A review on the first DIWAN-Culture-Conference

the conference program Dec. 16th-17th 2011 Programmheft Konferenz 16./17.12.2011 (PDF)

The opening of our conference was held by Angela Spizig, mayoress of the City of Cologne, who is a follower and supporter of the DIWAN project ever since its foundation. During her greeting words, she told us about her memories about Iran and the first Iranians she met in Cologne – personal experiences during the seventies influencing her own biography in terms of the protest movement. Thomas Krüger, President of the Federal Center for Political Education, who’s funding made this conference possible in the first place, pointed out the general efforts of his foundation to show all different facets of Iran during his opening address. The main goal is to left behind the tabloid image of a “Rogue State”. In doing so, the Center has provided different publications, online-dossiers and cinema series on Iran, in order to make visible all the interesting developments within the society. Finally, Uwe-Eric Laufenberg, director of the Cologne Opera that was hosting the conference, was telling us about his dream to stage an opera in Iran once. Especially the movie “Nader and Simin” influenced his image of Iran and caused him to be even more interested in the country, to have more questions to which he was looking forward to finding answers to during the conference.

Panel I: Latest Conflicts and Potentials
Irony and Paradox:The game on limits.

The DIWAN’s Leitmotiv is the encounter of cultures. So it was actually no surprise that Ali Abdollahi, a literary translator and expert of German-Iranian cultural exchanges who flew in to Cologne from Teheran, was giving the first keynote speech. He analyzed the influence of translated literary works on the contemporary Iranian literature: the emergence of a factual and socio-political lyric over the past 40 years; the integration of a lower-level colloquial language into the latest lyric; as well as the emergence of a female subject that can be clearly identified (female prose and poetry is drawing a wide attention in Iran recently). Abdollahi also pointed out the excited reception of translated philosophical works in Iran, such as the ones from Nietzsche and Hedegger – a phenomenon he could not observe in Turkey or India.

Isabel Herda, curator at the Museum of New Arts at Freiburg and initiator of the ‘Iran.com’ exhibition in 2006, put her focus on the new generation of artists that has mostly been established among the rather small and hidden galleries in Teheran: “a form of art that hurts and that is asking for the society’s condition, that is existing in the space between legality and illegality and that is addressing limits given by the state vs. the global connection. “ Gerda explains that these artists were allowed to exhibit in the Teheran Museum of Contemporary Arts in 2005 for the first time, gaining a lot of attention from abroad ever since. She identifies the paradox between a society that cannot elude itself from modernity and that has to adapt to an Islamic system at the same time, to be the main ground and topic young artists are doing their work on. Another important element of their work besides this ambiguity is said to be the “Western” view on Iran.

Roberto Ciulli, director of the ‘Theater an der Ruhr’ in Mühlheim, talked about his experiences with censorship in Iran. Under very difficult conditions, he managed to establish a cultural agreement between his theater and the Iranian Ministry for Cultural Affairs and to stage about 30 plays from Iran here in Germany. He travelled to Iran in 1994 for the first time, describing the plays he saw there as: “surprisingly professional and on the same level as European festivals. There is no other country in the Middle East and Central Asia that is capable of doing that.”

Nasser Zeraati, a literature critic, writer and documentary filmmaker from Gothenburg, described how he was literally burying his diaries and his collection of novels in his father’s house right after the Islamic Revolution. Being afraid of the revolutionary militia, most other writers burnt down their libraries, while Zeraati was burying his books in order to protect them. Twenty years later he dug them out again and documented that moment with his camera. And today – a time of serious censorship and limitations again – the literary language has become more explicit. Surprisingly lots of things are spoken out and get documented thanks to the internet and mobile phone cameras. The eighties were mainly characterized by war, repression and pseudonyms – even the access to paper was limited. Nowadays, critical books are simply published outside of Iran or would find their way into Iran as a pdf.-file. In summary, the underground literature is experiencing a great boom at the moment.

