Persian arts, or Iranian arts is one of the richest art heritages in world history and encompasses many disciplines including architecture, painting, weaving, pottery, calligraphy, metalworking and stonemasonry.

The Persian Fine Arts[link]

The Persian rug[link]

From the yarn fiber to the colors, every part of the Persian rug is traditionally hand made from natural ingredients over the course of many months.

The art of carpet weaving in has its roots in the culture and customs of its people and their instinctive feelings. Weavers mix elegant patterns with a myriad of colors. The Iranian carpet is similar to the Persian garden: full of florae, birds, and beasts.

The colors are usually made from wild flowers, and are rich in colors such as burgundy, navy blue, and accents of ivory. The proto-fabric is often washed in tea to soften the texture, giving it a unique quality. Depending on where the rug is made, patterns and designs vary. And some rugs, such as Gabbeh, and Gelim have a variations in their textures and number of knots as well. Out of about 2 million Iranians who work in the trade, 1.2 million are weavers producing the largest amount of hand woven aritistic carpets in the world. exported $517 million worth of carpets in 2002.^[1]

The exceptional craftsmanship in weaving these carpets and silken textile thus caught the attention of the likes of Xuanzang, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, and Jean Chardin.

Painting and miniature[link]

Mullahs in the royal presence. The painting style is markedly Qajari.

Oriental historian Basil Gray believes " has offered a particularly unique [sic] art to the world which is excellent in its kind".

Caves in Iran's Lorestan province exhibit painted imagery of animals and hunting scenes. Some such as those in Fars Province and Sialk are at least 5,000 years old.

Painting in Iran is thought to have reached a climax during the Tamerlane era when outstanding masters such as Kamaleddin Behzad gave birth to a new style of painting.

Paintings of the Qajar period, are a combination of European influences and Safavid miniature schools of painting such as those introduced by Reza Abbasi. Masters such as Kamal-ol-molk, further pushed forward the European influence in Iran. It was during the Qajar era when "Coffee House painting" emerged. Subjects of this style were often religious in nature depicting scenes from Shia epics and the like.

Pottery and ceramics[link]

Pottery Vessel, Fourth Millennium BC. The Sialk collection of Tehran's National Museum of Iran.

Prominent archeologist Roman Ghirshman believes "the taste and talent of this people [Iranians] can be seen through the designs of their earthen wares".

Of the thousands of archeological sites and historic ruins of Iran, almost every single one can be found to have been filled, at some point, with earthenware of exceptional quality. Thousands of unique vessels alone were found in Sialk and Jiroft sites.

The occupation of the potter ("kuzeh gar") has a special place in Persian literature.

Music[link]

During the course of Iran's recorded history, a unique distinctive music developed accompanied by numerous musical instruments, several of which came to be the first prototypes of some modern musical instruments of today.

The earliest references to musicians in Iran are found in Susa and Elam in the 3rd millennium BC. Reliefs, sculptures, and mosaics such as those in Bishapur from periods of antiquity depict a vibrant musical culture.

Persian music in its contemporary form has its inception in the Naseri era, who ordered the opening of a "House of Crafts," where all master craftsmen would gather for designing instruments and practicing their art.

Literature[link]

Iran is filled with tombs of poets and musicians, such as this one belonging to Rahi Mo'ayeri. An illustration of Iran's deep artistic heritage.

Persian literature is by far the most stalwart expression of the Iranian genius. While there are interesting works in prose, it is poetry where the Iranian literature shines at its most. Flourishing over a period of more than a millennium, it was esteemed and imitated well beyond the confines of the Iranian homeland. The literature of Turkey and India developed under its influence.

Some notable Iranian poets are: Ferdowsi, Khayyam, Hafiz, Attar, Sa'di, Nizami, Sanai, Rudaki, Rumi, Jami, and Shahriar.

Environmental Design[link]

Architecture[link]

The architecture of Iran is one with an exceedingly ancient Persian tradition and heritage. As Arthur Pope put it, "the meaningful Impact of Persian architecture is versatile. Not overwhelming but dignified, magnificent and impressive".

