Search results for ""author fereshteh daftari""

Contemporary art is now inclusive of geographies that until recently had escaped the attention of Western art centres such as Paris and New York. A vast area commonly referred to as the Middle East constitutes part of an "emerging geography" whose art has finally become globally visible. The region's artists, however, are neither fixed inside its territories nor permanently diasporic. Often on the move, they define themselves and the world according to their personal visions. Safar: Voyage (voyage being the translation of its equivalent in Persian) is a visual essay, bringing together a selection of these artists and displaying fragments of their itineraries. AUTHOR: Fereshteh Daftari received her PhD in art history from Columbia University. She worked in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1988 to 2009, and curated a number of exhibitions, including "Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking."Jill Baird is the curator of education and public programs at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her research and writing interests include arts and cultural education that challenge museums to respond to diverse communities. ILLUSTRATIONS: 50 colour images

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Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet tells the story of the evolution of Iranian contemporary art by examining the work of 30 artists.This is art where the ills of internal politics remain astutely masked below a layer of ornamentation, poetry, or humor. What unites the disparate works into a coherent theme is the artists coping mechanisms, which consist of subversive critique, quiet rebellion, humor, mysticism, and poetryhence the publications title. The subtitle Contemporary Persians is also a reference to a strategy of survival, this one used by Iranians in the United States during the early 2000s; at a time when Iranians were identified with hostage takers and terrorists, they adopted the identity Persians, which remained free of such associations.This title collects the work of a number of artists who are already well-known in the United States, including among others Afruz Amighi, whose work is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Monir Farmanfarmaian, who received a major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 2015."

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The modern and contemporary art of Iran has often been understood, and positioned by commercial institutions, as decorative or ethnic – hence the focus on calligraphy and veiled women. At a scholarly level it has been characterized as a comment on the socio-political context of the country. Viewing Iranian art as neither a commodity, nor an illustration of theory, Fereshteh Daftari approaches the modern art of Iran as a democratic space where pluralism – a range of different styles and ideas – can thrive. This art historical exploration offers new insights into Iranian art, from the late nineteenth century Qajar period, via the Saqqakhaneh movement of the 1960s and into the contemporary world. In the process the author comments on the concept of modernism in a non-Western environment and the shifting meanings of abstraction. She takes both a specific and a panoramic view of Iranian art to expose new themes such as the subversive appropriation of traditional art, whilst also tackling more perennial issues such as gender. With experience as an international curator, Daftari reviews the representations of Iranian artists outside the country and discusses the varied angles from which she has introduced the art to a Western audience. She explains how in the process she has steered clear of contentious rubrics, valorized contemporary media, and probed the complex relation between the individual and the political.

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