Ali Abdollahi added another comment here, explaining that book publishing is currently decreasing in Iran. This is mainly caused by the general economic situation but also due to the fact that a very high level and quantity of single book titles had been reached recently. There are more than 5000 publishers in Iran, a figure absolutely unthinkable a few years ago. He underlined the fact that censorship is implemented much less when it comes to translated works because the plot is taking place abroad. Writers have much more room and freedoms in case of translating pieces from Kafka, classic poetry and novels – nearly nothing is criticized there. Alireza Darvish, a painter and animation illustrator living in Cologne, showed some absurd looking censorship games such as a painting by Paul Gauguin that he had discovered during his studies of arts at Teheran university. Back in that time, he was wondering about all the female creatures wearing black clothing until he realized that this was a result of the censor’s work. His own drawings had to be shown in a different way from time to time as well: one figure for example was changed from a horizontal to a vertical orientation in order to show its reaching out for god. Darvish let us know that he had left the country in a difficult moment when Iran hardly had much contact with the outside world. Same as all the other artists living in exile he had to find a new language for expressing himself and was actually reborn. In the meantime, he is communicating easily even outside of Germany and does not feel like being in exile anymore. This experience was also underlined in the works of Roberto Ciulli that were partly even better received in Tehran than in the city of Remscheid. At the moment however, caused by the big gap between society and the political regime in Iran, he is distancing himself from the country. Isabel Herda also pointed out the situation of visual artists that is very difficult in general. An exhibition such as the “Iran.com” that took place five years ago would not be possible today. You need to be much more cautious about artists exhibiting abroad preventing them from facing repressions after travelling back to Iran.

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Get-Together and Cinema in the Forum for Fotography

Two days prior to the end of the Iran exhibition of Paolo Woods, the Diwan got invited to the Cologne Forum for Fotography again and had the chance to welcome its conference participants for a little get-together, having personal talks and getting to know each other a little better. The same evening, Iranian filmmaker and lyricist Geranaz Mousavi arrived at the conference as well – coming from Melbourne, she certainly had the longest journey from all the guests. Mousavi presented her latest film-debut “My Tehran for Sale” in Cologne for the first time. Dealing with urban youth culture and the difficult living conditions from actors and artists in Iran, the movie was a perfect complement to the topics discussed at the conference.

“My Tehran for Sale” provides a deep insight into the realities of life of young Iranians adapting to public forces caused by the regime and living their desire for freedom in private. An ambiguity of life giving room to honesty and passion only behind closed doors. A young actress for example has to adapt and obey to her authoritarian father, the public dress code, the prohibition of Western music and other bondages she is directly affected by when the authorities strictly forbid her to be a theater actress. In this moment, her personal path of life leads into a dead end, making the secret and excessive parties of Teheran’s youth more and more dangerous for her. The work that was begun by Bahman Ghobadi’s “No One Knows About Persian Cats” is further developed by Mousavi in “My Tehran for Sale” – she shows a mainly young and liberally-oriented community clashing against a reactionary system in daily life. The moment Marzieh gets to know and falls in love with an Australian-Iranian guy who offers her to leave the country and to live a life in freedom, the inner conflicts of her break out. In the discussion with the director after the movie, the audience was informed about the original setting and way of telling the story in the movie. Though it was shot in Iran in 2008 with an official production permission – as a doctoral thesis project of Geranaz Mousavi – she was not allowed to show the movie in Iran at the same time. However, through the black market, the movie became famous and Mousavi received quite a strong echo to it from her home country. She underlined her main intention as a film maker that she had with her debut project: she finally wanted to cover a story about Iran’s urban middle-class ‘underground-culture’ in contrast to the mainstream cinema that had been dealing with the life on the countryside for many years. She tried to find some kind of a film language that is able to illustrate unexpressed words and destroyed ideals. During her studies of movie science she dealt with the influence that lyrics have on the cinema. Mousavi further explains, that the story-telling in “My Teheran for Sale” is ‘multi-centrist, feminine and peripheral’ at the same time – there are a lot of single and individually separated but in a certain way still connected plots in the movie as well as plenty of leaps in time.

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Panel II – Generation Gaps
“Ali Kutschulu” (little Ali) has grown up

A view back on the DIWAN’s culture-conference on December 17th, 2011

For the opening of the second panel, covering the topic of “Generation Gaps”, several video clips from Teheran’s underground music scene were shown. The first clip by the rock band called Nahan showed the career of a famous Iranian TV series hero for children who had been grown up. Little Ali was the main character of a TV series that was aired during the 80’s. The main story was about the life of a little boy whose father was in combat at the frontline of the Iran-Iraq War. The mission of Iranian state television would have been fulfilled if today there would be plenty of grown up Alis that are loyal to the system. The songtext of Nahan though tells us about Ali as an adult who is disillusioned, depressive and who has no job. The second video clip is sung by the female Iranian Hip-Hop artist “Salome” who is performing in the underground but, with the help of the internet, has also gained international popularity. Her song “Ankabut” (the spider) is about her own lack of orientation. She is not aware of herself anymore – she does not know who or what she is. She is rebellious and obedient at the same time. Every morning she commits herself to her own personal ideals, but daily life does not care about her self-enacted integrity. Salome sings about the attitude to life of a whole generation.

