Farsam Sangini and Lapsking Hamed Dehnavi are in this exhibition
Video from Our group exhibition with Stuckist’s in Klaipeda Culture Communication Centre curated by Edward Lucie-Smith together with Zavier Ellis, Janet Rady and Ignas Kazakevičius.
The aim of this exhibition is to give a snapshot view of two very different contemporary art worlds – the one that
now exists in London, and the one that has grown up in Iran in the years since the fall of the Shah in 1979. London
is now undoubtedly one of the world capitals of contemporary art, rivaled in this respect only by Berlin, since
both Paris and New York seem to be losing their attraction as centers for young artists. It owes its pre-eminence
to the rise of what are now called the YBAs (Young British Artists) in the 1990s. However the YBA group are not so
young any more – they are in their mid 40s – and several generations of artists have made their appearance in
London since then. My concept here has been to show a few selected artists on a larger scale, and many more in a
section entitled Polemically Small. Polemically Small stresses two things – first the strong revival of painting and
collage in London, and second the return to small, sometimes miniature scale, which is a revolt against the inflated
rhetoric that seems to have overtaken so much contemporary art. This section has been chosen in conjunction with
Zavier Ellis, who is not only a practicing artist, represented in the other section of the show, but a gallerist (www.
charliesmithlondon.com) and curator well known for a series of innovative survey shows under the title The Future
Can Wait (www.thefuturecanwait.com). For help with this section special thanks are due to Jason Zeloof.
Iran has produced an astonishing quantity of interesting art in recent years – it is undoubtedly the creative powerhouse
in the visuals arts of the Middle East. It has been particularly strong in photography. The photographs shown
here emerged from a competition for young Iranian artists run on Facebook last year, where I had the honor to be
chairman of the jury. The works by Hojat Amani, who lives and works in Luristan, stress the way Iranian contemporary
art draws on age-old roots. His subject-matter – angels – is something deeply rooted in Iranian and Islamic
tradition. There are also some works by artists from an Iranian Stuckist group – Stuckism being a deliberately retro
response to conventional avant-gardism that was pioneered in Britain and that has now given birth to more than
200 affiliated groups in 47 countries, bound together by the enormous web site www.stuckism.com. That is to say,
it is a supposedly retro impulse that is expert in the use of the most modern means of communication. The Iranian
section owes a great deal to my friend and colleague Janet Rady (www.janetradyfineart.com).
Taken together, these two sections demonstrate both the importance of local traditions and at the same time the
inexorable growth of artist internationalism. It is worth noting, for example, that the Iranian photographs shown
here have passed all frontiers electronically. They arrived as picture files, and were printed in Klaipeda.
The third world of the title is of course Lithuania itself. Lithuanian art is represented by a small group of Polemically
Small works, to demonstrate how the idea works in a Lithuanian context. The most important thing, however, is
the Lithuanian audience. How will these works impact on Lithuanian culture? This exhinition has been made for a
Lithuanian public. Their response will be very much part of the show.
Edward Lucie-Smith
۵
از ۵
۱۲ مشارکت کننده