Suspended, with a Camera and Paintbrush in Hand

By Ashlee Fairey

Though it has been three years since Bahar Behbahani created her short film “Suspended” and she has made several video works since, it was still the film she chose to cue up in her airy apartment/art studio in Brooklyn on a recent April day. The film faded up into a sepia scene: a brick house with a curtained window and a back porch, a bicycle nestled in the corner. It could be a snapshot straight out of an old family album, except everything is upside down.

The screen gently sways like a rope-swing from which someone has just leapt. A woman comes into the screen, dangling upside down as children often hang from monkey bars, and as notes from a music box chime out, the woman closes her eyes as if in deep reverie. As the camera pulls back, we see that this woman’s feet are not hooked round a bar but are bound by rope, her arms limp by her ears as she twists with the wind, and the silent suggestion of death creeps in. The scene has a stillness that often permeates sleep, but it’s unclear whether this would be a dream or a nightmare.

As the film ended, Behbahani walked over to the stove and poured herself another glass of black tea, the kind she drinks when she visits her family back in Iran. “When you move from your home and your country, and when it’s very far geographically, you can’t really..I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like a dream,” Behbahani said slowly, softly, letting the tea’s steam cup her face. “Sometimes when I sleep, I don’t know if I’m in sleep or I’m awake. And when I’m awake, I have vice versa feeling. Sometimes you think, maybe it’s not real. Maybe I’m still there.”

The world’s art market has been fascinated with contemporary Iranian art recently. In 2006, for the first time, Christie’s included modern and contemporary Arab and Iranian art in its International Modern and Contemporary Art auction; the section almost tripled its presale estimates and brought in $2.2 million. Just a year later, another Christie’s auction of Arab and Iranian art realized $18 million. Since then, numerous shows of contemporary Iranian art have been showing in New York, London, Paris and Dubai. “There are times when certain things become popular, and certain artwork becomes relevant, fortunately or unfortunately,” said Liam Derik van Loenen, director of the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York. “There is a current phenomenon of dealing with Iran.”

Bahar Behbahani is  a contemporary painter and video-artist from Iran, but she manages to elude the limiting category of “Iranian Artist.” She is, simply, an artist. “She’s not shying away from issues involving living across two different cultures,” van Loenen said, but those themes stem not from a desire to highlight her nationality but from an artistic impulse for self-expression.

“With a lot of Iranian art – not all, but with a lot – there is a tendency to try to please and be beautiful,” said Anahita Varzi, director of the Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery, a New York gallery that specializes in contemporary Iranian art. “You can tell it is something that is supposed to speak to the collector and be something that you want to take and hang and, I don’t want to say decorate, but place in your home and have it look fabulous. [Behbahani] is definitely not an artist who is out there for that reason.”

Though it was her art that originally brought her to the Unites States, there was never a precise moment when Behbahani, now 37, decided to make the move. “If you decided to move to another country and it’s clear for you, you are focused,” she said in a gentle tone, brushing aside her curly black hair that nears the small of her back. At 5 feet tall, her presence is petite and unassuming, but her wide brown eyes exude a hypnotic intensity. “You know, ok, that was my past, this is my present and this is my future. In my case, I never say I decided that. I just go with the flow and things are just happening by accident. I didn’t want to come to America.” It just somehow happened.

In 2002, Behbahani, an emerging painter, traveled from Tehran to Geneva to attend an art show in which her paintings were hanging. It was meant to be a brief stay, but her cousins in Boston convinced her to visit. Two weeks into her Boston visit, she learned some of her work was to be included in a travelling show of Iranian art that was to start in D.C and move to Vermont, Atlanta and Florida. The curators asked her to tag along, and after great deliberation, she agreed. In Atlanta, she had her first major sale, and after that, she kept extending her return ticket home. She told herself she would stay a little bit longer, and then go home.