Opening the second panel, Saeed Paivandi, a sociologist teaching at the University of Nancy in France, lectured on an “Iranianized World and a Globalized Iran”. Iran’s younger population has neither internalized the Islamic revolution nor the war against Iraq – 70% of the population is below the age of 30. Paivandi identifies three major developments mainly characterizing the young population: firstly they have become ‘global’, their identity is no longer defined by strict boundaries and their desire for human rights has a universal character; secondly they are much more affected by individualistic and autonomous streams in comparison to the older generations; thirdly there is a feminist movement within a strictly patriarchal society. Young women are increasingly defining themselves as active citizens of society rather than as just being wives or daughters. Generation gaps are of course part of any society, but this conflict in Iran is very distinct, caused by the greater paradox between the inside versus the outside, life in public in contrast to private life, the state ideology versus civil initiatives. Filmmaker and lyricist, Geranaz Mousavi, born in Iran in 1974 and currently studying in Australia, perpetuates Paivandi’s observations. She describes the development of some kind of a patchwork or rather college-identity among the young population that cannot be put into any representational matrix. On the one hand Mousavi sees the older generation of filmmakers whose movies took place in rather isolated, rural and exotic provinces of Iran, showing its tribal character. On the other hand the younger filmmakers are more and more focusing their work on a young, urban middle class in Iran and its different subcultures and milieus. The omniscient narrator takes a back seat, the linear narrative style is burst and a “rainbow identity” of broken heroes as well as a story without any moral conclusions is developed. It is remarkable that an unprecedented generation of filmmakers such as Mithra Farahani, Sepideh Parsi and Mania Akbari are emerging. This kind of cinema can almost only be received through the black-market or youtube. However, specially for a Western viewer, these movies are an important completion of “official” productions that find their way to access international festivals and the world market.

From Hossein-Partys to Facebook-Beauties

The discussion afterwards broadened the view on the topic. Contributing a Western viewpoint, photographer Ulla Kimmig, who has been visiting Iran eight times, talked about her encounters with the youth in Iran. Also participating in this discussion was dancer and actor Shahrokh Moshkin Ghalaham, a member of the Comédie Francaise, who emigrated to Paris as a teenager. All panel participants repeatedly referred to the subculture of the youth in Iran:

Take for example the dancer Shahrokh Moshkin Ghalaham who is well known in the “underground” even though not a single source of state media is showing any of his performances. The culture of the Iranian Diaspora is supposed to have a massive influence on Iranians still living in the country. According to Said Paivandi, Moshkin Ghalaham is a perfect example for an “Iranianized World and a Globalized Iran” – exporting himself as being Iranian to the whole world and experiencing a reaction of that within his first home country at the same time. Geranaz  Mousavi provided an insight into her experiences during the actors-casting for her movie when she got to know two male and professional dancers that would only perform in the “underground”. Moussavi and Ghalaham agreed upon the fact that within the past years dancing has managed to establish itself as an own discipline of arts – leaving behind its traditional perception as being a culturally inferior discipline of artistic expression.

