National cigarettes, banned pop songs and memory oceans: Minneapolis Iranian artists show work about diaspora
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In the underground gallery of the Q.arma Building in northeast Minneapolis, there is a line of giant stubbed-out cigarettes, all of them glossy and hard ceramic.
Nearby are watercolor prints of Persian calligraphy featuring lyrics by female Iranian pop artists who worked in exile after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In a back room, artist Shirin Ghoraishi places a virtual reality headset on visitors, chaperoning them through an ocean horizon that leads to a subway car.
This is the show, “So Far, So Close,” featuring Ghoraishi, Ziba Rajabi and Katayoun Amjadi. The artists were all born in Iran.
“We all have been living outside of Iran for years,” says Rajabi, who also curated the show. “This is an exhibition that explores the complicated experience of displacement from the motherland through themes of space, distance and memory by three Iranian female artists.”
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The exhibition was funded by the Twin Cities Iranian Culture Collective and the Minnesota Humanities Center.
Rajabi’s works are the series of watercolor calligraphy. In her artist statement, Rajabi explains that in “the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Islamic regime banned pop music, and the only art and music allowed were war propaganda.”
The pop songs she references in her work come from Iranian artists whose work was smuggled into the country on tapes or VHS. For this show, she focuses on the music of Leila Forouhar, an Iranian woman who fled Iran in the 80s.
“Her experience of exile was similar,” Rajabi says.
Ghoraishi created a VR experience about reality, dreams and memory and where these areas overlap.
“The audience will see an ocean that is a representation of dreams and memories, which doesn't mean they are true or not true,” Ghoraishi says. “Sometimes memory tricks us. We remember something that didn't exist before.”
Ghoraishi ends the user experience by placing them in front of a full-length mirror in a dim room.
“This final moment is a necessary reminder that as an immigrant, we are shaped by what we remember of our past and what we have had to forget,” Ghoraishi says. “The mirror reflects not only the self but the constant negotiation of one’s identity.”
Amjadi created the nine giant ceramic cigarettes. The rest of her installation includes silkscreen prints of cigarette packs as well as two actual cigarette packs encased in a clear box. “Two ordinary cigarette packs picked up from newsstands in Tehran and Jerusalem,” Amjadi wrote in her artist statement.
The brands are Bahman, the national cigarette of Iran, and Alia, a cigarette brand from Palestine that is sold in Israel.
Amjadi says her art investigates “how objects carry memory, and the objects that we collect, especially as souvenirs that we bring from one place to another, are signifiers of memory, nostalgia and also identity are embedded in them.”
Bahman, Amjadi explains, is Farsi for “snow avalanche” and is also the word for February, the month of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
“Bahman is the month of revolution, a 1979 revolution in Iran that, in a sense, caused the Iranian diaspora,” Amjadi says. “So me and my friends right here would not be here if that event would not have taken place.”
Alia is the Arabic word for “exalted.” Amjadi says it also has the meaning of a return to the Holy Land for the Jewish people. (Aliyah means “ascent” in Hebrew and is used in Judaism to represent both the act of being called to read from the Hebrew Bible and the act of immigrating to Israel.)
“Which is a reverse diaspora but causes another diaspora, a Palestinian diaspora,” she says. “I’m interested in the desires and yearnings of one population for a homeland, for belonging to a place, and how it causes another group to be displaced, and the parities between these diasporas in a way.”
Gallery hours are 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. Saturdays through Tuesdays. Visitors can do the virtual reality experience Saturdays and Sundays from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. The exhibition will have a closing reception on Sept. 21.
