Amazingly Original: Contemporary Iranian Art at Crossroad: Engelska 2014

This book exemplifies the nontranscendent, unpretentious, and liberated path of contemporary Iran s art production and indicates an inward freedom from conventions and academic aesthetic themes. The honesty and authenticity of most of Iran s contemporary productions, be they in the works of Shirin Aliabadi, Mohammad Ghazali, Sadegh Tirafkan, Parastou Forouhar, Taraneh Hemami, Mandana Moghaddam and others discussed in this book is, when compared to Iran s earlier art, phenomenal. For, rarely has so much of a period s art appeared so simple yet turned out to be so complex. Mohammad Ghazali s Where the Heads of the Renowned Rest and Shirin Aliabadi s Miss Hybrid, among many others discussed in the book, prove this point. Ghazali s urban images appear at first to be ordinary, quotidian photography, until after some scrutiny, one enters the horizon of his profound metaphysical subversions. Aliabadi, who may be viewed as playful and even superficial, represents one of those interstices of play where the paradox of desire and control, of simulation and dissimulation, have made transparent both the microcosm and macrocosm of Iran s culture. Her images are filled with remembrances of past psychologies that can be measured, albeit subtly, beneath the façade of the work s modern females.