The Great Game / Iranian Highlights
Pavilion of Iran at the 56th International Art Exhibition la Biennale di Venezia.The Great Game / Iranian Highlights curated curated by Marco Meneguzzo and Mazdak Faiznia. Organization FFF Faiznia Family Foundation – Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. The idea of this exhibition, The Great Game. Iran, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Central­ Asian Republics, Kurdish Region: art, artists and culture from the heart of the world, comes from the consideration that the geographical area of these countries is, in fact, a historically unique territory, its destiny indissolubly linked by its historical and cultural situation: around these places there took place, and still takes place, what since the XIX century has been known as "The Great Game" for supremacy in Asia. A tangle of political, economic, religious, and social situations also finds an expression and interpretation in the art produced in these places, and it is this that the exhibition proposed for la Biennale Arte 2015 hopes to show through the work of some forty artists working in the region and who are particularly aware of social-­political questions. The section Iranian Highlights presents the work of four Iranian artists: Samira Alikhanzadeh, Mahmoud Bakhshi Moakhar, Jamshid Bayrami and Mohamed Ehsai, from different generations, genders, and expressive tendencies and instruments, who in this case are brought together by their will to display the wealth and complexity of Iranian art, which by its very nature is cosmopolitan, receptive, and accommodating as well as aware of its own cultural heritage.