ARTICLE 77 - Directing Iranian Art

[1 January 2010] Raziqueh Hussain for KHALEEJ TIMES

A specialist on the art of Iran and Central Asia, Dr Ladan Akbarnia has become the new executive director of Iran Heritage Foundation in the UK.

The Iran Heritage Foundation is a charity organisation and is the leading supporter of Iranian studies in the UK. Its mission is to preserve and promote the history, languages, and cultures of the Iranian world and to make Iran’s heritage accessible to diverse audiences.

The IHF promotes academic research through fellowships, grants, scholarships and publications. In association with museums and leading cultural institutions, the Foundation also organises exhibitions and convenes conferences on the history and contemporary culture of Iran. About the challenges that she is facing in her new role, she says, “As someone who has been situated in the academic community and museum world, I was already familiar with IHF’s mission to preserve and promote the history, languages and cultures of the Iranian world; I was less familiar with its local programmes, events and community development as I did not live in London or even the UK,” she says.

Part of this first phase of her transition has been to learn about the inner workings, the day-to-day running of the foundation, while continuing to develop the types of programmes, fellowships, and conferences and trying to engage curators to do ‘behind-the-scenes’ workshops or tours, bringing specialists to London to talk about Iranian culture and oral history, plan more programmes that engage youth and contemporary culture she says.

The Iran Heritage Foundation supported the first exhibition of contemporary Iranian art in the United Kingdom and, in the West, in London at Barbican Art Galleries in 2001. In contrast to some contemporary Iranian or Middle Eastern art exhibitions, where the art works on display are often also for sale, this exhibition sought solely to celebrate Iranian art in its diverse forms and covered the 20 years before and after the Islamic revolution of 1979. “I know that this area of contemporary art currently enjoys a great period of vitality in the Gulf region, but I cannot speak as much to the Middle Eastern context as I can to the European or, especially, the American one. Just last summer, between June and August 2009, three museums in New York City alone had exhibitions including or exclusively featuring contemporary Iranian or Middle Eastern art. One was ‘Tarjama’ (meaning translation) at the Queens Museum, another was ‘Iran Inside Out’ at the Chelsea Art Museum, and the third was a show that I curated, ‘Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam,’ at the Brooklyn Museum, which incorporated contemporary Iranian art into an exhibition of works ranging from the *ninth through the 19th century,” says the doctor of Islamic art history.

Although Akbarnia was born in the United States, she moved to Iran at the age of three, and she left Iran a few years later, just after the Revolution and at the beginning of the war with Iraq. She was eight when she returned to the States, “That journey, although it will probably sound cliché, had to have affected my life and thinking in some way. It is likely to be what inspired me to come full circle by pursuing a doctorate in Islamic (specifically, Iranian) art and ending up where I am today, speaking to you as the director of an important foundation dedicated to promoting and preserving Iranian culture,” she says.

Akbarnia is currently in the process of writing a catalogue for the exhibition she organised at the Brooklyn Museum, now scheduled to go to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in May 2010; the catalogue shares the title of the exhibition, ‘Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam’. She has also contributed to and edited several exhibition catalogues for the Aga Khan Museum collection, currently based in Geneva and has written on medieval Mongol art of Iran and Central Asia as well as on contemporary Iranian artists such as Shirin Neshat and Pouran Jinchi.

Her first job that sparked her interest in the art world was one that she held as a research assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She also sings and plays guitar, and used to write songs to ‘get me in the mood’ to write papers in grad school. “I am devoted to two causes in particular, other than the preservation of Iranian culture (of course!), the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and the Growing Spine Foundation,” she says.

Since it’s a truly exciting time for contemporary Iranian and Middle Eastern art, so many artists may have opportunities now that they might not have enjoyed even a decade ago. There is more exposure to the market and more exposure to the world at large. “It is critical that curators organise well thought-out exhibitions with specific ‘stories,’ so to speak, so that we are not just being introduced to a group of artists from Iran, or to a group of artists from the diaspora. I would encourage and challenge future artists and curators alike to produce shows that are even cleverer and more focused than the best exhibitions out there, so that the bar continues to be set higher and higher,” she says.

raziqueh@khaleejtimes.com

Article Courtesy: KHALEEJ TIMES