THE GALLERY BEYOND A GALLERY – AARAN GALLERY, TEHRAN, IRAN
M.R.BAHMANPOUR (NAZAR PUBLISHING HOUSE TEHRAN)

At this present time, to be a gallery owner in Iran performs a task beyond what is conventionally imagined. Even though gallery owners, similar to other professionals, generally have had an economic perspective towards their function, the socio-political developments in Iran have placed a larger responsibility on their shoulders, which is the accompaniment and advancement of the creative contemporary artistic currents of the country. This has typically not been a duty delegated to the commercial, marketing and sales institutions of the arts.

From the 1960s, Iranian contemporary arts currents grew in relation to the new European and American art movements.1 These currents required a new platform for their own definition and introduction, and in retrospect, in the past 50 years; it was what the museums had done, by being a vanguard in the discovery of new contemporary talents and in the creation of a new space for the modern artists. To the same degree, museums had also discovered that avant-garde artists had facilitated the possibility for the creation of new artworks. Hence, the contemporary arts grew expansively and museum curators, not to be outpaced in the field of contemporary arts, had always competed in the discovery of new creative talents.

Even though great artists grow in socio-cultural spaces, in the history of the contemporary arts, their works gains recognition through museums. This process, however, in today’s Iran has taken a different path. Gallery owners in Iran have accepted all the responsibilities typically afforded by the “modern art” or the “contemporary art” museums, and in the midst of it all, Aaran Gallery has been a vanguard in the creation of the space for the advancement of the contemporary arts, similar to the role played by some of the world’s great cultural centres, such as the George Pompidou Cultural Center in Paris in 1970s.

Aaran Gallery, through the selection of some courageous Iranian artists, opened new doors to the promotion of the contemporary arts that only existed desultorily in some corners of Tehran. The belief that the Iranian contemporary arts movement had been transformed and that it had entered a new era, was proven through Aaran Gallery’s exhibitions. This gallery gave recognition to a contemporary Iranian art whose artists were mostly young, and were primarily from a generation born after the 1979 revolution. Many of these young artists were looked upon unfavorably by Iran’s art critics and by promoting and exhibiting their works at Aaran Gallery, they needed the opportunity for the introduction of these artists and for the advancement of their works were provided. The opening of the Aaran Gallery, undoubtedly, should be viewed as an important turning point in the history and culture of gallery ownership in Iran. This gallery created the confidence and the belief in the minds of many art lovers about the opening and ownership of modern art galleries in today’s Iran.

This confidence has engendered opening of new larger galleries in Tehran in comparison to the older ones, and has shifted the tendency of the newly established galleries towards the contemporary arts and to the new perspectives in arts. Aaran Gallery has indisputably been influential in this trend, and the young and knowledgeable director of the gallery, similar to a modern arts museum curator, has managed to significantly assist the Iranian contemporary art currents.

1 Millet L’art contemporain Histoire et geographie
In the 1960s, many important art movements and styles found the appropriate conditions of development: pop art, neo-realism, neo-activism, motion art, earth art, body art, etc. which were all different forms of arts and incorporated unconventional media and matter, whether manufactured items, natural resources, perishables, or even attention to the body of the artist, and eventually they were classified as the virtual arts, and included the most provocative, deceiving, and unattainable styles. These movements either managed to capture the audience, or became misanthropic.


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