In Conversation with Azar Emdadi

Born in Iran Western Azerbaijan, Azar Emdad now lives and works in South Yorkshire, UK. She obtained her BA in Multi-disciplinary Design specializing in Photography at Staffordshire Polytechnic in 1989. In 1990, she was commissioned to document the war with Armenia in Soviet Azerbaijan. This extremely sensitive and important work was published internationally in many journals. In 1996, Emdad completed a postgraduate course in Gender Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, where she majored in Women in Film.

Azar's engagement is with art-based concerns, with particular emphasis on social, political, and gender issues. Her works have been widely exhibited both in the UK and internationally, including a solo show at the World Cultural House Berlin, the Silk Road Gallery in Tehran, Iran, the Homeland Society in Baku, North Azerbaijan along with UK-based group shows, including Stoke-on-Trent Museum, St. David Hall Cardiff, the Rose Issa Project, and many more. Azar’s work has been collected by many private collectors, including the Salsali Private Museum Dubai.

Dinner in Tehran is a series of 12 images, inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper. These images explore the various paradoxes that exist within Iranian society today; the issue of public and private personas, the fractured identities, censorship, religion and strict social codes, which result in many Iranians living a double life.

All 12 images show the same woman center stage, putting the role of a woman at the heart of Iranian society. In each image, the table is properly set and the food is plentiful as it plays a fundamental role in Iranian society, joining people together on a daily basis. These images are of young actors, professional models, friends and family members. Using the perspective of an Iranian woman living in the West, Azar Emdadi reexamines and questions representations of Islamic identity.

Q: You were born in Iran but you are living in the UK. How much and in which ways do these opposite cultures mark your works?
A: Being an Iranian living in the West, I feel myself curiously ‘bound’ equally to both. It is as if being caught between the divergent cultures of both East and West have somehow re-‘molded’ my perspectives, allowing me to appreciate and understand them in new ways. Because of this, I find myself politically, psychologically and emotionally torn. So much so, that even time spent in either sphere is physically disorienting. This continual conflict within my life has shaped – and continues to – my character and personality. Being centered from within, my principles and values clearly reflect these influential conflictions externally through my work.

Q: What does it mean for you to take a tradition and use it – is this just an endorsement or are you doing something else with it – something unexpected?
A: Contemporary art today explores ideas, concepts, questions, and practices that examine the past. This means using tradition as a vehicle, a visual platform to describe the present, and imagine the future. Often this helps to understand the underlying questions one is trying to answer and the ideology, or label it is subject to. Contemporary art can often seem overwhelming, difficult, or so simple that the viewer might wonder if they are missing something. Sometimes to understand where the behavior comes from, it is necessary to study the values and beliefs of the traditions that underpin them. It is an intensely personal undertaking for any artist to look into their own traditions to seek understanding. So, for myself, I see what is happening today in my homeland, and I ask why certain traditions are disappearing and how these experiences have an impact on how Iranians see themselves on the world stage. It is hard to realise that, because of this, many younger Iranians are losing interest in their own culture and heritage.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Thinking About Women's Life Story-Telling in Iran

Writing in the Journal of Women’s History, Professor Farzaneh Milani observes that autobiographical writing is a very new phenomenon in the very old land of Iran. Only since the mid-twentieth century have Iranian Muslim women begun to publish their personal stories in any form.

Early in her pursuit of Iranian women’s life stories, Milani speculated that “a barrier as forbidding as a veil covers private selves and inhibits self-revelation. The cultural context . . . values and strongly institutionalizes a sharp separation between the inner and the outer, the private and the public. The culture of Hijab . . . is not conducive to the development of personal narratives and their generic public uncovering and display of the self. I surmised that in a veiled society, women are not the only ones veiled. The concrete, the specific, and the personal are also veiled. Communication is veiled. Words are veiled. Public expressions of intimate relationships are veiled. In such a society, walls abound, dissimulation conceals individualistic tendencies; houses become compartmentalized into inner and outer areas; abstractions supplant concreteness; elusiveness substitutes precision; art becomes impersonal. There is no tradition of confession, either in its Catholic sense or in that practice’s secular modern version, psychotherapy. A culture that idealizes women’s public anonymity, I concluded, considers life narratives as exhibitionism, as an act of immodest self-referentiality, as self-absorption and an ultimate act of unveiling.”

