I watch Mandana Moghaddam’s 2017 video work Silence, which was shown at Konstnärshuset in Stockholm the same year, on Vimeo. My gaze follows the camera as it pans over a passive crowd, standing at a typical Swedish distance from each other, at a public swimming pool. Usually filled with with noise, movement, and screaming children, the place is now silent. Embedded in the silence, I register violence. The swimming pool and the people are representations of an emotional experience. In the silence, camera sweeps across faces and stops at a young woman. Suddenly, she jumps into the swimming pool and is immersed under water in a frantic soundscape.
Moghaddam’s work combines the artist’s biography with the political events around her. Born in Tehran in 1962, she was forced to leave Iran after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. She first came to Turkey as an asylum seeker, and a few years later relocated to Gothenburg. Her career as an artist has included exhibitions in both Sweden and Iran. In the early 2000s, she had a series of solo exhibitions in Sweden and Iran, and in 2005 she was part of the Iranian Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennial.
Moghaddam works with both moving images and sculptures made of materials including hair, luggage, water, and concrete. With titles such as Vinden bär oss med sig (The Wind Carries Us Away, 2015), Exodus (2012), The Wailing Wall (2013), Hanging Cypresses (2012), Father’s Legacy (2010), her works connect as much to nature as to experiences of migration, exile, and women’s oppression – themes given new currency by the feminist revolution in the streets of Iran and Kurdistan currently streaming on digital devices across the globe.
I invited the artist to my home to learn more about her background and artistic trajectory. As an artist and playwright of Kurdish descent, I also wanted to talk to her about alienation and communication. Is it possible to overcome feelings of alienation and isolation? Is the muteness in her work involuntary or is her art best conveyed by silence?
I have a lot of questions…
They are connected, so let’s start wherever you like.
How did you become an artist?
I have been painting and sculpting since I was a child in Tehran. When I was 8 years old, I used to draw clothes designs in a sketchbook, and would watch my cousin paint and learned from copying her. One path to art was the theatre. I started making masks and realised I liked working with set design. I read a lot of poetry as a result and was supported by the teachers at school. I also liked drawing and painting. I knew it was a path I had to follow. At the same time, I became interested in politics and started opposing the Shah’s regime – even though my father was part of his army.
Was art a natural feature of your home, growing up?
Natural on my mother’s side. My father bought books and encouraged me to read and study.
He encouraged your independence, acknowledged your interest in politics, despite his own role?
The most important thing for him was that I was independent. When I was 12, I became interested in religion. A year later, I went to my father and said: “God doesn’t exist, unfortunately. I’m going to quit!” He said: “You do what you want. I’m glad you’re reading and trying to find your own path.”
And what path did you find?
I was 15 years old. I wrote poetry about society. Every month I put posters on the walls of the school, a kind of wall journal filled with images and quotes from books I had read. It was popular; everyone at school, including the teachers, checked it out. At the end of the year, the students took it home, like art, and hung it up.
I was 16 when the revolution came in 1979. I worried about my father all the time. By then he had become a colonel. He and others in high positions in the Shah’s army were arrested and sent to prison on the first day of the revolution. I didn’t go to school for four and a half months, when, one day, the headmaster called me to her office to ask me to take the national exam. At 8:00, outside her door, I heard on the radio that my father had been executed without trial.
When was the decision made to go to Sweden?
My family broke. My mother was 34 years old with three children and no money. We tried. But there was nothing left to fight for; I wasn’t motivated. For two semesters, I divided my time between a teacher training college, known for political activity, and the school of theatre, film, and screenwriting. But the schools were being closed. I worked in various firms and took part in demonstrations. Four years after the schools were closed, some students were summoned to universities, some to hearings. I was suspended and was going to be sent to court for further questioning because of political activity.
Now, I knew I needed to leave the country before I was summoned again. I took my sister and brother with me to Turkey. After three years there as asylum seekers, we came to Sweden. We ended up in a refugee facility in a country we had no connection to and had to start over, from scratch.
How did you end up making connections with the Swedish art scene?
I studied chemistry, physics, and social studies, and could apply for various university programmes. Instead, I applied to Domens Konstskola [an art college] in Gothenburg. There I studied painting, sculpture, and graphics for five years. The head of the school, Tullan Fink, was very important to me and supported my artistic practice. After my studies, I approached different galleries, but they all said that they choose their own artists, and that no one would buy my work because I have a foreign name.
I went to the gallery Mors Mössa. The gallerist said: “Your work is very good, you should show in bigger galleries, but I can’t show you.” So I contacted Folke Edwards at the Gothenburg Art Museum, and asked him to come to my studio. He came, thought it was good, and sent me to the curator, Lena Boëthius. She introduced me to Galleri Maneten, where I had a solo exhibition in 1998.
Two years later, I had a solo show at Röda Sten [Konsthall] in Gothenburg. After that, I participated in three exhibitions at the Contemporary Museum in Tehran.
