Mother's Tankstation shortlisted / Iran's hidden art (Friday 2 November 2007)

Mother's Tankstation as entrepreneur

Alan Phelan: Eamon often spoke in tongues, archival paper, EVA glue, aluminium, balsa wood, leather with snakeskin print, plastic pipe, 29 x 23 x 66cm pedestal 130 x 16 x 16 cm, 2007; Phelan is one of the Tankstation artists; image held here.

One of Dublin's newer galleries, Mother's Tankstation, is the winner of the Arts Category in the 2007 David Manley Emerging Entrepreneur Award. They now go forward to the final of the Award, where they have a chance to win 10k euro plus mentoring valued at 80k euro.

No space for outside art in Iran

compiled by Marthe Leach

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran boasts what may be one of the most important art collections in the world. The collection, held underneath Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art, includes works by Monet, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Renoir, Gauguin, Pollock, Toulouse-Lautrec, Magritte, Miró, Warhol, Braque, and Picasso, just to name a few. This collection would be sure to draw art aficionatos from around the world - that is, if it anyone were allowed to see it.

Two women looking at Andy Warhol's prints of Mao Zedong. Image held here

Ahmadinejad, under advisement of Mohammad-Hossein Saddar-Harandi, a Culture and Islamic Guidance minister, is letting censorship reign king. The collection, amounted by Queen Farah, the last shah's wife, is kept under lock and key. It is only opened for some visiting artists and students. The reason for this is the same reason that popular music and many books are being banned. The museum director, Habibollah Sadeghi, calls this western-led globalisation “cultural socialism.” He states,

We are opposed to an aggressive, dominant culture...Westerners, especially Americans, think they are the rulers of the whole world and that other people are their servants. Perhaps they see themselves as like the heads of the military camps in Rome and we are the gladiators.

However, he claims that the reason this collection is not being displayed has nothing to do with Iran being a gladiator - they simply did not have enough space t o display the pieces. In fact, it seems that the museum doesn't have enough space to show works by anyone other than Iranian artists.

Sadeghi insists that the museum is proud to have such such a collection and that they plan to build a new building 40 to 50 times the current size in order to display all of the artworks at once. However, Sadeghi's predecessor, Alireza Sami-Azar, does not think Sadeghi is being completely honest. Before stepping down in 2005, he had staged a temporary exibition of the entire collection. “They haven't exposed them all in the last couple of years because the policy of the culture and Islamic guidance ministry is not to promote western art or culture. The museum has not brought any exhibitions by foreign artists, either western or from Iran's neighbouring countries, in the last two years. It's an inward-looking policy that aims to promote isolation."

Source: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0,,2201065,00.html

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News item 624  The idea of exhibiting a group of objects bought on eBay, though ...
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