Aziz art may 2016

Aziz Art

Shirin Neshat

AnishKapoor

May 2016

FarsophoneLondon Legal Walk

Iran

Lake Urmia

http;//www.aziz-anzabi.com

Director: Aziz Anzabi

Editor and translator :

Asra Yaghoubi

Research: Zohreh Nazari

1.Shirin Neshat9. Competition10.Anish Kapoor17. Competition18.London Legal Walk20.Lake Urmia

Shirin Neshat born 1957 is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York City, known primarily for her work in film, video and photography.Her artwork centersaround the contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, antiquity and modernity, and bridging the spaces between these subjects. Neshat has been recognized countless times for her work, from winning the International Award of the XLVIII Venice Biennale in 1999,to winning the Silver Lion for best director at the 66th Venice Film Festival in 2009,to being named Artist of the Decade by Huffington Post critic G. Roger Denson.

BackgroundNeshat is the fourth of five children of wealthy parents, brought up in the religious town of Qazvin in north-western Iran under a "very warm, supportive Muslim family environment",where she learned traditional religious values through her maternal grandparents. Neshat's father was a physician and her mother a homemaker. Neshatsaid that her father, "fantasized

about the west, romanticized the west, and slowly rejected all of his own values; both my parents did. What happened, I think, was that their identity slowly dissolved, they exchanged it for comfort. It served their class”.As a part of Neshat’s“Westernization” she was enrolled in a Catholic boarding school in Tehran. Through her father’s acceptance of Western ideologies came an acceptance of a form of western feminism. Neshat’s father encouraged each of his daughters to “be an individual, to take risks, to learn, to see the world", and he sent his daughters as well as his sons to college to receive their higher education.

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After graduating school, she moved to New York and married a Korean curator, Kyong Park,who was the director and founder of Storefront for Art and Architecture, a non-profit organization.Neshat helped Park run the Storefront, where she was exposed to many different ideologies and it would become a place where she received a much needed experience with and exposure to concepts that would later become integral to her artwork.During this time, she did not make any serious attempts at creating art, and the few attempts were subsequently destroyed. In 1990, she returned to Iran. "It was probably one of the most shocking experiences that I have ever had. The difference between what I had remembered from the Iranian culture and what I was witnessing was enormous. The change was both frightening and exciting; I had never been in a country that was so ideologically based. Most noticeable, of course, was the change in people's physical appearance and public behavior

EducationIn 1975, Neshat left Iran to study art at UC Berkeley and completed her BA, MA and MFA.

WorkNeshat’s earliest works were photographs, such as the Unveiling (1993) and Women of Allah (1993–97) series, which explore notions of femininity in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and militancy in her home country. As a way of coping with the discrepancy between the culture that she was experiencing and that of the pre-revolution Iran in which she was raised, she began her first mature body of work, the Women of Allah series, portraits of women entirely overlaid by Persian calligraphy.Her work refers to the social, cultural and religious codes of Muslim societies and the complexity of certain oppositions, such as man and woman. Neshatoften emphasizes this theme showing two or more coordinated films concurrently,

creating stark visual contrasts through motifs such as light and dark, black and white, male and female. Neshat has also made more traditional narrative short films, such as Zarin.The work of Neshat addresses the social, political and psychological dimensions of women's experience in contemporary Islamic societies. Although Neshat actively resists stereotypical representations of Islam, her artistic objectives are not explicitly polemical. Rather, her work recognizes the complex intellectual and religious forces shaping the identity of Muslim women throughout the world. Using Persian poetry and calligraphy she examined concepts such as martyrdom, the space of exile, the issues of identity and femininity.In 2001-02, Neshat collaborated with singer Sussan Deyhim and created Logic of the Birds, which was produced by curator and art historian RoseLee Goldberg. The full length multimedia production premiered at the Lincoln CenterSummer Festival in 2002 and toured to the Walker Art Institutein Minneapolis and to Artangel in

incorporate music, Neshat uses sound to help create an emotionally evocative and beautiful piece that will resonate with viewers of both Eastern and Western cultures. In an interview with Bomb magazine in 2000, Neshat revealed, "Music becomes the soul, the personal, the intuitive, and neutralizes the sociopoliticalaspects of the work. This combination of image and music is meant to create an experience that moves the audience." Neshat was profiled in The New Yorker magazine on October 22, 2007.When Neshat first came to use film, she was influenced by the work of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.She directed several videos, among them Anchorage (1996) and, projected on two opposing walls: Shadow under the Web (1997), Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Soliloquy (1999). Neshat's recognition became more international in 1999, when she won the International Award of the XLVIII Venice Biennale with Turbulent and Rapture, a project involving almost 250 extras and produced by

