The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

85 Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian Lightning for Neda Over a career spanning decades, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian has created an art imbued with the aesthetics of her Iranian culture. Inspired by its architecture and the traditions of Islamic geometry and pattern, and using media such as reverse-glass painting, mirror mosaic and relief sculpture, Farmanfarmaian has revived and adapted these forms to make original, compelling works. Clearly motivated to be an artist from her teens, she enrolled in Tehran University’s Fine Arts College in the early 1940s and then, at the age of 22, ventured to New York to study fashion illustration at Parsons School of Design. Following graduation, she pursued a career as a successful graphic and fashion designer and, during her 12 years in New York (1945–57), Farmanfarmaian became familiar with the city’s art scene — she met abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner, and a young Andy Warhol. In 1957, she returned to Iran to develop her artistic career. In Tehran, Farmanfarmaian also directed her prodigious energy towards collecting. Assembled throughout the 1960s and 1970s, her collection reflected both her unconventional interests and informed and consolidated her aesthetic concerns. To this end, she gathered a group of highly coloured images prevalent in Tehran’s coffee houses 1 and a significant group of tribal and antique reverse-glass paintings, as well as Turkoman tribal textiles and silver jewellery. 2 She also collected architectural fragments, such as doors, windows and wall panels. These latter pieces were salvaged from historic buildings (domestic as well as public) that were being demolished in her hometown of Qazvin, and in other cities in Iran, as part of the process of modernisation. Much of this was done to recover material culture that was rapidly disappearing, with the aim of gifting to Iranian state art collections. Immersing herself in this material and developing her own artistic language became interdependent activities for Farmanfarmaian, maturing into a unique practice. The characteristic mirror mosaic of Farmanfarmaian’s work is an Iranian decorative technique known as aineh-kari . As curator Rose Issa has explained: The technique dates back to the 16th century, when mirrors were imported from Venice and Bohemia to Iran and arrived broken. The new owners had to find imaginative ways of recycling these shards of glass, and would set the pieces in stucco to create decorative panels with attractive multiple reflections. As well as Sufi symbolism of reflecting the self, mirror has since been associated with purity, brightness, symmetry, veracity and fortune. 3 In Lightning for Neda 2009, Farmanfarmaian has constructed her most ambitious work to date. Commissioned for the Gallery’s Collection and premiering in APT6, its six panels of intricate mirror mosaic explore the geometric possibilities afforded by the hexagon. Essentially abstract, Lightning for Neda draws on the Islamic use of geometry to structure and develop complex architectural ornamentation. Arab mathematicians of the ninth century added considerably to Greek and Indian scholarship, and Muslim craftspeople have long relied on this knowledge to produce the myriad patterns embellishing the facades and walls of buildings. In this work, the six sides of the hexagon provide an underlying structure, and are expanded and elaborated on as a repeated motif. The mystical and symbolic connotations assigned to numbers in Islamic culture are based on the profound symmetry that the grammar of mathematics offers, a great inspiration for Islamic scholars. In this way the point of origin is the dot; it also signifies the primordial, the one, the permanent, the eternal. The line connecting two dots is understood as a symbol of the polarity of existence, the first move or direction, and therefore the intellect. From here, the plethora of geometric shapes expands to include the circle, the triangle (the isosceles and the equilateral each offering different possibilities), and so on. The hexagon represents the six directions of motion (up, down, forwards, backwards, right, left), and the six virtues: generosity, self-discipline, patience, determination, insight and compassion. In each of the six panels constituting Lightning for Neda , Farmanfarmaian uses over 4000 mirror shards to activate a myriad of patterns across a glittering and sublime surface. The title of the work pays homage to Neda Agha Soltan, a 27-year-old female Iranian student killed in the streets of Tehran during the pro- democracy protests following the presidential elections on 12 June 2009. Neda means ‘voice’ in Farsi and, in this work, the compelling voice of an octogenarian Iranian artist acknowledges the turmoil facing her country. Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian has herself experienced the trauma of exile, leaving Tehran in the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and returning in 2003 to rebuild her life there. Although all her works and collections were confiscated in 1979, her strength as an artist could not be curbed. Thus, in the splendour of Farmanfarmaian’s vision, the majestic spirit of affirmation also lives. Suhanya Raffel Endnotes 1 Coffee houses in Tehran are traditionally male-only establishments. Their walls are generally hung with stylised, highly coloured paintings of religious and national heroes. These works are identified as being made at the cusp of the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11). 2 The Turkoman are a formerly nomadic tribal people from the region encompassing Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, northern Iraq and north-eastern Iran. 3 Rose Issa, Mosaics of Mirrors: Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian , Nazar Research and Cultural Institute, Tehran, 2006, pp.14–15.