Past Tradition
Past Tradition is not an exhibition celebrating the traditions of days past, but rather presenting the works of forward thinking artists from the MENASA (Middle East, North Africa, South Asia) region who but push past the expectations, stereotypes, and perceived limitations that "being traditional" often implies. This exhibition is a detour from recent exhibitions that group artists together based on traditional techniques such as miniature painting. It looks beyond technique and nationality and into the complex relationship between tradition and identity in the twenty-first century, encouraging multiple ways of looking beyond the surface.
Tradition and nationalism are often interlinked, and New York based artist of Iranian origin Kamrooz Aram (b. 1978, Shiraz) looks at nationalism as "hallucination somewhere between destruction and celebration." In his acclaimed series 7,000 Years of History, Aram takes apart pages from mid-Century exhibition catalogs that depict artefacts of Iran's "7,000 Years of History," a nostalgic phrased used by Iranians to describe their magnificent historical past, perhaps as a way of coming to terms with the nation's relatively dismal present. These collages draw connections between Western Modernist veneration for geometry and that of traditional Iranian arts, posing questions about the complicated relationship between Modernism and non-Western Art. Frank Stella and Persian carpets have more in common than you would think.