Behbahani did return to Tehran in 2003, but only to visit: She had at that point settled in D.C. There were moments though, when she almost forgot where she was. When visiting New York one night, her friend took her to an Iranian dance party. Soon after arriving, she saw flashing lights and heard the police barge into the club after receiving a noise complaint. It was exactly as if she was back in Tehran, and the Basiji of the Revolutionary Guard were bursting into the party. Out of habit, she frantically looked for a place to hide her beer.

Though Behbahani still travels between Iran and the U.S. to see family and pursue artistic projects, she now lives in a luminous studio in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, where she moved in 2007.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, sunlight infused the drawn canvas curtains, creating a spectral glow. The only light to penetrate the windows fell directly on the neat rows of paint tubes lining the sill. The apartment is kept tidy and clean, save for the magenta splotches by the painting corner, staining the hardwood floors. Completed canvases were neatly stacked against the wall two feet deep and up to the high ceiling, and cardboard tubes crowded doorway corners.

It was lunchtime. The smell of sizzling garlic wafted through the apartment as Behbahani sprinkled rosemary, lemon juice and red saffron over chicken and prunes, which she would serve with quinoa and peas. Before leaving Iran, cooking never held any appeal for her, but she found soon after moving to the States that preparing a meal had a calming effect. “It’s like meditation,” she said, moving the chicken breasts around with a fork. “It’s cozy, like home. Some smells go back to memories.” Above the stove hung an earthenware jug painted with a picture of her parents the year she was born.

“Sam, lunch!” she called out to her friend. Feeding people in her home feels natural, just as the women of her family filled their tables with food. “People in the West see cooking as a symbol of repression, as serving men,” she said as she set the table. “But we [Iranians] think it’s a power to run and control the family. We are feeding, and that doesn’t mean we are anti-feminist.”

While some of Behbahani’s attitudes will remain forever Iranian, others fluctuate depending on which city she’s in. When in New York, she respects people’s personal space; when in Tehran, she jostles people on the street and elbows people in line. In New York, she feels people are too cold; in Tehran, she feels things are dysfunctional. “There’s no balance,” she said, drifting somewhere between the two cultures.

Moving from Tehran to New York and leaving behind family, friends and cultural customs inspired an important work of art. “I was in the process of thinking that whatever you experience or go through, either it’s bothering or painful or it’s pleasing or joyful, you get used to it.” As with all her ideas, this concept came to her with a color: green. It also came in a specific medium, and for the first time in her artistic career, that medium was a short film.

She was not entirely new to video: Behbahani, in collaboration with Iranian painter and filmmaker Pooya Aryanpour, made five documentary films about the lives of Iranian artists over the span of two years, starting in 2000. For her first short video artwork, however, she assembled a cameraman, sound designer and producer, and translated her vision to the screen. “You Get Used To It” (2005) opens with a triptych: the center frame shows a woman standing in green, leaf-flecked water. On either side, the frames focus on the floating leaves and the insects crawling on them. Behbahani often uses diptychs and triptychs in her work: it allows her to present multiple perspectives. “I like to have two or three..not variety but narrations of an event at the same time, because it’s my practice in life that nothing is fixed, and when you say, ‘This is happened like this,’ someone else explains it other way.”

Behbahani often finds inspiration in the natural world. “Nature changes. It experiences death, life, youth, age,” she explained. It was after the death of her father when she became hyper-aware of the changing season. The air was getting cooler, the days shorter. Life was moving on, and you get used it. As a child, Behbahani played in the garden pools of her home in Tehran, watching the insects struggling to swim through the green water. Sometimes she rescued them, sometimes she drowned them. “You think it’s a ridiculous struggle,” she said. “The beetle wants to go to this leaf, to that leaf, but for him, it’s life and death. I wanted to confront a human being and the struggle she thinks she’s got.”