the Galerie Jérôme de Noirmontwhich met with critical and public success after its worldwide avant-première at the Art Institute of Chicago in May 1999. With Rapture, Neshat tried for the first time to make pure photography with the intent of creating an aesthetic, poetic, and emotional shock. Games of Desire, a video and still-photographypiece, was displayed between September 3 and October 3 at the Gladstone Gallery in Brussels before moving in November to theGalerie Jérôme de Noirmont in Paris. The film, which is based in Laos, centers on a small group of elderly people who sing folk songs with sexual lyrics - a practice which had been nearing obsolescence.In 2009 she won the Silver Lion for best director at the 66th Venice Film Festival for her directorial debut Women Without Men,based on Shahrnush Parsipur'snovel of the same name. She said about the movie: "This has been a labour of love for six years.(...) This film speaks to the world and to my country."The film examines the 1953 British-American backed

coup, which supplanted Iran's democratically elected government with a monarchy.In July 2009 Neshat took part in a three-day hunger strike at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in protest of the 2009 Iranian presidential election

Exhibitions and film festivalsSince her first solo exhibition, at Franklin Furnace in New York in 1993, Neshat has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002); Castello diRivoli, Turin; Dallas Museum of Art (2000); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Serpentine Gallery, London; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, León; and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2005). In 2008, her solo exhibition “Women Without Men” opened at the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark, and traveled to the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens

, and to the Kulturhuset, Stockholm. She was included in Prospect.1, the 2008 New Orleans Biennial, documenta XI, the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and the 1999 Venice Biennale. In 2012 ShirinNeshat had a Solo Exhibition in Singapore, Game of Desire at Art Plural Gallery.A major retrospective of Neshat’s work, organized by the Detroit Instituteof Arts, was scheduled to open in 2013.Since 2000 Neshat has also participated in film festivals, including the Telluride Film Festival (2000), Chicago International Film Festival (2001) San Francisco International Film Festival (2001), Locarno International Film Festival (2002), Tribeca Film Festival (2003), Sundance Film Festival (2003), and Cannes Film Festival (2008).In 2013 she was a member of the jury at the 63rd Berlin International Film FestivalRecognitionNeshat was artist in residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts (2000) and at MASS MoCA (2001). In 2004 she was awarded an

honorary professorship at the Universität der Künste, Berlin In 2006 she was awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, one of the richest prizes in the arts, given annually to “a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.”In 2010 Neshat was named Artist of the Decade by Huffington Post critic G. Roger Denson, for "the degree to which world events have more than met the artist in making her art chronically relevant to an increasingly global culture," for reflecting "the ideological war being waged between Islam and the secular world over matters of gender, religion, and democracy," and because "the impact of her work far transcends the realms of art in reflecting the most vital and far-reaching struggle to assert human rights."In 2015 Neshat was selected and photographed by Annie Leibovitz as part of the 43rd Pirelli Calendar which celebrated some of the world's most inspiring women.

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Sir Anish KapoorCBE RA born 12 March 1954 is a British-Indian sculptor. Born in Bombay,Kapoor has lived and worked in London since the early 1970s when he moved to study art, first at the Hornsey College of Art and later at the Chelsea School of Art and Design.He represented Britain in the XLIV Venice Biennale in 1990, when he was awarded the Premio Duemila Prize. In 1991 he received the Turner Prize and in 2002 received the Unilever Commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Notable public sculptures include Cloud Gate (colloquially known as "the Bean") in Chicago's Millennium Park; Sky Mirror, exhibited at the Rockefeller Center in New York City in 2006 and Kensington Gardens in London in 2010; Temenos, at Middlehaven, Middlesbrough; Leviathan, at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2011; and ArcelorMittal Orbit, commissioned as a permanent artwork for London's Olympic Park and completed in 2012.Kapoor received a Knighthood in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to visual arts. He was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Oxford in 2014.In 2012 he was awarded PadmaBhushan by Congress led Indian government which is India's 3rd highest civilian award.

