The Middle East. A stirring location. In historical or geopolitical terms, it
constitutes somewhere thoroughly tangible — a zone of perpetual conflict to
which troubles are attracted as irresistibly as flies to a kebab stall. If
something goes wrong in the world, the Middle East is always a suspect. When
you turn to aesthetics, however, the picture darts behind a burqa. Before
the Saatchi Gallery unveiled Unveiled, I think it is fair to admit that we
Brits had never had any serious exposure to new art from the Middle East. In
all my years as your dutiful art critic, I have never previously encountered
an ambitious survey of the latest offerings from Iraq or Iran or Syria or
Lebanon or Palestine, let alone all of them at once.
So, Mr Collectability, Charles Saatchi, deserves big slaps on the back for
daring to plunge into this conflicted terrain. He was born in Baghdad, to a
family of Iraqi Jews, and the murmurs doing the rounds blame his origins for
his new interest in Middle Eastern art. I doubt that. He’s a shopper by
instinct, not a poet. If Saatchi is interested in Iraqi art, it is because
he encountered it at Art Dubai, not because it caused him to consider whence
he came. What is probably true is that his background as an exiled Baghdadi
fuels that fierce determination he keeps exhibiting to move his tent.
This is a much more interesting and valuable show than the survey of “new”
Chinese art that preceded Unveiled into Saatchi’s plush Chelsea
headquarters. The China show was a tired-looking affair that marked the end
of a brief cycle of fascination with all things Chinese, triggered by a
horrendous collapse of taste that began in Shanghai and quickly affected our
own greedy auction houses. How unusual to see Saatchi jumping onto a
bandwagon rather than starting one.
Unveiled plunges us instead into genuinely fresh territory. Who could have
imagined that a woman artist based in Tehran would currently be churning out
life-sized sex dolls that seek to capture the essence of the Tehran
prostitute? Yet that is what the aptly named Shirin Fakhim is up to. Her
home-made female approximations, roughed up from gaudy bras stuffed with
melons and fishnet tights bulging shapelessly from overstretched knickers,
are such ghastly things. One has a Playboy Bunny sequined on her crotch;
another a padlock and chain of the kind you attach to a garage door. As
grotesque as they are derivative — the moment you step among them, you know
you are in the presence of a Sarah Lucas fan — Fakhim’s DIY prostitutes are
socially revelatory, if aesthetically gross.
It turns out that 100,000 working girls are currently in action in Tehran. On
the streets, they sport all-enveloping burqas and broadcast their wares with
secret winks and nods. The Fakhim gear is saved for indoors.
Unveiled features the work of two types of artist. One group consists of
Middle Eastern exiles living in New York or London, whose work is invariably
devoted to generalised memories of the past and whose style has been
smoothly acquired at the international art bazaar: typical Saatchi artists.
Then there’s a more interesting cluster of awkward talents based in Iran,
Iraq, Lebanon. This group produces art that has had much less exposure to
the familiar shorthands of the West, and is distinguished instead by a
startling originality that often segues into extreme ugliness.
That is certainly the case with Ramin Haerizadeh, a burly, hairy Iranian with
a beard, who tries to pass himself off in his pictures as a chador-clad
female voluptuary writhing about sexily in a harem. Apparently, Haerizadeh
has been influenced by something called taziye theatre, in which men get to
play all the female roles. Taking photographs of himself in the nude, he
digitally manipulates the resulting body masses to create weird evocations
of a Persian paradise, made up mostly of his own tattoos and body hair. It
says in the exhibition guide that taziye is a “historic genre of
theatre” that “often tells stories of the life of Muhammad”. Walking up
gingerly to examine the labels flanking these strange images, I was taken
aback to see that they all have the same title: Men of Allah. Old Islam is
taking a swipe at new Islam.
No artist based in the West would have the cultural temerity to attempt what
Haerizadeh is doing in Tehran. The awkward authenticity he brings to his art
is what is most frequently missing in the work of the exhibition’s exiles —
the most feeble of whom is the Iranian-American Sara Rahbar. She gives us a
flouncy wall hanging in which the outlines of a Native American quilt are
combined with the Stars and Stripes, a bullet belt and exotic Persian
fabrics. Rahbar has worked in California, which is perhaps why her piece is
entitled Memories Without Recollection, and why her explanation for the work
insists: “We are all made up of the same fibre, in the end we are all
human.” Only in California would this patchwork of clichés have been allowed
out of the evening class.
Almost as predictable is Kader Attia’s huge roomful of bowing Muslim women
called to prayer. Made of empty chrysalises of silver foil, they don’t
actually exist as people, which is obviously — too obviously — the point. It’s
not surprising that the conflict between then and now is a recurrent
concern. Although modern Islam has no time for art, and likes to pretend
that it is a decadent distraction, old Islam was largely an art-based
culture, and most of the embedded artists are aware of that and seek to
remind us of it. Shadi Ghadirian, also from Tehran, shows us some beautiful
Iranian wives, dressed in traditional robes, who have surrounded themselves
with trashy modern knick-knacks: one of them wields a vacuum cleaner,
another listens to a ghetto blaster and a third is seen hanging on the
telephone, waiting for Hussein to call. In a show dominated, rather
surprisingly, by female artists, issues of the veil and a woman’s presence
in modern Islamic society keep cropping up.
Although the terrain tackled here has a genuine freshness to it, Saatchi has
settled into some predictable exhibition habits. Among the sculptures you
are certain to encounter at a Saatchi show is a sprawling model of a foreign
metropolis made out of bits and pieces of urban detritus bashed into
evocative city shapes. This exhibition features several of them: Marwan
Rechmaoui, from Beirut, stacks up piles of concrete boxes to re-create the
apartment block he fled when the Israelis attacked Lebanon in 2006; Wafa
Hourani, from Ramallah, uses Blue Peter methods to rustle up a bustling
Palestinian enclave that has sprung up in the shadow of the Israeli wall.
Another of Saatchi’s ungovernable appetites is for what used to be called bad
painting — kiddie-style pictures produced by adults. Unveiled is busy with
examples and, surprisingly, they are among the most powerful exhibits. In a
situation that demands doomy seriousness, Saatchi has managed to locate a
bunch of jokers who laugh themselves silly at the sight of all these suicide
bombers. Ahmed Alsoudani turns a bombed-out Baghdad into a riotous Disney
cartoon, while the exhibition’s best discovery, Tala Madani, paints clusters
of bright-pink fundamentalists floating down to earth on frilly parachutes
and joining in with hilarious “men- only events”.
The most alarming of these shows a religious gathering at which rows of
enraptured beardies soak themselves in golden showers of Holy Light. What is
being hinted at here, I dread to think. And I definitely don’t have the
nerve to speculate on it in public.
Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East is at the Saatchi Gallery, SW3,
until May 6