Since her first foray into video art, Behbahani has made two additional films: “Suspended” (2007) and “Saffron Tea” (2008). Carrie Springer, senior curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum, named “Suspended” Best in Show at the 13th Annual International Exhibition of Women’s Art in New York. The film went on to show at The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and a year later, was accepted into the Tribecca Film Festival.

Springer was captivated by Behbahani’s strong artistic voice, and the hanging figure in “Suspended,” which for her indicated Behbahani’s mastery of subtly blending the personal and the political. Springer also nominated Behbahani’s “Suspended” photographs that were ultimately included in the Bruce Silverstein Gallery’s 2010 Photography Annual.

The film’s theme of being suspended between homeland and current country, childhood and the present, dreaming and waking, serenity and eeriness, is carried through in “Saffron Tea.” Much of the film is out of focus and overexposed, so objects appear as shimmering lines of light and figures seem to hover like ghosts. Ephemeral wisps of color curl through the air like smoke, and the viewer can faintly make out an armchair, a platter of fruit, women fanning themselves in a sitting room.

Flashes of a home movie fade in and out while a child’s voice chatters. Yet these memories are merely fleeting fragments of a distant world. There is a yearning undertone to the film, but when a young woman appears, she is submerged in a tank of water, unable to flick a fan or pluck a grape. Just as in “Suspended,” the work’s quiet serenity is challenged by the eerie possibility of death, be it hanging or drowning. The tranquility Behbahani offers is always shadowed by doubt.

For “Saffron Tea,” Behbahani brought her friend and fellow video artist Sam Nosratian on as producer. Nosratian first met her six years ago while visiting a friend in D.C. “She’s definitely a lot more intense than I first thought, and a lot more serious than even my first impression,” he said. “You look at her and she’s this cute little girl, but she’s really, really tough.” When he came to her apartment for appetizers before going out, he was struck by the décor. The table was nicely set with candles lit, every detail attended to. “It was very, intensely nice. You know with Americans, you go over to their house for a drink and everything is much more relaxed, but with her everything was really intense, like we’re going to enjoy this moment. She’s very serious even about that.”

Behbahani and Nosratian share a love for tea, a distain for TV and an obsession with work. Though Nosratian is staying with Behbahani while they edit their new film, they don’t see much of each other – when working on videos, they each are focused on their computer screens. “You have to convince her there’s a good reason for her to go out and have coffee, otherwise she’s going to choose to work,” Nosratian said.

Though he admires her dedication, when he produces her videos, her fastidiousness drives him crazy. “She’s so fucking demanding. After “Saffron Tea” I fucking hated her,” he said. “No joke, I just hated her, I wanted to kill her.” After the film was finished, Nosratian vowed never to produce her work again. A year later, he was back onboard, working on her current, untitled work-in-progress.

While she can be relentless and uncompromising, Nosratian says, her perfectionism truly begets perfection. “I recognize her as one of the best artists of my time. Society hasn’t recognized that yet. I feel privileged to be part of her work.” He observes the reactions of curators and collectors as they view her work, and notes how their attitudes shift from indifferent to fascinated.

Liam van Loenen of the Silverstein gallery experienced a similar shift in attitude when reviewing Behbahani’s photography. When he first saw thumbnails of her work, he said, “I can’t say I was particularly impressed by it.” When the actual work arrived, however, “Only then did I feel interested in the work. From the group of 10 [hanging artists], she was someone whose work I wanted to learn more about.”

It is this reaction that Nosratian sees from many gallerists and collectors, and while Nosratian typically does not collaborate with other artists, he is working with Behbahani on her current video project because, quite simply, “my name gets to be next to her name.”

The newest film is a collaborative effort between Behbahani and Almagul Menlibayeva, a noted video artist from Kazakhstan. Continuing her interest in observing an event from multiple perspectives, the film will focus on the history and political implications of the Caspian Sea, an oil-rich area that both Iran and Kazakstan border. They have been working on the project for the last eight months, and hope to finish by early summer. Menlibayeva arrived two months ago to work with Behbahani during the editing process.