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CareerAnish Kapoor became known in the 1980s for his geometric or biomorphic sculptures made using simple materials such as granite, limestone, marble, pigment, and plaster.These early sculptures are frequently simple, curved forms, usually monochromatic and brightly coloured, using powder pigment to define and permeate the form. "While making the pigment pieces, it occurred to me that they all form themselves out of each other. So I decided to give them a generic title,

A Thousand Names, implying infinity, a thousand being a symbolic number. The powder works sat on the floor or projected from the wall. The powder on the floor defines the surface of the floor and the objects appear to be partially submerged, like icebergs. That seems to fit inside the idea of something being partially there." Such use of pigment characterised his first high-profile exhibit as part of the New Sculpture exhibition at the Hayward Gallery London in 1978.In the late 1980s and 1990s, he

was acclaimed for his explorations of matter and non-matter, specifically evoking the void in both free-standing sculptural works and ambitious installations. Many of his sculptures seem to recede into the distance, disappear into the ground or distort the space around them. In 1987, he began working in stone. His later stone works are made of solid, quarried stone, many of which have carved apertures and cavities, often alluding to, and playing with dualities (earth-sky, matter-spirit, lightness-darkness, visible-invisible, conscious-unconscious, male-female, and body-mind). "In the end, I’m talking about myself. And thinking about making nothing, which I see as a void. But then that’s something, even though it really is nothing."Since 1995, he has worked with the highly reflective surface of polished stainless steel. These works are mirror-like, reflecting or distorting the viewer and surroundings. Over the course of the following decade Kapoor's sculptures ventured into more ambitious manipulations of form and space. He produced a number of large works, including Taratantara (1999)

A35-metre-high piece installed in the Baltic Flour Mills in Gateshead, England, before renovation began there; and Marsyas (2002), a large work consisting of three steel rings joined by a single span of PVC membrane that reached end to# end of the 3,400-square-foot(320 m2) Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. Kapoor's Eye in Stone (Norwegian: Øye i stein) is permanently placed at the shore of the fjord in Lødingen in northern Norway as part of ArtscapeNordland. In 2000, one of Kapoor'sworks, Parabolic Waters, consisting of rapidly rotating coloured water, wasshown outside the Millennium Dome in London.

The use of red wax is also part of his repertoire, evocative of flesh, blood, and transfiguration. In 2007, he showed Svayambh (which translated from Sanskrit means "self-generated"), a 1.5-metre block of red wax that moved on rails through the Nantes Muséedes Beaux-Arts as part of the Biennale estuaire; this piece was shown again in a major show at the Haus Der Kunst in Munich and in

2009at the Royal Academy in London.Some his work blurs the boundaries between architecture and art. In 2008, Kapoor created Memory in Berlin and New York for the Guggenheim Foundation, his first piece in Cor-Ten, which is formulated to produce a protective coating of rust.Weighing 24 tons and made up of 156 parts, it calls to mind Richard Serra’s huge, rusty steel works, which also invite viewers into perceptually confounding interiors.

In 2009, Kapoor became the first Guest Artistic Director of Brighton Festival. Kapoor installed four sculptures during the festival: Sky Mirror at Brighton Pavilion gardens; C-Curve at The Chattri, Blood Relations (a collaboration with author Salman Rushdie); and 1000 Names, both at Fabrica. He also created a large site-specific work titled The Dismemberment of Jeanne d’Arc and a performance-based installation: Imagined Monochrome.The public response was so overwhelming that police had to re-divert traffic around Curve at the Chattri and exercise crowd control.

In September 2009, Kapoor wasthe first living artist to have a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. As well as surveying his career to date, the show also included new works. On display were Non-Object mirror works, cement sculptures previously unseen, and Shooting into the Corner,a cannon that fires pelletsof wax into the corner of the gallery. Previously shown at MAK, Vienna, in January 2009, it is a work with dramatic presenceand associations and also continues Kapoor's interest in the self-made object, as the wax builds up on the walls and floor of the gallery the work slowly oozes out its form.In spring 2011, Kapoor's work, Leviathan,was the annual Monumenta installation for the Grand Palais in Paris. Kapoordescribed the work as: "A single object, a single form, a single colour...My ambition is to create a space with in a space that responds to the height and luminosity of the Nave at the Grand Palais. Visitors will be invited to walk inside the work, to immerse themselves in colour, and it will, I

hope, be a contemplative and poetic experience."In 2011, Kapoor exhibited Dirty Corner at the Fabbrica del Vaporein Milan.Fully occupying the site's "cathedral" space, the work consists of a huge steel volume, 60 metres long and 8 metres high, that visitors enter. Inside, they gradually lose their perception of space, as it gets progressively darker and darker until there is no light, forcing people to use their other senses to guide them through the space. The entrance of the tunnel is goblet-shaped, featuring an interior and exterior surface that is circular, making minimal contact with the ground. Over the course of the exhibition, the work was progressively covered by some 160 cubic metres of earth by a large mechanical device, forming a sharp mountain of dirt which the tunnel appears to be running through.

