3 June 2015
Ferrara is a bit out of the way with respect to the usual circuits of Italian contemporary art, but anyone lucky enough to have visited the city at the time of the Biennale Donna in 2010 will undoubtedly remember the pictures of the Iranian photographer Shadi Ghadirian, showing women cloaked in floral chadors and with kitchen utensils instead of faces (Like Everyday, 2000-02). Ghadirian was one of the six female artists featured in an exhibition curated by Silvia Cirelli at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea testifying to the difficult situation of women in the land of the ayatollahs. The Iranian photographer, internationally renowned and one of the best-known women artists in her own country, has returned to show her work in Italy at the solo exhibition The Others Me, curated by Cirelli again and staged at the Officine dell’Immagine in Milan (until June 21). The forty-year-old Ghadirian turns her gaze on the themes that are most familiar to her: the role of woman in Iranian society, the clash between modernity and tradition, the ghosts of past conflicts. It is not of course hard to imagine that discrimination against women is still strong in Iran, but the journey in the company of these refined works, wholly free of rhetoric, takes us a stage further, revealing the contradictions of a country that is advanced and backward at one and the same time. In this sense, the series of photos that opens the exhibition, Miss Butterfly of 2011, inspired by a Persian fairytale that the artist used to tell her daughter, is particularly eloquent. In it we see women engaged in weaving strange spider webs between dark and silent domestic walls. The pictures are in black and white and evoke a sense of solitude, isolation and impotence. The show in Milan is not the only appointment in Italy with Shadi Ghadirian, who will also be represented at the 56th Venice Biennale in the major joint exhibition The Great Game, curated by Marco Meneguzzo and Mazdak Faiznia.
Shadi Ghadirian, The Others Me
Officine dell’Immagine
Curated by Silvia Cirelli
Milan
April 23 > June 21, 2015
Shadi Ghadirian, Miss Butterfly #09, 2011.
Shadi Ghadirian, Miss Butterfly #06, 2011.
Shadi Ghadirian, Nil Nil #08, 2008.
Shadi Ghadirian, Nil Nil #10, 2008.
Shadi Ghadirian, Like Everyday #13, 2002.
Shadi Ghadirian, Like Everyday #07, 2002.
Shadi Ghadirian, Like Everyday #05, 2002.
Shadi Ghadirian, Qajar #11, 1998.
Shadi Ghadirian, Qajar #09, 1998.