Moshkin Ghalaham himself is an example for a young generation of Iranians living in exile who have found and unfold their “being Iranian”. As a choreographer, he intentionally takes up Persian epics and legends as well as classic Persian music – by doing so he explores his own cultural heritage. He is constantly receiving enthusiastic feedback from the Facebook-community in Iran. Ghalaham explained that the actual engagement with Western culture under the state-ordered modernity during the Shah-regime (the generation of his parents) had only been highly superficial. Nowadays, in contrast to that, Iran’s younger population actively explores and develops modernity under the public surface. This should be seen as a thoroughly authentic discovery as well as an authentic appreciation of aesthetics. Provoking a lot of amusement in the audience, Ghalaham told several anecdotes about the conflicts he (as a dancer ) had with his parents. Being rather strict in a military way, his parents were hardly able to accept their own son – ironically something, the parents of today’s Iran would have much less problem with to accept if their children would take up such a profession. He used the podium to enter into judgment with the generation of his parents. Those children who grew up in the west and were only given this one cultural believe by their parents that Iran is the proudest country with the most inventions and the richest history on earth, are now starting to look for their true Iranian character, not believing in the old stories anymore. Another remarkable development can be seen in the way of self expression of young men in Iran nowadays: plucking their eyebrows, dressing their hair and wearing fancy cloths. The level of importance that is attached to outward appearance is unprecedented. Photographer Ulla Kimmig just tried to capture that lately, being focused on Iran’s youth during her last trip to Iran in 2009. She explicitly chose the month of mourning ‘Muharram’ in which the youth finds a legal gap that allows them to present themselves in public. It is actually less about getting to know each other but more about “exhibiting” the individual, showing their fancy hairstyles and chic coats that are marked with famous fashion labels.

Works from the painter Homa Arkani, who lives in Teheran, were shown afterwards as well. She has designed a series of paintings on women in large metro cities: grotesquely appearing creatures wearing shrill makeup trying to imitate an imaginary Western look. From Geranaz Mousavi’s point of view, these pop-art inspired works, illustrate the way the young generation in Iran is trying to gain a hearing out of nothing: “The youth is fully convinced of a metamorphosis that is caused by the pressure put on them by the authorities.” Sociologist Said Paivandi, being one of the few experts on the Iranian educational system in the West, explained the consequences of re-Islamization of Irans’ schools and universities since 2009. He believes that also this wave of re-Islamization will fail. All attempts to get men and women separated will be in vain. Also according to filmmaker Mousavi, universities are critically-minded think tanks anyway and “parallel schools” and “parallel universities” have emerged inside the official education system long ago. Reading and cultural circles form the gaps in which it is possible to think independently. Mousavi points out the young generation’s ability and strength of “mutual endurance” and also the endurance towards those young people who do not want to be part of the avant-garde and who do not believe in bipolar worldviews.

 

 

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Panel III: Gender Roles
What makes a man being a man?
What makes a woman beingg a woman?

A view back on the DIWAN’s culture-conference on December 17th, 2011

Political scientist and artist, Melanie Nazmy-Ghandchi, explains in her keynote speech that: “In contemporary Iran the gender topic is exploited

in order to perpetuate the given structures of power. The ability of mankind, granted by the state, to experience and explore its own diverse and sexual identity is not just sabotaged in Iran and many other countries of this world, it is simply non-existent. Nazmy-Ghandchi questions gender roles in Iran by showing flashlights from an exhibition curated by her in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum in 2008 under the title of “Naqsh” (Persian for image, model, role). At this exhibition, works of Iranian artists were framed by sociological examinations on topics such as the women’s movement, feminism, masculinity, trans-gender as well as female and male role concepts. “Naqsh” had the goal to put traditional clichés into perspective and to inspire people to reflect more on the topic of equality. Several pictures were shown by the curator at the same time. One, for example was an installation from Bita Fayyazi, an artist from Teheran, showing 15 asexual babies. Another work that was presented was a giant – “ruthlessly realistic” – painting from Ahmad Morshedloo showing elderly women wearing a tschador and men wearing undershirts standing next to each other in a strangely alienating way. Ali Reza Ghandchi, an artist located in Berlin, followed this same thought during his speech telling the audience about an art-dialogue he had with Maryam Salour, a statuary from Teheran, during the “Naqsh” exhibition in Berlin. Ghandchi involves a bronze sculpture from Salour in his video instellation: the sculpture, representing the female fragility, wearing coughs, is being violated and hit by a man’s hand (at least, that is the way it is perceived by the viewer). The question Ghandchi confronts the audience with is, if one would interpret it in the same way if a female hand would touch the sculpture? Moderating the evening, Nicoletta Torcelli asked writer Siba Shakib to read excerpts from her novel “Samira and Samir”. The story takes place in the mountains of the Hindu Kush and it is about a couple whose first born child is not a boy, but a girl. Being considered as a shame to give birth to a girl as your first child, the baby gets “relabeled” as a boy – a fate a lot of children actually suffer from in Afghanistan according to Shakib’s research. Shakib’s novel “Eskandar” deals with educational role assignments in Iran, that are actually not related to Islam but can be seen as an instrument to proclaim state power. A body in a biological sense is also always a body in a social sense – this basic experience is also made by female musicians in Iran. This is a fact even though, according to oud-player Arman Sigarchi, women have always been present in traditional Iranian music. Under the rule of the Safavid dynasty women used to play the lute and one of the first women to put down the veil was a musician. Music played by women in Iran has always survived so far, even when the traditional music performed by solo singer Hengameh Achawan and Parisa was prohibited in public. Peace Nobel Prize winner and lawyer, Shirin Ebadi, added to Siagarchi’s statements that music schools were shut down after the revolution and that the people were only allowed to listen to religious songs and march music on the radio. But people could not abstain from music and finally the regime had to find a compromise. So in the past years, songs that used to be sung by Iran’s diva of the 50s (Delkash), were then simply performed by male singers. Eventually the regime also allowed women to sing in a chorus, as long as accompanied by male voices, and the ban on musical and vocal studies was lifted as well – concerts held by women for women took place again, even though they sometimes got broken up by fundamentalist groups. Ebadi explained that music as such has never been prohibited in Islam. About 200 years ago a cleric would even read from the Koran with a lute and Dervishes are known to find their access to god through dancing and singing.