But then, living in the United States, she discovered that “invisible fences” also existed in America; these were less physical than cultural. The process of self-revelation only goes so far; zones of privacy and secrecy remain, but the boundaries keep shifting. Have these femces since fallen by the wayside in the Age of Facebook’s potentially extravagant culture of self-disclosure? Or are there still shifting boundaries? What causes a cultural shift that allows any individual to tell her story?

Even as American women, from movie stars to ordinary women, indulge in a “tell-all” or at least “tell-almost-all” culture, and sign up for courses in life-writing, women writers in Iran took to embedding their autobiographical work in poetry, in novels, and then insisting that these works were “not really” about themselves. In the late twentieth century, some began to publish more documented “hostage narratives” and “prison narratives.”

Where does one draw the line between fiction and “truth”? And why does it matter?

Clio, the Muse of History who talks back, thinks that the “facts” of personal stories do matter, but that they require considerable space to “get right.” They can’t be presented adequately in the space of the “soundbite,” the “tweet,” or the Facebook profile, or even in an on-line museum exhibit. This is why autobiographical memoirs and books still count.

What do Clio’s readers think?

Further reading: Farzaneh Milani, Women’s Autobiogtaphies in Contemporary Iran (1990); Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (1992); and Words, not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement (2011). This blog is based on Farzaneh Milani’s article, “Iranian Women’s Life Narratives,” Journal of Women’s History , 25:2 (Summer 2013), 130-152.

Haleh Anvari: Beyond the Cliche

Image from Chador-nama

The black chador has irrevocably become what Iranian photographer and writer, Haleh Anvari describes as Iran's visual shorthand, its unregistered trademark. Haleh's quest to deconstruct and liberate the chador from reductionist stereotype occurred as a byproduct of her relationship with the foreign press reporting in Iran and that of the chador itself. Her determination to re-present the chador has resulted in the photographic projects, Chador-nama, Chador-dadar, and Peace Chador, and the performance-work, Power of Cliche.

Having studied politics and philosophy at university in UK, Haleh returned to Iran and worked as a local translator/producer for foreign journalists covering Iran. “I was a product of two cultures and it subsequently gave me license to see both sides of the coin, so to speak,” she remarks. One thing that she consistently observed while working with foreign press was that the black chador had become synonymous with Iran; regardless of the issue being reported on hand, it was the sole image being transmitted of Iran. "I was unhappy that they would see my country exclusively through that lens and I was always trying to make them see Iran differently," she says. 

"After six years of working as a 'sidekick', I started writing for myself but the Iranian authorities were not happy and subsequently, banned and threatened me," she reminsces. "I got stuck in the house with lot of bitter and depressive thoughts...and it was around that time that I received a digital camera as a birthday present."

A definitive encounter with the chador also deeply impacted her. "I was driving down a street when I saw a woman in a chador rush to me, there was so much swagger in her walk - and it made me angry! It made me think at that point how the Iranian system had somehow made me feel separate from them the way I was dressed," she says. Coming from a chadori family, Anvari mentions that as a child, she perceived it an aspirational garment, describing it as "cuddly and a safe harbor." So where did the alienation and disconnection to the chador spring up from? "Wearing the chador was no more about a personal choice of modesty; it had become a political statement instead," she says.

Image from Chador-nama

Image from Chador-dadar

Her engagement with the chador then occurred on a more emotional level, including and highlighting all that had been omitted from the chador's current avatar: color, light and movement in Chador-nama, significantly situating the chadors in the Iranian country-side. The chador then saw itself on a global journey in Chador-dadar. “If the chador had become an Irani icon, I thought of taking it to other global icons and photographing it in their midst,” she says; the project became a live installation and her journey took her to Jaipur and Agra in India, Istanbul, and Dubai [Dubai's landmark Burj al Khalifa in the background above]. “I learnt so much about the environment that I was photographing in," she mentions, elaborating that while onlookers engaged with the chador at Amber fort, Jaipur, for instance, she had had to model the chador herself in Turkey, where the chosen model declined to do due to her secular beliefs.