Trans/Planting --Contemporary Art by Women from/in Iran

Aaram Bayat, Aylene Fallah, Chohreh Feyzdjou, Shadee Ghadirian, Gita Hashemi, Taraneh Hemami, Kendal Kennedy, Haleh Niazmand, Termeh Dimi Yeghiazarian at A Space Gallery/Toronto, January 13-February 17, 2001.

While I was viewing the work of Iranian photographer Shadee Ghadirian, a man (non-Iranian) stood beside me. Appearing overwhelmed by her work, he turned to me: "Wow, what irony. It's not fair. Just not fair. They're not even allowed to go to school over there, are they?"

Moments later, I watched as another man (of Iranian descent) stood, with self-conscious nonchalance, on top of Aylene Fallah's work Merge into Nothingness--a large woven braid of hair--while everyone else carefully stepped over and around it. The irony of this scene seemed to go unnoticed.

The incongruency of these two experiences, while at first seemingly insignificant, seemed to represent the broader concerns of Trans/Planting. As an exhibition of work by nine Iranian women, the show examines issues of displacement and identity and raises questions surrounding reception and audience. Looking at the specificity of the Iranian exile, and also our Western tendency to both generalize and romanticize the immigrant experience, Trans/Planting reveals the problems of trying to simultaneously address the multitude complexities of both subject and audience.

How, for example, do I read such work with understanding, without being dogged by the current hype of multiculturalism? Faced with this fear, it is clear how we in the West are often afraid to be critical of the "other"--finding it easier to simply ignore such work or subject it to the same glowing interpretation again and again. Paralyzed by a desire to be part of an informed audience, it is easy to fall into such traps--who am I, after all, to say whether a work expressing experiences I can scarcely imagine either succeeds or fails?

These complexities are inherent in an exhibition of work that is almost impossible to disentangle from the baggage of politics, nationality, and religion, not to mention current postcolonial theory that surrounds it. It is perhaps true that discourses around hybridity and postcolonialism have now been wrested away from their legitimate practitioners (those colonized or exiled) and used in a generalized way to increase the appearance of understanding the "other" and the experience of diaspora. With Iranian women becoming increasingly the exotic "new" in the art market (see the success of recent art star Shirin Neshat, for example), we see how the West has created a new set of boundaries around that which threatens to go beyond our understanding, and thus our control. As chic commodities, both postcolonial discourse and "Iranian Women Artists" can be packaged together in a happy marriage of "Identity in Art" that make us feel like good Westerners sensitively exploring global understanding and inclusiveness.

There is always the danger of the who superseding the what--the novelty of Iranian women making art becoming more important than critical discourse on what they are producing; treating being an Iranian woman as though it were a disability, something to overcome, to create in spite of. Restricted to its own category, such work is often not allowed to equal the status of Western (nonexiled or hybrid) art. Thus it is unsurprising that the artists in Trans/Planting have a complex and ambivalent relationship toward both nationality and their status as purveyors of hybridity and displacement.

Rather than playing the postcolonial game as it were, these women reject simplified readings of exile and identity, and instead they embrace what has been termed "intentional hybridity"--artists conscious of their position, who disrupt mainstream thought by bringing together previously disparate languages, images, and discourse. Those of us locked in homogenous, monological language and society are (perhaps understandably) often simply lost when faced with the "other" of periphery, who speaks in a multitude of languages, visual or otherwise. Consequently, artistic practice based on an awareness of hybridity is often subject...