Persian Gardens[link]

The tradition and style in the garden design of Persian gardens (Persian باغ ایرانی) has influenced the design of gardens from Andalusia to India and beyond. The gardens of the Alhambra show the influence of Persian Paradise garden philosophy and style in a Moorish Palace scale from the era of Al-Andalus in Spain. The Taj Mahal is one of the largest Persian Garden interpretations in the world, from the era of the Mughal Empire in India.

• Examples: see Category: Persian Gardens

Calligraphy[link]

Says writer Will Durant: "Ancient Iranians with an alphabet of 36 letters, used skins and pen to write, Instead of ear-then tablets". Such was the creativity spent on the art of writing. The significance of the art of calligraphy in works of pottery, metallic vessels, and historic buildings is such that they are deemed lacking without the adorning decorative calligraphy.

Illuminations, and especially the Quran and works such as the Shahnameh, Divan Hafez, Golestan, Bostan et al. are recognized as highly invaluable because of their delicate calligraphy alone. Vast quantities of these are scattered and preserved in museums and private collections worldwide, such as the Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg and Washington's Freer Gallery of Art among many others. Styles:

• Shekasteh
• Nasta'liq
• Naskh
• Mohaqqaq

Tilework[link]

The tilework is a unique feature of the blue mosques of . In the old days, Kashan (kash + an which literally means "land of tiles") and Tabriz were the two famous centers of Iranian mosaic and tile industry.

Cinema[link]

With 300 international awards in the past 25 years, films from Iran continue to be celebrated worldwide. Few of the best known directors are Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Majid Majidi.

Persian Work[link]

A sample of Tabriz rugs

Since centuries, Iranian art has developed particular patterns designed to decorate Iranian produced craft. These motifs can be :

• Inspired by ancestral nomad tribes (such as geometrical motifs used in kilims or gabbehs).
• Islam influenced, with an advanced geometrical research.
• Oriental based, also found in India or Pakistan.

Metalwork (Ghalam-zani)[link]

Silver handcrafts of Tabriz

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Khatam-kari[link]

An example of "khatam-kari"

Delicate and meticulous marquetry, produced since the Safavid period: at this time, khatam was so popular in the court that princes learned this technique at the same level of music or painting. In the 18th and 19th centuries, katahm declined, before being stimulated under the reign of Reza Shah, with the creation of craft schools in Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz. "Khatam" means "incrustation", and "Khatam-kari" (Persian: خاتم‌کاری‎), "incrustation work". This craft consists in the production of incrustation patterns (generally star shaped), with thin sticks of wood (ebony, teak, ziziphus, orange, rose), brass (for golden parts), camel bones (white parts). Ivory, gold or silver can also be used for collection objects. Sticks are assembled in triangular beams, themselves assembled and glued in a strict order to create a cylinder, 70 cm in diameter, whose cross-section is the main motif: a six-branch star included in a hexagon. These cylinders are cut into shorter cylinders, and then compressed and dried between two wooden plates, before being sliced for the last time, in 1 mm wide tranches. These sections are ready to be plated and glued on the object to be decorated, before lacquer finishing. The tranche can also be softened through heating in order to wrap around objects. Many objects can be decorated in this fashion, such as: jewellery/decorative boxes, chessboards, cadres, pipes, desks, frames or some musical instruments. Khatam can be used on Persian miniature, realizing true work of art.

Coming from techniques imported from China and improved by Persian know-how, this craft existed for more than 700 years and is still perennial in Shiraz and Isfahan.

Mina-kari[link]

Enamel working and decorating metals with colorful and baked coats is one of the distinguished courses of art in Isfahan . Mina, is defined as some sort of glasslike colored coat which can be stabilized by heat on different metals particularly copper. Although this course is of abundant use industrially for producing metal and hygienic dishes, it has been paid high attention by painters, goldsmiths and metal engravers since long times ago. In the world, it is categorized into three kinds as below:

1. painting enamel
2. Charkhaneh or chess like enamel
3. Cavity enamel.