Public commissionsTurning the World Upside Down, Israel Museum, 2010

Kapoor's earliest public commissions include the Cast Iron Mountain at the Tachikawa Art Project in Japan, as well as an untitled 1995 piece installed at Toronto's Simcoe Place resembling mountain peaks. In 2001, Sky Mirror, a large mirror piece that reflects the sky and surroundings, was commissioned for a site outside the Nottingham Playhouse. Since 2006, Cloud Gate, a 110-ton stainless steel sculpture with a mirror finish, has been permanently installed in Millennium Park in Chicago. Viewers are able to walk beneath the sculpture and look up into an "omphalos" or navel above them.In the autumn of 2006, a second 10-metre Sky Mirror, was installed at Rockefeller Center, New York City. This work was later exhibited in Kensington Gardens in 2010 as part of the show Turning the World Upside Down, along with three other major mirror works.ArcelorMittal Orbit, London Olympic Park, 2012In 2009, Kapoor created the permanent, site-specific work Earth Cinema for Pollino National Park, the largest national park

in Italy, as part of the project ArtePollino – Another South.Kapoor's work, Cinema diTerra (Earth Cinema), is a 45m long, 3m wide and 7m deep cut into the landscape made from concrete and earth.People can enter from both sides and walk along it, viewing the earth void within.Cinema di Terra officially opened to public in September 2009.Kapoor was also commissioned by Tees Valley Regeneration (TVR) to produce five pieces of public art, collectively known as the Tees Valley Giants.Thefirst of these sculptures, Tememos, was unveiled to the public in June 2010. Temenos stands 50 metres high and is 110 metres in length. A steel wire mesh pulled taught between two enormous steel hoops, it remains an ethereal and an uncertain form despite its colossal scale.In 2010, Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem was commissioned and installed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The sculpture is described as a "16-foot tall polished-steel hourglass " and it "reflects and reverses the Jerusalem sky and the museum's landscape, a likely reference to the city's duality of celestial and earthly, holy and profane".

Cloud Gate at the Millennium Park, ChicagoAlso in June, Kapoor's Orbit was announced as the winning proposal for an artwork for the 2012 Olympic Games. The Greater London Authority selectedKapoor's sculpture from a shortlist of five artists as the permanent artwork for the Olympic Park. At 115 metres tall, Orbit is the tallest sculpture in the UK.

Soon to be completed is a granite monument to commemorate the British victimsof 9/11 in New York’s Hanover Square.When asked if engagement with

people and places is the key to successful public art, Kapoor said,

“I’m thinking about the mythical wonders of the world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. It’s as if the collective will comes up with something that has resonance on an individual level and so becomes mythic. I can claim to take that as a model for a way of thinking. Art can do it, and I’m going to have a damn good go. I want to occupy the territory, but the territory is an idea and a way of thinking as much as a context that generates objects.

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http://www.farsophone.org.uk

Lake Urmia is an endorheic saltlake in Iranian Azerbaijan, Iran and near Iran's border with Turkey.Thelake is between the provinces of East Azerbaijan and West Azerbaijan in Iran, and west of the southern portion of the Caspian Sea. At its full size, it was the largest lake in the Middle East and the sixth largest saltwater lake on earth with a surface area of approximately 5,200 km² (2,000 mile²), 140 km(87 mi) length, 55 km (34 mi) width, and 16 m (52 ft) depth.[5] The lake has shrunk to 10% of its former size due to damming of the rivers that flow into it andpumping of groundwater fromthe area.Lake Urmia, along with its once approximately 102 islands, are protected as a national park by the Iranian Department of Environment.

EcologyLake Urmia is located in Iran UNESCO Biosphere Reserves in IranSee also: Geography of Iran and Environmental issues in IranPalaeoecologyA palynological investigation on

long cores from Lake Urmia has revealed a nearly 200 kyr record of vegetation and lake level changes. The vegetation has changed from the Artemisia/grass steppes during the glacial/stadial periods to oak-juniper steppe-forests during the interglacial/interstadial periods. The lake seems to have had a complex hydrological history and its water levels have greatly fluctuated in the geological history. Very high lake levels have been suggested for some time intervals during the two last glacial periods as well as during both the Last Interglacial as well as the Holocene. Lowest lake levels have occurred during the last glacial periods.

