Bahman Jalali, Images of Imagination, 2002, C-print 70 × 70 cm

Viewing the works of contemporary artists from Tehran on the last two floors and the terrace of an abandoned office building in the centre of Athens one feels suddenly exposed to two different urban worlds: the city of Athens on view, the art of Tehran on show. The exhibition Lion under the Rainbow: Contemporary art from Tehran, which forms part of the parallel plan of the Art Athina 2008 art fair, condenses in a critical manner the diversity of the Iranian art scene as it has developed in the present, through the works of 19 artists, living and working in the city of Tehran.

Artist Alexandros Georgiou initiated a ‘personal’ journey to Tehran in 2005, in order to question the adherence to proscribed notions of the West regarding the Iranian Islamic republic and its repressive political regime. His journey formed part of a series of ‘spiritual’ voyages that Georgiou has set to perform in the East.

Further back in time, in the 19th century, British and French Orientalists had set out to discover the mystique of the cultures of the East. And in modernity, artistic authority was grounded in the notion of the artist’s unique experience. Baudelaire set out to praise imagination against truth to nature and Gauguin thought that imagination breathes by exposing the body to new experiences. Within this framework, Georgiou’s travelogue adventure appears like a shamanistic act with the intention of discovering one’s identity in relation to the world and its cultures. He seems to be ‘mapping’ the regions of the body and the self in a similar mode to artists such as Rikrit Tiravanija, who looks at modes of communication through the voyage and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster who explores urban life in the cities around the world in an autobiographical manner.

In an attempt to counteract those forces which work to present a pre-fixed image of the Iranian art scene, Georgiou delved deep into the mechanisms adopted by young contemporary artists who tend to react against the dominant trend of political art or against any tendency to promote features of tradition in a predetermined way.

Like ancient Persia, Iran has had a long, creative and glorious history. The artists who participated in Lion under the Rainbow are accustomed to the ideological content of representations imposed by their country’s history and heritage yet they appear to be exploring the staggering diversity of creative voices as a mode of combative resistance and a passport to greater mobility. Issues of identity, of gender, of the relationship between the sexes, of the prescribed image of the west and the social and political condition of their country, together with the fantastic world of Persian poetry, tradition and the world of fantasy, seem to mark the reality and the personal experience of the artists in the exhibition.

In the exhibition, photography as a medium seems to represent the characteristic gaze in contemporary Tehran, ascribed with various significations. The gaze of Shokoufeh Alidousti is introverted, with dark, mysterious portraits of the self. Similarly, Rana Javadi imposes a quality to her persona by posing herself next to her poetic writings.

The portraits of Bahman Jalali also give a striking impression to posing, since they appear loaded with emblems of national identity and symbols of certain memorabilia related to the 1979 revolution. And memory in the form of document appears also in the photos of Katayoun Karami, alluding to the past, in the format of a series of stamps. Powerful images bring to mind the signification of the arrested gesture, as described by Lacan. In static images, posing has a ‘strategic value’ because pose ‘mimics the immobility induced by the gaze, reflecting its power back on itself’, to use the words of art historian Craig Owens.

Mehran Mohajer comments superbly on the power of photographic memory by constructing a Camera Rosea, a box camera functioning as a repository of memories of historical and personal detritus.

In Lion under the Rainbow, sensory data that lead to the arrest of the gaze and appear as its mirror image are present in the video installation of Majid Ma’soumi Rad who performs the symbolic murder of memory in Utopio-graphy, by shooting at photographs of political figures but also of loved ones.

One attests to an interesting juxtaposition between realism and ephemeral subjectivism in the signified passages of the exhibition. Lyrical narratives about the personal experiences of individuals within a wider collective memory are conveyed through the ephemeral drawings of Neda Razavipour and her video film about the discourse on the veil, putting into question the specter of the body that houses identity. Similar romantic and nostalgic passages are seen in the video of Rozita Sharaf Jahan who presents the inner personal state of depression, and in the linocut prints of Reza Bangiz that allude to fairy tales. Lyricism and nostalgia is evident in the ironic and humorous paintings of Ali Chitsaz who presents, in the form of comics, the great history of Persia, as well as in the poetically orchestrated sound piece of Farshad Fozoumi, for the sake of musical improvisation.

Some works adopt the polemic of criticism by commenting on the status of the state and the freedom of speech and action in relation to the values of the West. Mahmoud Bakhshi analyses the freedom of looking in Islam, set in a western disco environment. Similarly, Mamali Shafahi and Behrouz Rae as well as Vahid Sharifian comment on the obtrusive symbols of the media and the cultural figures of western societies and Jinoos Taghizadeh goes to the edge by extreme public manifestations of torture and suffering, by drinking poison as a reaction to set values and ways of living.

The exhibition Lion under the Rainbow — the title is borrowed from a work by Vahid Sharifian — appears to be a curatorial extension of Georgiou’s personal artistic activity. It emerges as the subjective testimony of his inner thoughts about discovery and displacement. A similar gesture of examining artistic activity through a ‘border’ culture perspective was the exhibition Sampling, curated by Locus Athens, which presented ‘samples’ from the contemporary Turkish art scene. Such projects stimulate our critical perception about the cultural places we inhabit and the borders we live in. Yet such a subjective impression of a particular culture and its signs runs the risk of turning into a comment in relation to the fixity of the place or it might appear as a nostalgic view of one’s first encounter, during the voyage, with the unknown.

Yet, Lion under the Rainbow definitely expresses the passion of Alexandros Georgiou for the city of Tehran. Needless to say, the lion is the heroic symbol of Persian history and the rainbow is the road forward to experimentation.