Symbols of Rebirth
Nasim Nasr is what one might call a topical artist. As a woman from Iran dealing in issues of gender, sexuality, prohibition and Islam, she fulfills a brief that makes tokenistic revisionists convulse with delight. Some artists are favoured by circumstances being in alignment with who they are and what they want to do. Many are spurred along, if not created, by the wave of political circumstances around them, including, for example, Brecht and the mass socialist movement, and Yeats and Irish revolutionary nationalism.1 Some artists achieve their moment, others pick their moment, others have the moment thrust upon them. Contemporary art has made a particular imperative of cultural branding, so that artists now become cultural show ponies for traits of difference and curiosity. This seems a negative note to begin on, but a necessary one. For Nasim Nasr is an artist who knows the extent to which she is framed by her culture in a place like Australia. She is keenly conscious of the advantages that accrue to this position—the sympathy that comes from curiosity or compensatory guilt—which make up one face of that same coin that also limits her. In Australia Nasr is never simply an artist, she is an Iranian artist, or Iranian-Australian if she is lucky. The screen of cultural difference, globalization’s ‘veil of Maya’, is a condition of her expression. To understand Nasr’s work is therefore not to try to understand Iran per se, but to see how we understand Iran.
This is why Nasr’s work is operatively and identifiably ‘Islamic’. It is curious and alarming to trace Orientalist stereotypes that have evolved since the early nineteenth century: woman as harem strumpet, man... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Women in Shadow 1–4, from Women from Shadow performance series, 2011. Australian Experimental Art Foundation. Photograph Rodney Magazinovic. Courtesy the artist.
Unveiling the Veil, 2009. Video stills. Courtesy the artist.
