The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

55 a full-grown tree, a refuge for birds and insects. The celebrated Sufi text Mantiq at-Tayr (The Conference of the Birds) , by mystic and poet Farid Ud-Din Attar, is adapted in animated form by Mohammad ali Soleymanzadeh in Kalaghi keh Mikhast Ghavita rin Bashed (A Crow Who Wanted to be the Strongest) 1998, and by Ahadi in Safar-e Bidari (The Path of Love) 2004. The story recounts a pilgrimage of the birds in search of the Simorgh, the mystical sun bird who lives on the cosmic mountain Qaf. Only 30 birds survive to attain the realisation that the nature of the Simorgh, what they have been seeking, is within them as their own profound essence. Many of the animation works in The Cypress and the Crow: 50 Years of Iranian Animation feature animal figures — birds, mice, the fox, the goat and many more — which have literary and symbolic associations, and are also alter egos for humanity. The crow exhibits the baser human traits — selfishness, suspicion, greed, opportunism — but is also crafty and intelligent; there are many stories about crows. Kurdish–Iranian painter Mashaallah Mohammadi began making animations five years ago on the basis of scanned drawings. In his short work Other Being 2006, a man is shot and falls into a pool, where his lifeblood transforms into red fishes. Laleh Khorramian’s I Without End 2008 concentrates life and love into two figures formed in orange peel and placed in a miniature domestic interior. They sit together, curl around each other, and convey intense fragility and emotion. Many contemporary animation works by artists function in this way, as visual poems in which crystallising images vehicle metaphoric associations. In an international context, animators are often not recognised as artists, nor their works as art objects; animation frequently falls between the gaps of art and film. When exhibited in an art context, the extraordinarily diverse aesthetic qualities of these works, which combine all of the plastic arts, film, video and computer-based media, disrupt and bring into dialogue otherwise hermetic spheres of production and exhibition. Art historian and cultural critic Susan Buck-Morss points to the unique vitality of art practices for which there is no formal institutional context of exhibition. She refers to the ‘gesture of disappearance’, where ‘aesthetic experience manages Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian Iran b.1924 Shazde Garden – Kerman (detail) 2009 Mirror mosaic, reverse glass painting and plaster on wood / 180 x 110cm / Courtesy: The artist and The Third Line, Dubai