What of more availability in Isfahan is the painting enamel of which a few have remained in the museums of Iran and abroad indicting that Iranian artists have been interested in this art and used it in their metal works since the Achaemenian and the Sassanid dynasties. The enamels being so delicate, we do not have many of them left from the ancient times. Some documents indicate that throughout the Islamic civilization of and during the Seljuk, Safavid and Zand dynasties there have been outstanding enameled dishes and materials. Most of the enameled dishes related to the past belong to the Qajar dynasty between the years 1810–1890 AD. There have also remained some earrings. Bangles, boxes, water pipe heads, vases, and golden dishes with beautiful paintings in blue and green colors from that time, Afterwards, fifty years of stagnation caused by the World War I and the social revolution followed. However, again the enamel red color, having been prepared, this art was fostered from the quantity and quality points of view through the attempts bestowed by Ostad Shokrollah Sani'e zadeh, the outstanding painter of Isfahan in 1935 and up to then for forty years.

Now after a few years of stagnation since 1992, this art has started to continue its briskness having a lot of distinguished artists working in this field. To prepare an enameled dish, the following steps are used. First, choose the suitable dish by the needed size and shape which is usually made by a coppersmith. Then, it is bleached through enameled working which is known as the first coat. It is then put into a seven hundred and fifty degree furnace. At this stage, the enameled metal will be coated with better enamels a few more times and again reheated. The dish is then ready to be painted. The Isfahanian artists, having been inspired by their traditional plans as arabesque, khataii (flowers and birds) and using fireproof paints and special brushes, have made painting of Isfahan monuments such as step, the enameled material is put into the furnace again and heated at five hundred degrees. This causes the enameled painting to be stabilized on the undercoat, creating a special "shining" effect. Most of today's enamel workings are performed on dishes, vases, boxes and frames in various size.

Relief and sculpture[link]

Median man in Persepolis relief

The Qajarid reliefs of Tangeh Savashi were made by order of Fath Ali Shah.

Relief carving has a history dating back thousands of years. Elamite reliefs are still to be found in Iran with Persepolis being a mecca of relief creations of antiquity.

Other handicrafts[link]

• Galesh
• Ghalamkar
• Giveh
• Iranian Termeh
• Persian Jewels
• Qalamkari

See also[link]

• Safavid art
• Qajar art
• Culture of Iran
• List of Persian painters
• Iranian modern and contemporary art
• Iran's House of Art
• International rankings of Iran
• Graffiti in Tehran

References[link]

1. ^ BBCPersian.com

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Art of Iran

• Iranian Artists and Persian Art Resource
• Iran Arts and Entrtainment Directory
• Central Asian miniature painting

|name=Shirin Neshat |image= Viennale talk (2), Shirin Neshat.jpg|thumb|Neshat at the Viennale 2009]] |caption= |birth_date= (1957-03-26) March 26, 1957 (age 55) |birth_place=Qazvin, Iran |occupation= Artist }}

Shirin Neshat شیرین نشاط (born March 26, 1957 in Qazvin, Iran) is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York City. She is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography.^[1]

Background[link]

Neshat's father was a physician and her mother a homemaker. Neshat has stated about her father, “He fantasized about the west, romanticized the west, and slowly rejected all of his own values; both my parents did. What happened, I think, was that their identity slowly dissolved, they exchanged it for comfort. It served their class”. As a part of Neshat’s “Westernization” she was enrolled in a Catholic boarding school in Tehran. Through her father’s acceptance of Western ideologies came an acceptance of a form of western feminism. Neshat’s father encouraged each of his daughters to “be an individual, to take risks, to learn, to see the world", and he sent his daughters as well as his sons to college to receive their higher education.^[2]

Life and work in the West[link]

Neshat left Iran to study art in Los Angeles at about the time that the Iranian Revolution occurred. As an effect of the political restructuring, after the revolution her father, who had been financially secure and about to retire, was left without benefits and a meager salary (MacDonald 4). Once the revolution was over and the society was restructured as a traditional Islamic nation, her family was no longer able to enjoy the comfortable life to which they had grown accustomed. About a year after the revolution, Neshat moved to the San Francisco Bay area and began studying at Dominican College. Eventually, she enrolled in UC Berkeley and completed her BA, MA and MFA.