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Modern ecologyLake Urmia is home to some 212 species of birds, 41 reptiles, 7 amphibians, and 27 species of mammals, including the Iranian yellow deer. It is an internationally registered protected area as both a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and a Ramsar site. The Iranian Dept. of Environment has designated most of the lake as a National Park.The lake is marked by more than a hundred small, rocky islands, which serve as stopover points during the migrations of several wild birds including flamingos, pelicans, spoonbills, ibises, storks, shelducks, avocets, stilts, and gulls. A recent drought has significantly decreased the annual amount of water the lake receives. This in turn has increased the salinity of the lake's water, lowering the lake viability as home to thousands of migratory birds including the large flamingo populations. The salinity has particularly increased in the half of the lake north of the causeway.By virtue of its high salinity, the lake no longer sustains any fish species. Nonetheless, Lake Urmia is considered a significant natural habitat of Artemia, which serve as

food source for the migratory birds such as flamingos.In early 2013, the then-head of the Iranian ArtemiaResearch Center was quoted that Artemia Urmiana had gone extinct due to the drastic increases in salinity. However this assessment has been contradicted.Falling level and increasing salinityThe lake is a major barrier between two of the most important cities in West Azerbaijan and East Azerbaijan provinces, Urmia and Tabriz. A project to build a highway across the lake was initiated in the 1970s but was abandoned after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, having finished a 15 km causeway with an unbridged gap. The project was revived in the early 2000s, and was completed in November 2008 with the opening of the 1.5 km UrmiaLake Bridge across the remaining gap.The highly saline environment is already heavily rusting the steel on the bridge despite anticorrosion treatment. Experts have warned that the construction of the causeway and bridge, together with a series of ecological factors, will eventually lead to the drying up of the lake

turning it into a salt marsh which will directly affect the climate of the region.Lake Urmia has been shrinking for a long time, with an annual evaporation rate of 0.6m to 1m(24 to 39 inches). Although measures are now being taken to reverse the trend the lake has shrunk by 60% and could disappear entirely.Only 5% of the lake's water remains.

Bridge construction over Lake Urmia in 2005On 2 August 2012, Mohammad-Javad Mohammadizadeh, the head of Iran's Environment Protection Organization, announced that Armenia has agreed ontransferring water from Armenia to counter the critical fall in Lake Urmia's water levels, remarking that "hot weather and a lack of precipitation have brought the lake to its lowest water levels ever recorded". He added that recovery plans for the lake include the transfer of water from Eastern Azerbaijan Province. Previously, Iranian authorities had announced a plan to transfer water from the Aras River, which borders Iran and

Azerbaijan; the 950-billion-toman plan was abandoned due to Azerbaijan's objections.In July 2014, Iran President Hassan Rouhani approved plans for a 14 trillion rial program (over $500 million) in the first year of a recovery plan. The money is supposed to be used for water management, reducing farmer's water use, and environmental restoration. Several months earlier, in March 2014, Iran's Department of Environment and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) issued a plan to save the lake and the nearby wetland, which called for spending $225 million in the first year and $1.3 billion overall for restoration.The Silveh Dam in PiranshahrCounty should be complete in 2015. Through a tunnel and canals it will transfer up to 121,700,000 m3 (98,700 acre·ft) of water from the Lavin River in the Little Zabbasin to Lake Urmia basin annually.In 2015, president Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet approved $660 million for better irrigation systems and steps to combat desertification.

Environmental protestsThe prospect that Lake Urmia may dry up entirely has drawn protests in Iran and abroad, directed at both the regional and national governments.

Desalting of Urmia LakeProtests flared in late August 2011 after the Iranian parliament voted not to provide funds to channel water from the Araz River to raise the lake level. Apparently, parliament proposed instead to relocate people living around Lake Urmia.

More than 30 activists were detained on 24 August 2011 during an iftar meal.On 25 August, several soccer fans were detained before and after the Tabriz derby match between Tractor Sazi F.C. and Shahrdari Tabriz F.C.. for shouting slogans in favor of protecting the lake, including"Lake Urmia is dying, the Majlis[parliament] orders its execution". In the absence of a right to protest publicly in Iran, protesters have incorporated their messages into chants at football matches.

Further demonstrations took place in the streets of Tabriz and Urmiaon 27 August and 3 September 2011.Amateur video from these events showed riot police on motorcycles attacking apparently peaceful protesters.According to the governor of West Azerbaijan, at least 60 supporters of the lake were arrested in Urmia and dozens in Tabriz because they had not applied for a permit to organize a demonstration.

On May 5, 2016, Leonardo Di Caprio posted a photo of "a dilapidated ship dock remains on dried up Lake Urmia" on his Instagram page stating: "It used to be the biggest salt lake in the Middle East, but it now contains five percent of the amount of water it did two decades ago due to climate change, dam construction and decrease in precipitiation."

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