Safar Redraws Middle Eastern Art Map at UBC’s MOA

Getting to “Safar/Voyage” is a journey in itself.

First, there is the winding ride to UBC’s bucolic, suburban-feeling campus. Then, the walk into what recent signage tells you is Musqueam territory, past busloads of German tourists on a cultural excursion, and into one of Arthur Erickson’s greatest buildings—a soaring modernist triumph overlooking a Pacific cliff.

Once past the elegant threshold of the Museum of Anthropology, there is the descent into its great hall full of totems and ancestral spirits and down again into the museum’s eastern edge, where the Audain Gallery, opened in 2010, ushered in a new focus on contemporary art. Perched beside a much more ethnographic section full of masks, Pacific-island costumes and First Nations artifacts, “Safar” could easily be overlooked. But those who notice it will be glad they did.

“Safar” is located in MOA’s Audain and O’Brian galleries, and the delineation between the galleries marks a natural division between the two parts of the exhibition—the Audain is full of more visceral works, while the O’Brian houses the more ephemeral pieces.

This sense of duality also suits an exhibition that plays with ideas of place and displacement, absence and presence, penetrable and impenetrable via contemporary works by Arab, Iranian and Turkish artists.

While there are elements of the survey show in “Safar” (the Arabic and Farsi word for “voyage”), it’s largely an attempt by curator Fereshteh Daftari (formerly of MoMA) to present works that challenge traditional Orientalist visions of the “Middle East” (as Egyptian feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi has famously asked, “Middle to whom?”). By presenting contemporary works, Daftari hopes to free the artists from the burden of exposition and ethnography, situating them firmly within the often-itinerant global art world as free agents of self-expression.

As interest in contemporary Middle Eastern art has grown in tandem with recent invasions and “interventions”—one of the ironies always pointed out to me by artists who still live and work in Baghdad—it has become as hot a commodity, to my mind, as West Coast real estate.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a scenario today like the one that unfolded in the wake of 9/11, when a group show of Canadian artists of Arab origin at the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau was threatened with closure—largely due, it’s been said, to a video work by Jayce Salloum that featured an interview with an ex-Lebanese National Resistance fighter. That exhibition was saved at the 11th hour by the outcry of then-prime minister Jean Chrétien.

Still, in regards to “Safar,” its coordinating curator and MOA curator of education and public programs Jill Baird did confess to a moment of panic in the wake of the Boston bombings.

But Baird needn’t have worried. There is nothing overtly “political” about “Safar” that might inflame easily outraged North American sensibilities—which isn’t to say much of its context and subtext isn’t politically charged. But “Safar” is much more an exploration of how we perceive the “Middle East,” with the onus for explanation and examination returning back to the viewer in an elliptical fashion.

While visitors can begin at either gallery, most seem to gravitate to the Audain first. Here, they are greeted by two different versions of the world: the first, a 2007 work by Shiraz-born, California-educated, Paris- and Tehran-dwelling artist Farhad Moshiri called Yek Donya (One World), the second, internationally celebrated Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum’s 2006 sculpture Hot Spots.

While Moshiri’s gleaming, optimistic map of a borderless world embedded with thousands of blue and gold Swarovski crystals reads like shiny new Byzantium cartography, it can also register as a subversive kick at the privileged, “it’s a small world after all” presumption. Hatoum’s glowing neon globe speaks to a world of crisis capitalism emergencies, caged and violent, yet also linked by issues that affect us all, like global warming.

On an adjacent wall, one finds Tehran-born, New York–dwelling artist Ali Banisadr’s The Merchants—a Bosch-meets-Persian-miniature ode to the world of commerce, inspired partly by the 2008 financial crisis, but also in this context perhaps an unwitting reference to the global art market. Speaking of which, this is the one conventional (i.e. oil-on-stretched-cloth) painting in the entire show, and it is by one of seven Iranian artists (an unsurprising proportion in light of Vancouver’s significant Iranian community, and the involvement of prominent local arts patron Nezhat Khosrowshahi as chair of the exhibition’s volunteer committee). This situation made me wonder why the work of exiled Iraqi artist Hanaa Malallah—whose tableaux depicting ravaged Iraqi flags and maps, slashed and burned, manage to achieve a subtle poignancy—was not included.

One of three Palestinian artists in “Safar,” Gaza-born, Paris-dwelling artist Taysir Batniji travelled to Vancouver to install Hannoun, a work he recreated specially for MOA. A carpet of pencil shavings recalling poppies (the “martyr’s flower”) are strewn over a slightly raised white platform contained by a cube. On the other side of this fragile border hangs a photo of the artist’s workshop in Gaza, often rendered inaccessible due to bombings and border closures. It is an engaging work, playing with absence and presence and the act of creation amid the frustrations of political geographies.

