Azadeh Elmizadeh, A Hundred Times, Why?

In 1544 the embattled Mughal Emperor Humayun set out from Delhi to the court of the Safavid Shah Tahmasp I in Tabriz. In addition to securing the Shah’s help in recapturing his lost Kingdom, the Mughal Emperor arranged for the relocation of painters from the studio-atelier in Tabriz to his own court in Delhi. This was the first of three waves of artist migrations between 1544 and 1585, from Iran to India, that gave rise to the Mughal School of Painting. Having commissioned two of the finest Persian manuscripts ever made— copies of the Shahnameh by Firdawsī and the Khamsa by Nizami—the Shah’s reputation as a major patron of the arts was assured. In time, Humayun and his successors would boast equally impressive accomplishments. Such traffic in artists, artworks, and motifs in the history of Islamic art was, and still is, the rule. 

With their hazy and whimsical colouring, Azadeh Elmizadeh’s works recall the atmospheric richness of those Safavid masterpieces. Her modus operandi as well—moving from Persian folk tales and poetry, from text to images—places her work in relation to the manuscript tradition. The gently evocative Three Shape Shifters and a Landscape (2018) is a series of collage works produced in the midst of intercity travel through her native Iran. It combines fragments of earlier paintings to capture scenes and characters from folktales familiar to Elmizadeh from her childhood, and was revisited in an audio collection during her travels. The titular shapeshifters are characters who, a little like the itinerant artist herself, move through a landscape in search of adequate forms for themselves. During and after her MFA at Guelph, the painter sought such forms in the corpus of Persian miniature paintings. 

On first viewing the series featured here, A Hundred Times, Why? (2020), I thought I recognized a motif from a page of Tahmasp I’s iconic Khamsa. The horse and rider carried on a burst of flame reminded me of an image of the Prophet Muhammad’s ascension to Heaven on his steed Buraq. Elmizadeh’s image reiterated on one-hundred silks is, however, a pre-Islamic one, taken from the story of Siyavash in Firdawsī’s Shahnameh. As the story goes, Siyavash is forced to prove his innocence after a false accusation by riding on his black stallion through flames, repeatedly. The Kafkaesque trial is doomed from the outset, and Siyavash dies without having cleared his name. Elmizadeh pictures the effort as a meditative or a cathartic one, carried on in spite of its futility. In some of the panels the horse’s image is evacuated, or doubled in a hallucinogenic manner, and the tortured rider is more often released from the image than fixed within it. Text fragments from the story included along the bottom edge of a few silks signal the elemental power of the myth with references to tears, smoke, earth, and radiant flames. These materials, it seems, or suggestions of them in washes of colour and rhythmic patterning, replace the narrative as the primary content of the artwork. In this way, the series is addressed to the eye, the mind, and the body rather than a particular, Farsi-speaking, Iranian, or Islamic audience. 

The Persian manuscript tradition, in its Islamic and pre-Islamic aspects, is conjured by this work, but it’s also merged with others. The grid arrangement recalls the cool Conceptualism of Sol LeWitt or the whispering Minimalism of Agnes Martin. Elmizadeh’s carefully layered treatment of colour pays homage to the colour field painting of Helen Frankenthaler and the brooding tones of Mark Rothko. She names these last three artists, and others like Bonnard, as influences that move her oeuvre well beyond the sphere of Iranian—or more broadly Islamic—literary and visual arts. What’s perhaps most compelling about this range of references in the work is that while it is generated through a focused study of the manuscript tradition, and made coherent through such study, it isn’t hemmed in by the national, ethnic, or religious identities associated with that tradition. Elmizadeh’s work is instructive in this way, restoring the porousness and cross-cultural richness of Iranian and Islamic literary and visual arts that are very often denied in both popular and academic representations of them. The work brings what are lazily called the West and the East into a dialogue but without rendering those terms in a binary, geopolitical relation. Indeed, the coordinates of the work are personal, artistic, literary, and embodied or sensory, which is to say, they are multiple and shifting rather than fixed and binary. 

On the heels of a well-deserved Joseph Plaskett Award in Painting, Elmizadeh plans to extend her study of Persian paintings with visits to collections in London, Berlin, and Paris. As she notes, the dispersal of Persian paintings across Europe harbours an opportunity to bring them into conversation with various twentieth-century Modernist idioms. Pages from the studios of Tabriz kept in European collections are, for her, not exiles but travellers, just as the artists who painted them were in their time. Even before this scattering of manuscript paintings in an international market, the single-page work, with its putative Western values of individualism and techniques of cast shadows and single-point perspective, emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a choice form for artists across the Islamic world. Elmizadeh’s arrangement of single-silk sheets here, in an iterative structure, captures this home-grown aspect of the tradition as well. Nevertheless, the fate of such paintings is very often described as a sad one. Tahmasp I’s Shahnameh, most notoriously, was acquired in 1903 by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, then sold in 1959 to the American collector Arthur Haughton before being dismembered into individual pages and sold again at auction. A limited repatriation of the remains of the two-volume manuscript was secured in 1994 when Haughton’s heirs swapped 118 of the original 258 illustrations for a work by the Dutch-American Willem de Kooning that the Iranian government found offensive. Through Elmizadeh’s work, there is an opportunity to register the injustice of such a proprietary treatment of these masterpieces, while still granting that their displacement enriches their biographies. After all, it is in this circumstance uniquely that de Kooning may cross paths with the heroes of the Shahnameh. Siyavash’s meeting with Frankenthaler and Rothko in Elmizadeh’s images too might well be viewed in this way. 

For more on Azadeh Elmizadeh’s work, see: https://azadehelmizadeh.com/ 

Tammer El-Sheikh is an Assistant Professor of Art History at York University. His work has focused on Contemporary art in Canada, and art in the Middle East and its diasporas. He has contributed essays and reviews to Canadian Art, Parachute, C Magazine, Border Crossings, ETC Magazine, Akimbo.ca, and several exhibition catalogues. His scholarly writing has appeared in ARTMargins and Arab Studies Journal. 

This article is published in issue 38.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue