New Year...New Semester

After taking a month off to finish final exams and celebrate the holidays--I'm back at IU and back to blogging! One of my favorite classes this semester is a directed readings course with Dr. Choksy who is an expert of Ancient Iranian Studies and Zoroastrianism. The topic for the course is Pre-Islamic archaeology and the theme of sacral kingship. Here is an article that he wrote for the The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies about this exact topic: Sacral Kingship in Sasanian Iran. This week I'm reading a detailed archaeological survey of Iran written as a travel guide by Sylvia Matheson in the early 1970s. She travels to each province of the country highlighting the most impressive sites (of the supposed 250,000) and adds several notes about hotels, chaikhanas (tea houses), and transportation. I feel like I'm touring the country with her...but at the same time, I'm reminded how difficult it would be to recreate her path of travel nowadays. Paths of travel, especially disrupted ones, is a theme of another course I'm taking on Nomadic Pastoralism of Eurasia with Dr. Shahrani. Many of the migration patterns of Euraisan nomads as well as Iranian nomads were disrupted with forced settlement for taxation, and pressures to urbanize and modernize. Ideology, perhaps more than anything else, has brought nomadism to an end. Yet connections are forged as scholarship, literature, and art--whether ancient or contemporary, can speak to us across these limitations of space and time. The intense documentation of Matheson's work was perhaps intentional--foreshadowing the rise of the Islamic revolution and the future of Iran's relationship to the West. As I work towards the end of my first year as a PhD student, I appreciate documentation more and more, and nothing seems as esoteric. Happy new year to my blog readers and wishing you many moments worth capturing!

S. Matheson in Iran

Imagining Iran: The Art of Samira Abbassy

The artist Samira Abbassy barely had a chance to know Iran, the country where she was born in 1965; she emigrated to London at the age of 2. As a Middle Eastern woman living first in Britain and then in the United States — she moved to New York in 1998 — Ms. Abbassy has described often feeling alone, isolated and displaced; she recalled little of her native country. Her paintings try to bridge this divide, depicting an imaginary space, a place of inclusion, in which she explores ideas of identity and her somewhat ambivalent relationship to Iranian culture. Ms. Abbassy is one of an Arab-Iranian minority of Arabic speakers in Iran, where the dominant language is Persian.
Inspired by Persian & Indian miniature painting tradition, as well as outsider art. Visually, Abbassys work reflects her cross-cultural heritage in a number of ways. She draws on the visual traditions of both Middle Eastern and Western art in a manner that is neither superficial nor eclectic, but rooted firmly in her belonging to both cultures. The recurring themes in her work aim toward a shared mythology and iconography that underlies both societies. She excavates through layers of often-contradictory cultural identity towards an understanding of her own background. Here's the link to her personal website:
http://www.samiraabbassy.com/index.html

Tribute to Annemarie Schimmel

When I first discovered the works of Dr. Annemarie Schimmel (1922-2003), I was amazed by her prolific list of publications and lectures on Islamic India and Persian mysticism. It was obvious that after reading only a little of her writings that Schimmel had a special love for her research and tirelessly worked to highlight the rich achievements of the Islamic world in Western academia.
Schimmel's biography reads one of a prodigy:
Born on April 7, 1922, in Erfurt, Germany,  she finished high school at 15 and earned a doctorate in Arabic and Islamic studies at 19. She had a nearly photographic memory. For years she was a consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she was legendary for her ability to identify scraps of ancient text.  After earning her second doctorate, in comparative religion, Ms. Schimmel began teaching Persian and Arabic poetry at the University of Marburg in Germany. For several years she taught theology at the University of Ankara in Turkey, the first woman and the first non-Muslim to do so. In 1967 she inaugurated the Indo-Muslim studies program at Harvard, and remained on the faculty for the next quarter-century. She was proficient in Latin, Greek, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, and Pashto. She was also a much sought-after lecturer, and her style of delivery was famous: she would clasp her purse with both hands, shut her eyes, and speak for exactly the amount of time allotted to her.
She was much loved in Pakistan and even a boulevard was named after her in Lahore:

One of Schimmel last projects was a book titled: The Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art and Culture (2006).  It's a highly readable survey of the Mughal Empire and includes fascinating information about women at the court and the imperial household. In the coming years, I hope to travel to Lucknow, India to study Mughal Persian through the American Institute of Indian Studies. With Schimmel on my desk, I don't need to look far for inspiration :)

Tribute to Shirin Neshat

Neshat left Iran to study art in Los Angeles at about the time that the Iranian Revolution occurred. 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." 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.

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). She currently lives in New York City.

Slideshow 

Video from December 2010, Art in Exile