Epic Iran: Same skin, same game
The exhibition at the V&A shows there is much more that unites than separates us, writes George Pitcher
Had I been stopped in the street before yesterday and asked what I knew about Iran, I’d have mumbled something about the Islamic revolution of 1979 and Ayatollah Khomeini, the shahs and the Peacock Throne. I’d probably have mentioned the Iran-Contra affair under President Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump’s shredding of the nuclear deal.
Oh, and on a personal level, how the Iranian state-owned Press TV used to send cabs to take me to a west London studio to provide a token Christian viewpoint on issues of the day.
All reasonably accurate, of course (though the Peacock Throne was originally part of the Indian Empire), but typical of the very limited knowledge of westerners like me, especially those of us pro-am Christians who are bound to view Iran through the prism of our religion.
That was before I joined a small after-hours tour of Epic Iran at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London yesterday evening. The sheer ambition of this exhibition is breathtaking before you even get to it – a grand sweep of all of five millennia of Iranian art and culture.
But what’s really challenging is the sheer depth and breadth of Iranian cultural history. The question it inevitably raises is why don’t we know this stuff? Educated and otherwise inquisitive people are evidently negligent in the superficiality of their knowledge of that history.
It’s unfair to lay the blame for this in any particular western spot, but here’s an illustrative mindset. The Argentinian-born Christian missionary strategist Luis Bush coined the geo-political term The 10/40 Window for the eastern and western hemispherical region between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator, from North Africa to the Far-east, which has never been effectively evangelised. It also contains economically the poorest nations on earth – the prosperity-gospel undertones of this are loud and clear.
Iran is at the heart of the 10/40 Window. But as a country that is effectively a vast plateau bordered by mountain ranges, it’s always been abundant in mineral wealth. Early to the Bronze Age, it also led in the industry of human ideas.
An illuminating (for me) vignette of this arose as I looked at a couple of 500-330 BC (intriguingly not listed as BCE in this exhibition) rhytons, which are hand-held drinking “horns”, fashioned in beautiful sculpted shapes, in this case a horse. They are tilted so that wine flows from a spout at the base into the untouching mouth.
“What does that make you think of?” asks Ina Sarikhani Sandmann, Epic Iran’s curator and whose family owns many of the artefacts that form the spine of this engrossing exhibition. Well, it strikes me as a very hygienic way to share a chalice in a covid-secure way. She answers her own question: “It’s a way of drinking wine in allegiance with others.” Coming together as one body. Communion.
So, the cup which we bless… As she’s wearing a pandemic mask, it’s impossible to know whether Ina alludes to that, but there may be a twinkle in the eye above it. In any event, I’m viewing much of the rest of the exhibition through the eye of this particular beholder.
Robes of Honour
When we come to a pair of medieval Robes of Honour, one is a lustrous purple (though it may have its roots in indigo), and I’m reminded of Lydia of Thyatira in Asia Minor, now Turkey, a wealthy merchant in purple dye, according to the book of the Acts of the Apostles, who is thought to have been bankrolling the early Jesus movement there. An example, surely, of Christianity’s revolutionary liberation of women.
By contrast, Iran has always been an oppressor of women, right? Well, wrong. From its first-millennium Persian Empire days, women were integral to the Iranian economy. The fifth-century BC’s King Xerxes the First’s Admiral of the Fleet was a woman, Artemis. Such meritocratic women were venerated, not victimised.
Even the advent of Islam in the second half of the first millennium AD didn’t bring the female repression for which it gets such a bum rap in the West. Islam has no Virgin Mary (though she enjoys a Quranically honoured place), but Khadija, Muhammad’s first wife and the Mother of Islam, bankrolled the Prophet after his first visions in much the same manner as the earlier Lydia did the Christ. By the late 19th-century, there were woman exerting significant political influence in Iran while their Victorian equivalents were at home embroidering.
Universal anguish
None of which is to take away from the horrors of the post-1979 mullahs. Epic Iran doesn’t shy from them in its final, contemporary room. Here is a striking monochrome video installation called Turbulent by Shirin Neshat, in which a man sings a 13th-century love poem in front of a male-only audience, while a woman opposite stands in silence in an empty chamber. As he ends, he stands in shock as she begins an atonal, ululating and wordless cry of universal anguish (audibly not unlike the late Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries).
Here also is Azadeh Aklaghi’s extraordinary Eyewitness, a frozen tableau of the Shah’s 1974 assassination of student activist Marzieh Ahmadi Oskuie, somewhere between art and documentary and with the resonance of AccidentalRenaissance. And here is the late Shirin Aliabadi’s Miss Hybrid #3, a blue-eyed blonde defiantly blowing bubblegum as an Everywoman of Iranian urban youth, testing government control.
What challenges western preconceptions is that all of this is produced in relative security within Iran. But also what is so challenging is a deeper and possibly discomfiting thought that we have so much more in common than what separates us.
Above all, my takeaway from Epic Iran is what happens to our diverse religions and cultures when the radical patriarchies get hold of them. For Iran, that’s the relatively recent imposition of an Islamic fundamentalist theocracy (though the shahs didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory either). For us, it’s the rather older epistolic injunctions of St Paul that women should cover their heads and keep their mouths shut.
Neither will do, of course. In the spirit of passing the rhyton, we might say in our tradition that we’re all one body, because we all share in the one cup. But another way of putting it is that this show persuades us that we have so much of the same skin in the same game.
Epic Iran is at the V&A until Sunday 12th September 2021.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.