About Shahrzad and the artist by Anindita Sinha Ali Ettehad is a Tehran based artist, art critic and art curator. His works originate from his roots and are related to Persian mysticism. He uses Old Persian paintings, classic Persian literature and old calligraphy in his works. Ali uses the Persian mysticism traditions as his grammar and tries to blend it with contemporary life issues like the socio‐political problems of the Middle East. Ali is constantly searching for cultural archetypes and ways of remarking to what he calls his nation’s socio‐political sicknesses. He elucidates these sicknesses as the lack of historical and cultural memory, where people live in the present but tend to forget their past. So he wants to remind the youth of their cultural moorings through his works. Ali feels that all old civilizations are facing this problem and trying to survive in today’s expanding culture of globalization. So, as an artist, and art curator, Ali has been focusing on ‘localization’ for the past eight years, working against ‘globalization’ of art and culture. Ali also explains that attending this workshop at Shilpgram in Udaipur becomes all the more relevant to him and his concerns for ‘localization’. To him, such workshops mean a lot as it showcases the rich cultural legacy that old cultures hold. In his words, “old cultures are not dead bodies, but such workshops are enough to bring them out of the dead.” Ali began his contribution to this workshop by his music performance titled Shahrzād based on the Arabian Nights ‘One thousand and one nights’, which is originally a collection of stories from the Middle East, in which a lady Shahrzād, who is the main character tells stories for her own survival. Metaphorically, the name Shahrzād, has been used by the artist Ali for his performance series to symbolically represent old cultures and civilizations trying to find a way to survive in a modern world. Ali portrays Shahrzād, by wearing a long black robe and covers his face with long black hair. He plays a musical instrument called Tanboure during his performance. Ali performs this series in many countries, except Iran from where he belongs. In each performance, Ali sings to people different stories with different context, most of which are based on Rumi’s Masnavi couplets/ songs. As he performs in different countries, he captures
his audiences’ reactions. However, in most countries the audience cannot understand these lyrics or their meaning which he sings in Farsi. So the audience ends up build their own interpretations and impressions, which is actually the idea behind which Ali performs. He just desires to show an old culture trying to survive, which is the crux of these series of works, as they relate to the survival story of Shahrzād. For the workshop, Ali created a 2‐D artwork as part of a bigger series of his ongoing works named ‘Purdahs of Silence’ from his Confidence series. All these Purdahs are the artist’s self portraits, a diary where his memories are captured. To create his artwork, he used the image of his performance in Shahrzād, and composed it with elements of ancient Persian illustration, old Persian calligraphy. The text associates with a contemporary event of Iran’s history. The theme behind “Purdahs of Silence” is the lonely existence that is enveloping the Middle East in an increasingly globalised world. Ali used the modern technology of digital compositing techniques in the platform of Adobe’s Photoshop, to create his contemporary 2‐D artwork. Ali reminds us that in the 16th and 17th century, European painters have also used emerging technologies to create their artworks. Just as the pin‐hole camera was a technology modern to their times, the computer is our modern technology.