It would be “a short-term excursion,” the president promised while speaking at a golf club in late winter. But now it has been six months since the United States and Israel attacked Iran, and there is no end in sight to the war. On Tuesday, the United States began new airstrikes, after a month of relative calm.
Last March, as Tehran endured daily aerial bombardment — as well as a continuing internet blackout that the Iranian regime imposed during last winter’s nationwide anti-government protests — the Los Angeles-based curator Aram Moshayedi began corresponding (as best as he could) with Iranian artists about a possible American exhibition.
The artists, needless to say, couldn’t travel. Their works couldn’t travel either. Any possible presentation would have to come together another way. And for “To Share a Stomach,” a quick-turn exhibition at the nonprofit art center The Brick, Moshayedi found an original alternative: have Los Angeles’s deep bench of artists (plus a few from outside the city) make the work for them.
The two dozen Iranian artists in this significant show are participating via the hands of strangers. They have entrusted their work to U.S.-based peers through instruction manuals and machine translations, through Zoom meetings and WeTransfer exchanges. The Americans who fabricated (or adapted) the art of their Iranian counterparts are “performing as proxies,” Moshayedi writes in an introduction here, “on behalf of those constrained by circumstances not of their making.”
The resultant show is shaggy, but that only adds to its emotional weight; the modesty of many of the works becomes a source of compassion. It has no political mission, unless it can be called political to remind audiences that Iranians and Americans are bound by the same human experience. In Los Angeles, home to the largest Persian community outside Iran, that should be a statement of the obvious.
This is a war exhibition in format but not in subject matter. While most of the Iranian artists in “To Share a Stomach” work in Tehran, their work looks at affairs across the country and throughout its history. In the wake of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, one of the largest anti-government protests since 1979, the documentary photographer Hashem Shakeri traveled to the drought-stricken borderlands of Iran and Pakistan, where he photographed a lone figure standing in the crook of a kahur tree. Paired with the Los Angeles painter Laura Owens, Shakeri has translated his photograph here into a large monochrome, the tree blood-red, the sky and sand a soft pink. The kahur tree thrives in arid regions. It is gnarled, desiccated, and still upright.
Other works of art here aren’t direct realizations so much as sequels, reconceptions, continuations. Meghdad Lorpour has been drawing hands lately; when the war began he left Tehran for his family’s home in the northern city of Sari, traveling with only a single brush and some other bare art supplies. One recent drawing is a weirdly tender image of wilted flowers grasped in a hand with, strange to say, seven fingers — each digit dainty, elongated, like the fingers in a Parmigianino painting. The Los Angeles-based draftsman Karl Haendel, who has previously made hyperrealistic images of impossible hands, responded to Lorpour’s work with a seven-figured hand of his own, large and starker than the original, the nails and veins picked out with the same surreal compassion.
Connections fail, and so does Google Translate, but no matter; this is a show about communicating with others, valuing them, loving them, even though you know you’ll never get it quite right. (The title, too, is a kind of sympathetic mistranslation; in the catalog, Moshayedi writes that “To Share a Stomach” is an Angeleno misreading of the Farsi word hamdeli, which means “empathy” but contains the root word for “stomach.”)
The painter Aidin Khankeshipour writes an email proposing a still life; the photographer Gina Osterloh arranges for him a horse skull, some flowers, a performer frozen like marble. The Iranian artist Maryam Mohry sends images of her spare watercolors of animals; Kate Costello, inspired by them, paints her own small scenes of bugs, birds and bears. Mimi Amini, in Tehran, sends a message on WhatsApp: What if we made a sword of clear glass, suspended in a vitrine? Kelly Akashi, in Los Angeles, helps her craft the glass blade, but instead it dangles in the air: a see-through sword of Damocles.
What is lost in translation is regained through trust, and the success of “To Share a Stomach” resides in the lenient and unspecified nature of these American-Iranian encounters. Individually, many works here make no impression. There are paintings and installations as minor and forgettable as in any contemporary group show, and why shouldn’t there be? Most of the U.S.-based artists did not know their Iranian partners before this show, and have of course never met in person. It isn’t what these joint creations look like that makes them notable, anyway; it’s how they affirm, through art, a few shared human ideals that war severs and that hard-line governments of various stripes abridge. That is a small way to defy a blockade, but it counts.
In another example of imagery circulating between West Asia and the West Coast, earlier this week the commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces posted an A.I.-generated video on a social network his media company owns. It depicted, as if from the open door of an American army helicopter, the Iranian energy hub of Kharg Island “being blown to smithereens!!!” An A.I.-produced image like this one has no roots, no referents; even death is just a product of pixelated noise. The artists in “To Share a Stomach,” by vibrant contrast, insist that images can still bind us together, and that war is not a rendering.
To Share a Stomach
Through Sept. 19, The Brick, 518 N. Western Ave, Los Angeles; 323-848-4140, the-brick.org.