At a diagonal to Hannoun, Nazgol Ansarinia’s 2009 subversion of the Persian carpet, Rhyme and Reason, offers unexpected images of contemporary Tehrani life hand-woven in silk, wool and cotton. Fusing the otherwise strictly delineated public and private spheres, depictions of a family on a motorbike frame its edges, while street fights and school girls in Islamicized uniforms form vignettes. At its centre is a mandala-like circle of chadored women sharing food, stories, gossip and possibly a mourning ritual.

A few feet away stands Parviz Tanavoli’s bronze sculpture Oh Persepolis II. The only “Canadian” in the show, Tanavoli is one of Iran’s most famous modern sculptors and divides his time between West Vancouver, where he lives in comfortable obscurity, and Tehran, where his family-home-turned-museum was shut down by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he was only a mayor, not a president. A 1975 element of the work features rows of a private pictorial language referencing cuneiform script, and it may be read at once as an ode to Persia’s pre-Islamic glory and a possible comment on its exploitation by a decadent shah. In 2008, this work was given a bronze frame, evocative of an almost nostalgic sense of protection for a pre-Islamic past neglected by the current regime.

On an adjacent wall, Y.Z. Kami’s 2007 work Konya offers a visual ode to the city where the poet Rumi lived and died. Panels of photographs juxtapose old stone walls embedded with Sufi script, mausoleum domes, and other images, managing to convey a sense of mysticism with a textural flourish. Next to it is Mitra Tabrizian’s staged photograph of working-class Tehranis, poised in the midst of daily rituals, in a dystopian landscape framed by a giant billboard of Khamenei and Khomeini extolling “revolutionary” values. Caught between internal politics and external threats, this portrait of Iran’s sanctions-plagued have-nots is oddly reminiscent of the Vancouver school.

Susan Hefuna’s Woman Cairo 2011 infuses traditional Egyptian mashrabiya latticework with a subtle use of more modern signage. And Lebanese artist Ayman Baalbaki’s installation Destination X that recreates a family car in flight, its roof-rack piled high with bedding, baskets and furniture, evokes Lebanon’s civil war as well as the 2006 Israeli bombardment. The work and its evocations also find tragic resonance with today’s Syrian crisis.

The only Iraqi in the show, Helsinki-based artist Adel Abidin, offers a fake travel-agency video installation called Abidin Travels. Inspired by his trip to post-invasion Iraq where a US marine greeted him with a friendly “Welcome to Baghdad,” he subverts a traditional “exotic” travelogue voiceover about his hometown’s many charms with scenes from the height of the mid-2000s violence. Visitors are encouraged to take home video-still posters proclaiming “Welcome to Baghdad” that include images of women in mourning, US soldiers dancing, and victims of kidnappings and roadside bombs.

As you exit the Audain Gallery, grisly posters in hand, Moshiri’s golden, idealized map offers an ironic wink.

Works in the O’Brian Gallery include Egyptian/Australian artist Raafat Ishak’s Responses to an Immigration Request From One Hundred and Ninety-Four Governments, where he diminishes the power of state bureaucrats by creating egg-shaped national emblems with responses in stylized Arabic script (Canada’s was “please refer to our website”). There’s also a series of self-portraits by Palestinian-Kuwaiti artist Tarek Al-Ghoussein juxtaposing an image of the artist veiled in a keffiyeh against different landscapes (including one of him staring out at his homeland from the Jordanian banks of the Dead Sea, for which he received a special visit from local police). Nearby is a video piece called Sundown by Hamed Sahihi, a young student of Abbas Kiarostami, that inserts a ghostly figure onto a day at the beach on the banks of the Caspian Sea, and I Will go to Paradise, Self-Portrait, Hyeres 2008, a series of hand-coloured photographs by Egyptian Youssef Nabil who slowly vanishes into the Mediterranean.

“Safar”’s parting gesture is, fittingly, a haunting video loop: Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman’s unedited 20-minute journey across the desert plains of Erzincan, in eastern Anatolia,  in 2009.

In what was once known as Mesopotamia, source of so much human culture and site of present-day conflict, the artist wanders blindfolded and wobbly, a solitary black figure against the barren landscape, holding out his hands for balance. Gradually, he disappears into the horizon, drawing the viewer into his Don Quixote–like journey, refusing to offer any safe narrative certainties, demanding complicity.