You represented Iran at the 2005 Venice Biennial. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Around that time, I decided to move back home with my children to Iran. After three months in Tehran, I got a call from a gallerist. She gave me a week to come up with proposals for the Iranian Pavilion in Venice. I sat at home, thinking and drawing hair braids hanging from the ceiling. It resulted in the installation work Chelgis II (2005), consisting of four hair braids. They are six metres long and hang from the ceiling, penetrating a cement block. The block hangs in the hair, floating in the middle of the room. An earlier work, Chelgis I (2002), is a hair sculpture, where the figurative form represents a woman. Her hair goes around and all over her; it falls to the floor and crawls in under a glass dome.
Chelgis was based on what it means and what it feels like to be a woman in our time. I wanted to show the pressure women carry. Some women become part of the oppression, become oppressors themselves. But they are oppressed too. Men are oppressed too. Especially in our countries.
How was your work received in Venice?
At the opening of the biennial, the committee came and asked why we hadn’t submitted the catalogue; it could have won. “If we knew about your work, it would have been in the main pavilion.” That was enough for me, that they said that. Iran had no experience of similar procedures, and the catalogue should have been submitted to the jury six months before they selected the winner.
I’m going to make a giant leap in time to the present and the protests in Iran and Kurdistan. Your work is very topical in light of these new forces for change, Chelgis in particular being an effective illustration of that struggle.
For forty-four years we have been waiting for this. Today’s protests are a continuation of the struggle against the totalitarian regime. It is my struggle too. It is also my experience, being a girl and a woman in Iran, being oppressed. We feel the same oppression. Art was my cry, my attempt to resist. When I was young, there was no telephone contact. No one heard what was happening there [in Iran]. The connections between people were weak. We didn’t have the media exposure and the connections we have today. Art was my method. I believed change could happen if we started communicating across borders.
What is your response to what is happening now?
I’m thinking about how the Iranian revolution was not a revolution. It did not come from the people. It had been ordered from abroad. Today, the people are driving the protest movement. The young, the children of the post-revolution, cannot be linked to external influences in the way my generation was accused of. Young people today have no political ties to foreign countries; the resistance comes from within themselves.
Bringing people together is something you’ve worked on in a concrete way in your art. Could you talk about that?
During the student revolt in 2001, the regime’s slaughter of its own people did not reach the world. I wanted to intervene, so I called Iran – there was no time to prepare anything – and gave my phone to people on the street in Gothenburg, so that the person on the other end could talk about what was happening in Iran. But that wasn’t enough, so what could I do? I started working on Brunnen [The Well, 2008], based in the idea of an open direct link to a telephone number in Iran. I went to various cultural institutions in Gothenburg and Stockholm, but no one was interested. Finally, I was invited to be part of the SpotCity art festival, which allowed me to realise my idea of a well in Gothenburg and one in Tehran that would enable people in Sweden and Iran to talk to each other.
At first, everything went well, and the project was approved by an arts institution in Tehran. But then it was suddenly shut down. The Ministry of Culture was afraid that Iranians living in Sweden would be able to convey regime-critical propaganda. In addition, they said the work made fun of the story of “the last imam” who disappeared into a well. Later, Brunnen was shown in other places around the world, including Seoul, New Dehli, and Bangalore.
The idea of the well stems from an older work of yours?
Yes. In 1998, I showed the installation Exile (1998) at Galleri Maneten, as I mentioned earlier. Visitors were greeted by telephone signals from inside the gallery space. At the same time, a video started in another room, leading the viewer into an empty apartment. Everything looks seemingly normal, but the bedroom is in a mess with clothes spread everywhere. The camera takes us further into a closed room with a window with a view. Out of sight, a friend of mine sat randomly dialling different numbers and connecting the calls to the phone at the gallery. The phone rang until a visitor picked up the receiver. Then they could start talking to each other in whatever language or manner possible.
The work was based on my time at a refugee centre when I had just arrived in Sweden. My only contact with my mother was through a phone outside, where the temperature was 38 degrees below freezing. There was a war going on, and no one answered in Iran.
Your works emphasise the importance of dialogue. Which artists are you in dialogue with and feel a kinship to?
Mona Hatoum and Eva Hesse have always interested me, but I have also learned from poetry and poets in Iran.
The recurring alienation in your work can be interpreted in different ways. What has your impression of the artistic community in Sweden been?
Today, the art world is more open, and inexperienced artists can get access too. But back then, it was closed.
Your life story is interwoven with your practice. Is your art allowed to be separate and independent from personal narrative?
Exile is universal; people flee all the time. In the video work Exodus I (2012), suitcases float in the sea, sometimes sloshing here and there near the shore, and you don’t know where the bags are headed. The work takes its name from the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt sometime between 1450 and 1290 BCE. History repeats itself. Flight is an ancient movement. People leave everything: their homes, their family; some die along the way.
Even if your intention is to speak to a global experience of migration, I wonder if there has been a tendency, in Sweden, for your work to be interpreted solely in biographical terms, and if that has held you back – held back the art.
Yes. A lot of people aren’t interested in reading my art separately from my personal or cultural background. But my purpose is not me.