Parastou Forouhar, an artist from Offenbach, dealt with the female body in her works again and again – a field that is strongly observed and regulated by the theocracy. Bigger and smaller inscriptions in public would remind us of these regulations saying things like “Sister, your hedjab is my honour”, “my flag” or even “my Islam”! The subject in those sentences, Forouhar remembers, has always been male and very religious. The artist kept and still keeps having contact to female activists calling for the foundation of a women’s museum in Tehran. Forouhars works always lead to the ambivalence between male violence and female tenderness and beauty. She remembers that right after the revolution the female Eros was banned from the public sphere and that women became degraded to “black holes”. But step by step, feminism is retaking its spot in society. Forouhar then quoted the words from, Iranian women’s rights advocate, Jaleh Ahmadi: “Caused by the fact that the Islamic Republic is dominated by male patriarchs, the opposition automatically becomes female and opposed to violence.”

The artist is very much interested in the development of young men that are constantly trying to find new models of manhood, far away from any kind of regulations by the system they live in. During her frequent visits to Iran, Forouhar realizes that the male self perception is occupied by doubts and that the boundaries between femininity and masculinity are blurring and becoming more hybrid. Adding to this, Ali Reza Ghandchi says if men – same as women – constantly tend to surrender to a dictate of fashion and beauty, this fact would also bare a positive aspect: it would at least be a breaking of established gender roles. According to Parastou Forouhar, the same breaking of roles can be seen in the revolt against student movement leader Majid Tavakoli. By making him to wear female clothing (a chador) the authorities tried to take away his male honor. But in a wave of solidarity and remarkable protest, plenty of men would put on a chador as well and get photographed for the internet.

Shirin Ebadi finally defined the patriarchic system as the real enemy, not accepting the equality between the different genders. This system is negating homosexuality because men who love men would weaken men’s strength and women who love women would threaten men’s monopoly of power. The laws in today’s Iran are born within this “non-spirit of patriarchy” and they make, for example, use of psychology trying to argue that women, caused by their sensitive nature, would be able to become a teacher but not a judge. From Ebadi’s point of view, “one should be very careful to assume that all problems within the society of Iran would be vanished in case of an abolishment of religion. No! It is actually the patriarchic system that needs to be overcome.”

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Picture gallery

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 Read and listen to reactions on and voices from our conference:

1. Deutsche Welle: Cologne Opera, An Encounter of Iranians who want to read in between the lines (Persian)
2. Deutsche Welle: Shahrokh Moshkin Ghalam: „My Dance Has No Gender” (Persian)
3. Deutsche Welle: picture slide show
4. News-Gooya: “In Between the Lines” a report by Akhtar Ghasemi (Persian)
5. News-Gooya: a picture report by Akhtar Ghasemi on the first conference day (Persian)
6. News-Gooya: a picture report by Akhtar Ghasemi on the second conference day (Persian)
7. Handelsblatt: Iranian Arts – Irony: The Subtile Instrument (German)
8. Deutschlandfunk: „Things That Make a Real Persian” (German)
9. WDR3: “In Between The Lines. Being Iranian….” (German)
10.WDR5: “Art and Culture in Iran – A Conference in The Cologne Opera” (German)