-Americans marched through Downtown Seattle on November 19, 2022 in solidarity with Iranians back home, photo: Alborz Kamalizad.

Muse/News: Flashy Morsels, Queer Films, and Iranian Protest Art

SAM News

“15 LGBTQ art shows that are spicing up global museums this fall”: Dan Allen for NBC Out with exhibitions from around the world to see, including Anthony White: Limited Liability at SAM. 

“…a world not unlike our own, overpacked with morsels of flashy but disposable pop culture, technology, luxury branding, gaming, junk food, and various other vices.”

SAM and the Betty Bowen Committee have announced the six finalists for the 2022 Betty Bowen Award, an annual juried award for PNW artists. The Stranger shared the news; stay tuned for the winner announcement on November 1!

Local News

Via Capitol Hill Seattle: Joe Bar, a beloved Capitol Hill coffee shop known for its art shows, will be closing after 25 years. Don’t miss the final group art show—titled The End—before it closes October 26. 

This week included Indigenous Peoples’ Day; Crosscut gathered six of its recent articles “that honor the robust Native heritage and history in the Pacific Northwest.”

The Seattle Queer Film Festival launches this week and runs through October 23 at various locations. Dominic Baez of the Seattle Times previews the festival’s opening night film, What the Funk?!, a documentary on the “popular, all-people of color, funk-centric burlesque festival.”

“Part of my motivation for documenting this was, you know, the only person that’s going to be the best at telling your history is going to be you,” [Mx. Pucks A’Plenty] said. “When you look at burlesque history, there’s not a lot of Black and brown burlesque history that survived, or was even recorded in comparison to our white counterparts.”

Inter/National News

Artnet’s Taylor Defoe recounts the recent concerns brought up about the erasure of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s queer identity in presentations of his work.

Tessa Soloman for ARTnews reports on the recent air strikes by Russia reportedly targeting Ukrainian museums and heritage sites

Pamela Karimi for Hyperallergic on the “many shades of Iran’s protest art.”

“Most of these works were created by graphic designers and illustrators for social media platforms; however, they represent only one of the diverse art forms being produced in contemporary Iran. In response to the current unrest, many have abandoned exhibition and performance for the ‘anonymous’ expression of political views through graffiti and ephemeral installations.”

And Finally

Go, Mariners!

 Rachel Eggers, SAM Associate Director of Public Relations

Image: Alborz Kamalizad.

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