The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

143 Farhad Moshiri Hybrid confections The vast city of Tehran, with its rich cultural and visual art traditions and volatile recent history, inspired Farhad Moshiri’s three ‘candy store’ paintings in APT6. A vibrant modern city with a strong art scene, Tehran has been shaped by numerous turbulent events over the last 30 years — from the 1979 revolution, which saw the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty and the politicisation of Islam, to the war with Iraq in the 1980s, and the recent troubled elections of 12 June 2009, which reinstated conservative president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is a city characterised by a productive clash between tradition and modernity, and the desire to find a uniquely Iranian way of negotiating such discord. Accordingly, Moshiri has described Iran as ‘a gigantic art project’: ‘you feel like this whole country is an experiment, trying to do something different’. 1 Moshiri studied in the United States at the Californian Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in the 1980s, returning to Iran a decade later. His aesthetic language is formed by a pop sensibility, a keen eye for vernacular culture and a consciousness of Persian cultural heritage. American conceptual artist John Baldessari was Moshiri’s mentor at CalArts, while Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is also an influence. His interests are in ‘consumption and cultural hybridity’ and, ‘using the embedded cynicism in the material’, he often lets his subjects and materials speak for themselves. 2 A versatile and multifaceted artist, Moshiri’s practice has encompassed painting, photography, installation and the occasional curatorial project. His materials and motifs range from Farsi script, Persian poetry, Swarovski crystals and gilt furniture and weaponry, to post-revolution architecture and commercial household items. The architecture of Tehran forms the unlikely starting point for Mobile Talker 2007, Soldier 2007 and Magic White Horse with Gold Saddle 2008. Inspired by ‘the mall, the bazaar, the decorative and ornamental, and wedding culture in Iran’, 3 these paintings were initially prompted by the excess of the popular post-Islamic revolution style of architecture: To me the white buildings decorated with layers of baroque, Roman and Iranian carving look like cakes. The idea of people living in a huge wedding cake and their ostentatious lifestyle, especially the extravagant weddings, was the starting point for a cake series that took a tongue-in- cheek look at high society and the hybridisation of cultures. 4 All three paintings are associated with a group of works referred to as Moshiri’s ‘candy store’ works, after the kitsch, evocative name of the solo exhibition in which they appeared, and for their characteristically sculptural surfaces of acrylic ‘confectionery’ created with a cake- decorating tool. Subsequent exhibitions were titled ‘Sweet Dreams’ and ‘Threshold of Happiness’. Soldier and Mobile Talker use two layers of imagery. Backgrounds are formed by a flat hyperrealist painting of an ornamental, elaborately layered wedding cake and modern drapery, adorned with red roses. Although they refer to items which are significant in Persian culture — the red rose of Rumi’s thirteenth-century poetry and fabric — they are emptied of obvious importance to become satiric signifiers of kitsch wedding culture and nouveau riche aspirations. Over this imagery, Moshiri draws the outline of a figure formed using his acrylic ‘icing’. In Mobile Talker , a veiled young woman is outlined in bright hues, her mobile phone pointing to the tension between tradition and modernity in Iran. Soldier shows a moustachioed soldier in a style suggesting Persian miniature painting. The third work, Magic White Horse with Gold Saddle , plays on the idea of the minimal or op art canvas; this idea is subverted both by the title (which refers to a classic Persian tale), and by the textural detail of the work’s surface, which is covered with sculptural, jewel-like confectionery. The white horse of legend is almost buried by the abundance of ornamental food and scintillating colour. Farhad Moshiri’s works are beautiful, hybrid objects, which undermine attempts to stereotype either the exoticism of the East or the consumerism of the West. Complex and multilayered, they combine local and global references to take a light-hearted, yet penetrating, look at the paradoxes of contemporary life in Iran. Abigail Fitzgibbons Endnotes 1 Farhad Moshiri, in Deborah Campbell, ‘Unveiled: Can Iranian artists depict the real Iran?’, Modern Painters , no.56, October 2005, p.58. 2 Farhad Moshiri and Antonia Carver (interview), ‘Every society has its taboos’, Arts Newspaper , vol.17, no.191, May 2008, p.49. 3 Moshiri and Carver, p.49. 4 Farhad Moshiri, in Jyoti Kalsi, Gulf News , 10 May 2007, <http://archive.gulfnews . com/articles/07/05/10/10124262.html>, viewed 10 September 2009.