Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet

Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet' tells the story of the evolution of Iranian contemporary art by examining the work of 30 artists.This is art where the ills of internal politics remain astutely masked below a layer of ornamentation, poetry, or humor. What unites the disparate works into a coherent theme is the artists coping mechanisms, which consist of subversive critique, quiet rebellion, humor, mysticism, and poetryhence the publications title. The subtitle 'Contemporary Persians' is also a reference to a strategy of survival, this one used by Iranians in the United States during the early 2000s; at a time when Iranians were identified with hostage takers and terrorists, they adopted the identity Persians, which remained free of such associations. Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet brings together the work of a number of well-known artists, including Afruz Amighi, whose work is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Monir Farmanfarmaian, who received a major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 2015, amongst many others?Shiva Ahmadi, Shirin Aliabadi, Mahmoud Bakhshi, Shadi Ghadirian, Khosrow Hassanzadeh, Shirazeh Houshiary, Farhad Moshiri, Parviz Tanavoli.