The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

54 removed and placed in proximity; Converted Heirloom 2007 is a single carpet cut into the floor plan of an apartment — the domestic as reduced, constrained by walls and not alive with social or aesthetic possibility. In Lili Lili Hosak (Lily Lily Little Pool) 1992, Vadjiollah Fard Moghadam tells the story of a chick falling in a pool and its parents trying to get help from the community of other animals to save it; the stylised geometrical forms of the animals, trees and pool are cited from carpet designs. The narrative of carpets functions in every direction, offering a model of a non-linear experience of time and place, and carpet designs literally link different geographies through natural motifs. In Noureddin Zarrinkelk’s Pood ( Persian Carpet ) 1998, a father takes the family’s herd north in search of water during a drought; on his return, he invents the carpet in order to bring the sea and the forest that he has seen back to his children in the desert. Nazanin Sarbandi’s Ghali (Carpet) 1980 similarly plays on carpet design that resembles an undulating landscape running to a great ocean of blue with island swirls, made real in a child’s imagination. The garden and the tree of life are important Persian carpet motifs, defining a locus of art and the sacred in the domestic realm; gardens figure in the Persian mystical literature of Hafez, Rumi and Omar Khayyám as places of spiritual refuge and transcendence. Caribbean novelist, poet and essayist Édouard Glissant, whose writings have been influential in the field of post- colonial criticism, contends that every work of art carries in it a totalité-monde (or world-totality), which links the particular place where the work is emitted to a world view from there. 9 Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, who has created a large-scale installation for APT6, Lightning for Neda 2009, also completed this year a smaller work entitled Shazde Garden – Kerman , in the same materials of reverse-glass painting: plaster and mirrors. Here, Farmanfarmaian represents the cypress, sacred in Iran, and links it to the tree of life. In the Islamic tradition, the tree of life is in heaven and harbours brightly coloured birds which sing melodiously, representing the souls of the faithful; the tree may also represent the human body and aspirations to the divine. 10 Farkhondeh Torabi’s Risheh dar Asseman (The Sprout) 2006, a pebble and sand animation, shows a young shoot surviving harsh conditions until one day it surges and blossoms into Maryam Bayani Iran b.1982 Dastane Sofal (The Pottery Tale) (stills) 2008 / Digital video, black and white and colour, stereo, 8:34 minutes, Iran / Images courtesy: The artist