After graduate school, she moved to New York and married a Korean curator, Kyong Park, who was the director and founder of Storefront for Art and Architecture, a non-profit organization.^[3] Neshat helped Park run the Storefront, where she was exposed to many different ideologies and it would become a place where she received a much needed experience with and exposure to concepts that would later become integral to her artwork. ^[4]

During this time, she did not make any serious attempts at creating art, and the few attempts were subsequently destroyed. In 1990, she returned to Iran. "It was probably one of the most shocking experiences that I have ever had. The difference between what I had remembered from the Iranian culture and what I was witnessing was enormous. The change was both frightening and exciting; I had never been in a country that was so ideologically based. Most noticeable, of course, was the change in people's physical appearance and public behavior.^[5]" As a way of coping with the discrepancy between the culture that she was experiencing and that of the pre-revolution Iran in which she was raised, she began her first mature body of work, the Women of Allah series.

Her work refers to the social, cultural and religious codes of Muslim societies and the complexity of certain oppositions, such as man and woman. Neshat often emphasizes this theme showing two or more coordinated films concurrently, creating stark visual contrasts through motifs such as light and dark, black and white, male and female. Neshat has also made more traditional narrative short films, such as her recent work, Zarin.

The work of Shirin Neshat addresses the social, political and psychological dimensions of women's experience in contemporary Islamic societies. Although Neshat actively resists stereotypical representations of Islam, her artistic objectives are not explicitly polemical. Rather, her work recognizes the complex intellectual and religious forces shaping the identity of Muslim women throughout the world. Using Persian poetry and calligraphy she examined concepts such as martyrdom, the space of exile, the issues of identity and femininity.

As a photographer and video-artist, Shirin Neshat was recognized for her portraits of women entirely overlaid by Persian calligraphy (notably through the Women of Allah series). She also directed several videos, among them Anchorage (1996) and, projected on two opposing walls: Shadow under the Web (1997), Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Soliloquy (1999).

Neshat's recognition became more international in 1999, when she won the International Award of the XLVIII Venice Biennale with Turbulent and Rapture, a project involving almost 250 extras and produced by the Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont which met with critical and public success after its worldwide avant-première at the Art Institute of Chicago in May 1999. With Rapture, Neshat tried for the first time to make pure photography with the intent of creating an aesthetic, poetic, and emotional shock.

In 2001-02, Neshat collaborated with singer Sussan Deyhim and created Logic of the Birds, which was produced by curator and art historian RoseLee Goldberg. The full length multimedia production premiered at the Lincoln Center Summer Festival in 2002 and toured to the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis and to Artangel in London.

Shirin Neshat has become one of the most well known Persian artist within the Western artistic world. While she lives in New York City, she addresses a global audience. Her earlier work was symbolic of her personal grief, anxiety and the pain of separation from her home country. It took a neutral position on Islam. As time progressed and the Islamic regime of Iran became more intrusive and oppressive, Neshat's artwork became more boldly political and subversively critical against it.

She seeks to, according an article in Time, "untangle the ideology of Islam through her art." Her current cinematic work continues to express the poetic, philosophical, and metaphorical as well as complex levels of intellectual abstraction.