As they worked on a recent Sunday afternoon, Nosratian at his desk sporting chunky headphones, Menlibayeva hunched over her screen and Behbahani reading printed-out research, no one spoke. Only the clicking of keyboards, the creak of a chair and the bubbling of water could be heard. Hot water is kept at a boil throughout the day, and two teapots sat ready on the stove. “When you hear water is boiling, it feels that there is a home and there is a life,” Behbahani explained. “I think for us it means that the wife of the house is around, the mother. Someone who is taking care of everything, to serve people in the house. It’s a very warm feeling. You go to the house of a person in Iran and they don’t have tea – it’s like, either they’re not very welcoming or sad or something is wrong in their life,” she said with a light laugh.

Behbahani is highly conscious of her Eastern background, and just as aware of her Western audience. She has come to realize differences in the ways Iranian and American critics confront her work.  “Over there they criticize your work as a contemporary work, as a piece of art, because you are all the same. We are in Iran,” she said. “But here they look at you as a Middle Eastern artist that does something that should be related to issues of the Middle East or some characteristic, which I agree, should have the characteristic of my own roots and culture, but the definition is different.” She found that many members of the media were focusing their questions on irrelevant cultural details, such as whether she covered her hair, instead of reacting to her art. “Sometimes I doubted that they even saw the work because they didn’t make any statement about the work, and it was disappointing.”

For a while, Behbahani intentionally avoided any cultural or religious elements in her work, nervous to include elements that would either label her as Middle Eastern or be misconstrued by a Western audience. For her, the chador is a symbol of her grandmother, of family and nostalgia. For many American viewers, however, it is an instant commentary on religious or political issues, so she excised them from her art. Behbahani’s paintings from 2000 are abstract and devoid of any overtly nationalistic attributes, using a translucent layering effect to convey multiple perspectives. Her marks are delicate but their movement and energy is vigorous, at times even alarming.

Last year, she began experimenting with silk screens. Wrapping the screen around wooden frames, she was able to achieve the same spectral, multilayered effect as her films. Yet Behbahani began to include more culturally-specific elements, with collaged images of Iranian women and furniture peering through the transparent silk. They caught the attention of Anahita Varzi, director of the LTMH Gallery. Varzi reviewed Behbahani’s work, looking for pieces to include in the “Tehran-New York” show that opened at the LTMH Gallery this past March. “We wanted to bring in something that was new, that was fresh, that was cutting edge, something that spoke for itself,” Varzi said of the show.

She saw that in the silk screen paintings, and chose to include three pieces in the show. “We thought it was very unique, unique in terms of the form and the use of materials, and the way that she played with the materials and the storyline. The theme of homeland, memory, personal issues and cultural issues is nothing new for Iranian artists, but the way she translated it in the work was really, really wonderful.” There is an ambiguity to her aesthetic that draws the viewer close and challenges them to carefully study the work, to understand what is actually going on. The poetic beauty of Behbahani’s surfaces, which Varzi noted as rooted in Iranian aesthetics, merges with more contradictory aspects of Iranian culture, such as images of the veil.

In her more recent paintings, Behbahani has continued to incorporate more overtly Iranian elements and presents them in a satiric tone. In her “My Fantezi (Broken Fantasy)” series (2009 – 2010), she includes the faint, fluid white outline of a cat lying on a sofa, a teapot balancing precariously atop her head, platters of fruit and Persian rugs. She still embraces an abstract aesthetic and a delicate, ephemeral tone to her markings, but by cramming all things “Persian” into the composition, Behbahani boldly challenges the definition and its subsequent assumptions.

“As I get older, I think I should talk about what comes from my heart,” she said. Though she relies on her art for income, and can’t afford to push her work too far beyond what her viewers are ready to accept, Behbahani sees her work as a vehicle to enact change. “I should practice to make it personal so it detaches from stereotypes…I think art can do that.”