Iran | Inside Out

By Sandrine Colard

In an era of Cold War hysteria, Sting once sang, “Russians love their children too.” Twenty-five years and some axes of evil later, the artists of the Chelsea Art Museum’s exhibition Iran Inside Out , remind us, if needed, that the Iranians too love, laugh, imagine, create, and rise up just as the rest of us. The featured contemporary artists, living and working in Iran and throughout its Diaspora, prove there is a bubbling creative energy and an equally critical, sometimes scathing, global perspective emanating from this nation.

Even if the number of works can be overwhelming or the quality of the pieces varied, curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath succeed in conveying the mixes and dissonances of exile, as well as the attempts at self-reinvention of a people too often limited by internal religious and political dogmas, or the Western evening news. Saghar Daeeri’s “Shopping Malls of Tehran,” for example, may seem paradoxical at first. But her work, she says, is exactly about “paradox in Iran…[They] are all about showing Tehran’s girls’ connection and communication with each other through fashion…in Iran, the Islamic country.” Iran Inside Out is a breath of fresh air that unapologetically explodes cliches.