3/5
Little is allowed to breathe in this new exhibition, which forces artworks up against each other like commuters jostling on the Underground
26 May 2021 • 12:16pm
Detail from Shirin Aliabadi s Miss Hybrid #3, 2008
Credit: © Estate of Shirin Aliabadi. Collection The Farjam Collection
A blue-eyed blonde is staring at you through the camera. Though she wears a headscarf, her attitude is feisty, defiant. A plaster across her nose indicates recent cosmetic surgery. An enormous bubble of lavender gum, obscuring her mouth, is about to burst – like her generation of Iranian women, perhaps. Pop!
It’s a surprise, this photograph from 2008 by the artist Shirin Aliabadi – in the V&A’s new exhibition, Epic Iran. With more than 300 objects (none from Iranian institutions) spanning, as the subtitle puts it, “5000 years of culture”, it challenges Western stereotypes about a country infamously included in President Bush’s “axis of evil”. To those of us weaned on news
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