In 2006 Shirin was awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, one of the richest prizes in the arts, given annually to “a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.”^[6]

Shirin was profiled in The New Yorker magazine on October 22, 2007.^[7]

In 2009 Neshat won the Silver Lion for best director at the 66th Venice Film Festival for her directional debut Women Without Men, based on Shahrnush Parsipur's novel of the same name. She said about the movie: "This has been a labour of love for six years.(...) This film speaks to the world and to my country."^[8] The film examines the 1953 British- and American-backed coup, which supplanted Iran's democratically elected government with a monarchy.^[9]

Games of Desire, a video and still-photography piece, was displayed between September 3 and October 3 at the Gladstone Gallery in Brussels before moving in November to the Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont in Paris. The film, which is based in Laos, centers on a small group of elderly people who sing folk songs with sexual lyrics - a practice which had been nearing obsolescence.^[10]

In July 2009 Shirin Neshat took part in a three-day hunger strike at the United Nations headquarters in New York in protest of the 2009 Iranian presidential election.^[11]

In December 2010 Shirin Neshat was named Artist of the Decade by Huffington Post critic G. Roger Denson, for "the degree to which world events have more than met the artist in making her art chronically relevant to an increasingly global culture," for reflecting "the ideological war being waged between Islam and the secular world over matters of gender, religion, and democracy," and because "the impact of her work far transcends the realms of art in reflecting the most vital and far-reaching struggle to assert human rights." ^[12]

Works[link]

• Turbulent, 1998. Two channel video/audio installation.
• Rapture, 1999. Two channel video/audio installation.
• Soliloquy, 1999. Color video/audio installation with artist as the protagonist.
• Fervor, 2000. Two channel video/audio installation.
• Passage, 2001. Single channel video/audio installation.
• Logic of the Birds, 2002. Multi-media Performance.

• Mahdokht, 2004. Three channel video/audio installation.
• Zarin, 2005. Single channel video/audio installation.
• Munis, 2008. Color video/audio installation based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel Women Without Men.
• Faezeh, 2008. Color video/audio installation based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel Women Without Men.
• Possession, 2009. Black & white video/audio installation.
• Women Without Men, 2009. Feature film based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel Women Without Men.

Film and Video[link]

• Expressing the inexpressible [videorecording DVD] : Shirin Neshat. c 2004, 42 minutes, Color. Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities & Sciences. Originally produced by Westdeutscher Rundfunk in 2000.

See also[link]

• Iranian cinema
• Iranian modern and contemporary art

References[link]

1. ^ Claudia La Rocco (2011-11-14). "Shirin Neshat’s Performa Contribution". The New York Times. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/shirin-neshats-performa-contribution/. Retrieved 2012-02-08. 
2. ^ MacDonald, Scott (2004-09-22). "Between two worlds: an interview with Shirin Neshat". Highbeam.com. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-128865266.html. Retrieved 2012-03-29. 
3. ^ After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art by Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal, and Sue Scott.
4. ^ "Shirin Neshat in Conversation with Carol Becker and Phong Bui". Brooklyn Rail. September 2009. http://brooklynrail.org/2009/09/art/shirin-neshat-with-carol-becker-phong-bui. 
5. ^ Excerpt from interview between the artist and Linda Weintraub, author of 'In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art'
6. ^ The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, official website.
7. ^ The Woman Behind the Screen: Online Only: The New Yorker
8. ^ Payvand.com
9. ^ Orden, Erica. “Snapshot of a Song” Modern Painters, November 2009.
10. ^ Orden, Erica. “Snapshot of a Song” Modern Painters, November 2009.
11. ^ Orden, Erica. “Snapshot of a Song” Modern Painters, November 2009.
12. ^ Denson, G. Roger, "Shirin Neshat: Artist of the Decade,"Huffington Post, December 20, 2010.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Shirin Neshat

• Shirin Neshat at the Internet Movie Database
• CV/Images
• Heyoka magazine Interview with John LeKay
• Arthur Danto Shirin Neshat interview
• Time profile, photo essay and interview (08/2000)
• Guardian article (07/2000)
• Guardian article (10/2002)
• Reuters article (10/2006)
• Shirin Neshat in Conversation with Carol Becker and Phong Bui (9/2009)
• G. Roger Denson, "Shirin Neshat: Artist of the Decade," (12/2010)
• On Iran's Green Revolution