Quotes of the Day

When Shirin Neshat's photographs and films of Iranian women in chadors propelled her to international prominence in the 1990s, she didn't mind that her work was little known in her own country. After her privately screened films provoked extreme reactions — from enthusiasm to outright denunciation — she preferred to keep a low profile. But her country is catching up with her. Last year Neshat's work was publicly exhibited in Tehran for the first time, and her conceptual 12-minute film Tooba (2003), a poetic fable about a Persian woman who thinks she is a tree, was well received. Iranians, she says, are becoming more attuned to allegorical art. "In Iran, poetic language is subversive," says the petite, soft-spoken Neshat. "It is the only way that something can be said that can be read between the lines."

There's plenty of reading material in "Far Near Distance," the largest exhibition in Europe of Iranian fine art, photography, installation, sculpture, film, music and literature. The exhibition, which runs through May 9 at Berlin's House of World Cultures, features 19 artists, both exiles and those who live in Iran. For the first time, Iran's old guard — Neshat, photojournalists Abbas and the late Kaveh Golestan, filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami — appear alongside the next generation of pop artists, photographers and filmmakers. What unites them is a fixation on Iranian identity and place.

The Berlin exhibition examines the social fissures that contribute to Iran's political unease, helping to explain why half the country voted with its feet last month, boycotting the parliamentary elections. Coming 25 years after the Islamic revolution, the boycott was the protest of a growing civil and consumer society against theocratic rule and its periodic cycles of censorship and violence. This subversive mood is reflected in the works on display — some from before the revolution.

Neshat, 47, first gained international recognition with her Women of Allah (1993-97) series, veiled self-portraits inscribed with 1960s Iranian feminist poetry that challenged Western stereotypes of Muslim women. Her piece in the exhibition, Turbulent (1998), is a split-screen video installation featuring the avant-garde singer Sussan Deyhim, who wrote the music for Tooba, performing to a dark, empty auditorium. On another screen, a male vocalist sings verses from the poet Rumi to an appreciative audience of men. The piece meditates on women's voicelessness in Islam and Iran's laws that prevent them from singing in public. "In many ways the foundation of Turbulent, and much of the work I've made since, is very Iranian," says Neshat, who has lived in New York City since 1984. "But ultimately I have a message that is larger than the boundaries of Iran, one that is also timeless in the sense of feeling oppression and incarceration — and the breaking of that."

Many of the exhibits in Berlin are inspired by the collision between a large, oppressed younger population and the conservative establishment. Farhad Moshiri, the Iranian Jeff Koons, uses everyday objects to comment on that clash. His installation pairs Louis XIV furniture with modern household appliances, all plated with gold leaf — a metaphor for the Shah's opulence and Iran's ready-to-party twentysomethings, nearly 70% of the population, who exhibit a similar taste for luxury brands. The prolific Moshiri, 40, who studied art and filmmaking in California before his return to Tehran in 1991, says young Iranians are gripped by the Internet and satellite TV, an onslaught the censors can't stop. "We're not trying to deny the fact that we're living in an Islamic world, but we're also influenced by mtv."

For the veteran photojournalist Abbas, 60, "Iranians feel very much under occupation. There is total schizophrenia between public and private life. You can live with it, play with it, but eventually you pay a price — alcoholism, drugs, madness, even art." The two years that Abbas spent in the country during the revolution, from 1978 to 1980, were, he says, "equivalent to 25 years of my life." The exhibition features photographs from his Iran Diary: 1971-2002 (Autrement). Abbas, who lives in Paris, returned to Iran for the presidential elections, won by Mohammed Khatami, in 1997. He discovered a new Iran that poses another kind of challenge. "The revolution is not finished," he says. "It's moving toward a more tolerant society. But how do you photograph something that's going on inside people's heads?"

One possible answer is supplied by Shadi Ghadirian's Domestic Life, a 5-m-by-2-m billboard that peers into the psyche of Iranian women. In the piece, the faces of 50 or 60 women in colorful, patterned chadors are obscured by emblems of domesticity — an iron, a coffee pot, a broom. These represent the traditional pressures governing the lives of housewives and working women. "I want to show the reality of living in Iran," says the 29-year-old Tehran resident. "I want to take good photos about my life, my time, my country."

"Working in Iran you have to be a trapeze artist," says documentary filmmaker Maziar Bahari, 37. "You always have to be careful of who you're dealing with, or who may take you to court and make complaints against you." Bahari's film Along Came a Spider (2002), shown as part of "Far Near Distance," tells the story of the "spider killings" in the holy city of Mashhad, where 16 prostitutes were caught in the web of Saeed Hanaei, a construction worker who murdered his victims at home while his family prayed at the mosque.

The exhibition's most famous participant, film director Abbas Kiarostami, 63, has long blurred fact and fiction in his work — witness films like Ten, where the real life of actress Mania Akbari becomes part of the plot. At Berlin, however, Kiarostami opts for stark realism, displaying the black-and-white landscape photographs he has taken throughout his film career. His message: As the years of political turmoil fall away, only the essentials remain — mountains, sunlight, the sea. There are those who want to, once again, shroud this terrain from view and return Iran to revolutionary values — a gloom through which these artists shine.

• MALU HALASA
• A Berlin exhibition helps some of Iran's greatest artists shine a light on their turbulent country