The Iranian director of The Salesman, nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, will not attend next month's Oscars ceremony. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art worries that exhibitions, archaeological surveys and excavations with institutions in the Middle East will have to be cancelled or curtailed. And the Sundance Institute Theatre Program may have to scale back its exchange program with artists from the Middle East and North Africa.
As President Donald Trump's executive order seeking to keep many foreigners from entering the United States sowed widespread confusion throughout the immigration system and at airports around the globe, cultural figures and institutions were calculating how the new policies would harm their art and missions.
"Scholarly exchanges and international collaborations are key to our ongoing work, and we are very concerned that a number of programs we have in place could be threatened, just at a time when the world needs more, not less, exchange and mutual understanding," said Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The executive order, which was signed by Trump on Friday, blocks entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. It also suspends entry of all refugees for 120 days and bars Syrian refugees indefinitely. Artists – and citizens – from the affected countries legally residing in the United States said they did not dare leave for fear of being denied re-entry.
In the most high-profile case, Asghar Farhadi, who directed The Salesman, said he would not attend the Oscars ceremony next month even if he were granted an exception to the visa ban.
He had planned to attend the February 26 ceremony and call attention to a visa ban he called "unjust". But the new regulations presented "ifs and buts which are in no way acceptable to me even if exceptions were to be made for my trip," he said.
In his statement, Farhadi, whose film A Separation won an Oscar for best foreign-language film in 2012, said he condemned "the unjust conditions forced upon some of my compatriots and the citizens of the other six countries trying to legally enter the United States of America and hope that the current situation will not give rise to further divide between nations."
Farhadi's film centres on a Tehran couple starring in an amateur production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and includes subtle critiques of censorship in Iran. The film's screenplay had to be approved by the Iranian government, which also chose the film as the country's official submission to the Academy Awards.
Marcel Mettelsiefen, director of Watani: My Homeland, an Oscar-nominated documentary, said the film's Syrian protagonist, Hala Kamil, would not be able to travel to the Oscars ceremony because she has a Syrian and a German refugee passport.
The film follows Kamil and her children as they seek asylum in Germany. "It is very sad she cannot come," Mettelsiefen said. "She is the star of the movie."
Kamil has been a frequent visitor to the U.S., even giving a speech on the plight of refugees at the United Nations in August.
Where and how did things go so wrong?
Kim Benzel, curator
Hussein Hassan, the Kurdish director of the feature Reseba – The Dark Wind, which was to have its North American premiere at the Miami Film Festival next month, said he had withdrawn his visa application to protest Trump's policy.
The film's producer and one of its screenwriters, Mehmet Aktas, said the movie, a drama about a bride-to-be who survives an attack by the Islamic State group on her village, showed that not all Muslims are terrorists. Festival organisers say they still plan to show The Dark Wind.
Philip Himberg, artistic director of the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, said he feared the visa ban would shut down a fruitful workshop exchange for professionals from the Middle East and North Africa. Since it started in 2012, about 60 Arabic-language professionals have attended the workshops in Utah, Wyoming, Berlin and Morocco.
"It shatters my heart," Himberg said. He added that the program was supported by a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Trust, and the Sundance Institute did not know what would happen if the artists the grant was intended to bring to the United States could no longer travel there.
The ban is also expected to affect museums. Curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art said the order could disrupt or limit its loans to and from the affected countries and would restrict travel by colleagues and artists to the US for education, research, fellowships, workshops, conferences and other training. They said it might also scuttle their hoped-for archaeological surveys and excavations in partnership with Iraq and Iran, and a joint publication project on Nishapur with Iran.
Trump's move is "particularly ironic, given that the earliest formulation of what we recognise today as the concept of habeas corpus was expressed in the Codex Hammurabi, an ancient Iraqi monument about justice, set up in public so that all citizens could access their rights," said Kim Benzel, the curator in charge of the museum's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art.
"It was one of the many contributions of Iraq to the world, and in this case, to democracy itself," she added. "Where and how did things go so wrong?"
A spokeswoman from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art said: "We have no idea yet how this might affect us, but we do have at least one important exhibition of art mostly from Iran that would be impacted by travel restrictions that would make it difficult to do research and work with artists and authors, as well as borrow works of art that would require couriers from collections in Iran."
Trump's order has already complicated a coming production of Hamlet by Waterwell, a nonprofit theatre in New York. One of the actors, Mohammad Aghebatian, an Iranian citizen who trained at Yale University, is now in Iran and uncertain whether he will be allowed to return to the United States.
"This is completely and utterly un-American," said Arian Moayed, an actor who is a founder and an artistic director of Waterwell. "He doesn't know what to do – we're trying to find him a lawyer."
Shari Rezai, a concert promoter in Los Angeles who specialises in contemporary Persian music and brings artists from Iran and elsewhere to the United States, said she had six shows planned through June, and cancelled all of them three days ago, when she heard about the impending ban. She worried that her seven-year-old business was now at risk.
"Tonight I have a concert in LA," she said, with an American-born Iranian artist, Fared Shafinury, whose band has some immigrant members. "I'm just so afraid that this is going to be my last concert."
For now, many artists from affected countries who are legal residents in the United States say they cannot leave the country for fear of not being able to return.
Shahpour Pouyan, an Iranian artist living in New York under a green card whose work is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said he would be unable to travel to Toronto for a group exhibit or to Paris for a solo exhibition in March.
"I am stuck here. I can't leave the country and as an artist it means I can't make shows and present my works internationally," he wrote in an email message. "This is such a mess."
The New York Times