Over the past five decades, artist Fereydoun Ave (b. 1945, Tehran; lives in Paris) has assembled a singular collection of modern and contemporary Iranian art inflected by personal history, friendship, sensibility, and circumstance. On returning to Iran in 1970 after years of education abroad, Ave worked as a curator and designer at Tehran’s Iran-America Society Cultural Center, where he organized groundbreaking exhibitions of both Iranian and international artists. Around the same time, he began collecting art with money borrowed from his grandmother. He continued to collect over the years, while he moved on to positions at consequential Tehran arts institutions, including the avant-garde Theater Workshop (Kargah-e Namayesh), where he worked as a designer, and the Zand Gallery, where he served as artistic director.
After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Ave stayed behind as droves of his compatriots left the country. In the early 1980s, he launched 13 Vanak, an independent art space for emerging Iranian artists in a disused garden shed in an iconic Tehran square. The nimble and irreverent exhibitions at 13 Vanak attracted diverse audiences, including, on occasion, befuddled agents of the state. Though 13 Vanak closed in 2009, Ave has continued to mentor successive generations of artists both in and outside Iran.
Ave, who is an accomplished artist himself, serves as both subject and cipher of this presentation, a vantage onto the fascinating—and contested—cultural history of 20th- and 21st-century Iran. Included in the presentation are a selection of works from his Rostam series. The artist has said,
“I started reading the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, after the revolution. I guess I was desperately looking for something I could relate to. I wasn’t a Muslim, so I couldn’t identify with the Islamic side. I was not a Republican, so I couldn’t identify with the Republic. I had to find something that I could identify with, and I suppose that ended up being ancient Iranian mythology. I was trying to understand this new macho mystique around me—why women were being treated the way they were, while men were just strutting about. The only way to protect the macho mystique was to put women under a veil, accuse them of adultery, make them villains and temptresses, and so on. I began to think of it as a sort of paper-thin fragility; here were men who were breaking their backs to protect this image of themselves as chivalrous guardians. Which brought me to the mythical story of Rostam in the Shahnameh, about a king who unknowingly ends his own line by killing his only son. I started using this image of a famous wrestler named Abbas Jadidi in my work as a sort of contemporary Rostam, in part because the only thing that the Islamic Republic didn’t censor, visually, was sports. Wrestling is the national sport of Iran, after all. It’s an iconic, almost mystical image—a picture of male fragility, if you will.”
