Rolling blunts with Iranian currency, appropriating coveted Iranian paintings with tattoos and bottles of whiskey, and turning the chador into a sexy, sensuously revealing cloth, San Francisco-based artist Taravat Talepasand loves to play.
Taravat means “freshness” in Arabic. By mixing and refreshing cultural stereotypes and signifiers, Talepasand works with what she calls her “double life,” playing with her position as a dual citizen: somewhere between Iran and the US, between the traditional and the contemporary aspects of both,and at times, between being an object of desire and an object of political paranoia.
Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Taravat Talepasand’s cultural duality began as early as the year she was born—1979. “That was the year of the Iranian revolution,” she says. “And that, in some ways, is the basis for all my work.”
Portland is a far cry from Tehran. But in her teenage years, Talepasand wasn’t making work about her position; she was living it. Her neighborhood was predominantly white with a suburban aesthetic, though there was an Iranian community that was strong and ever present. She snuck out, drank, skateboarded, played piano, and then came home to speak Farsi and eat Persian food with her family. “Don’t get me wrong—we ate hot dogs and hamburgers on the weekends, we had barbecues,” Talepasand assures, “but we ate most meals on the floor on a sofreh, even though we had a beautiful dining room table in the next room.”
Talepasand began her art career in earnest at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she started in architecture, switched to fashion, and finally, settled into an illustration major. It was through the rigorous technical training in the illustration program where Talepasand began to develop her aesthetic. Playing with the lines between perception and identity, Talepasand had begun the exercise of taking iconic and symbolic imagery and subverting it, flipping it on its head, making it crude, distasteful, taboo, and sexual.
“I took illustration classes, which I pretty much always failed. For example, an assignment might be to take a character from pop culture that everyone would recognize, and change it, flip it around.” However, when she showed up to class with “an impeccably painted Sesame Street Gang, all the characters portrayed accurately, except that Bert and Ernie were fucking each other in the ass,” that was not what they had in mind. “I had my own way of depicting things,” she says with a coy smile. “I wanted to work on my own terms.”
When Talepasand visited Iran, her work changed. She was 24, and getting ready to start her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. While she was in Iran, she apprenticed under a traditional miniature painter for a period that was supposed to be three months. After three days, he felt that he had taught her everything she needed to know. “He would make me copy miniatures, and I would copy them, but I would mess with the scene, with the idea.” Here, Talepasand developed an admiration for traditional Qajar dynasty miniature paintings, scenes of men and women in
embrace, bare breasted, and eroticized. These paintings have been censored by passing regimes; their sexuality covered up, scratched off, or scraped away. Talepasand was determined to bring these violated works back to life, albeit on her own terms. She copied these scenes with subverted precision, using the traditional and tedious methods of egg tempera. A woman’s reflection in the
mirror appears male; a bottle of whiskey replaces a bottle of wine. And, in recent work, a red chador, which normally conceals the female body, exposes the thighs and underwear of Talepasand herself, who sits with her legs spread to the viewer. “I realized I look it, I speak it, I am it—I have to make work on it.”
Though this practice came easy while she was in Iran, coming back to the US proved diffi cult in this regard. “I didn’t want to pull my Iranian card,” she explains. “I wanted to be honest about it.” It was her delve into self-portraiture that allowed her to embrace this change in her work—she could speak personally, not generally, about cultural divides and stigmas, the cosmopolitan and traditional aspects of her experience, and play with herself the same way she had been playing with other imagery. “When I am drawing, I know that I am drawing myself, but I get carried away sometimes, and maybe fantasize about the way I look to others.” By re-positioning herself into these scenes, repainting them, and playing with their symbolism, she is again staging a “double-life” for these censored works, which mirrors her own.
And the blunts? In her most recent trip to Iran last summer, she collected a stack of currency which depicts the late Muslim cleric and political leader Ayatollah Khomeini. “It’s against the law to cut up money anywhere in the world; it’s super against the law to cut up money with the Ayatollah Khomeini on it.” She intends to roll these into blunts proper and somehow get them to a 2008 exhibition in New York without being arrested.
Though she loves how her combination of imagery tests the limits of cultural comfort, the rebellion against tradition is ultimately not her goal. “First of all, these poses are very old—they’ve already happened. I am doing something that’s already been painted. It’s not necessarily a flip-off to Iran or a flip-off to America.” Instead, it’s a matter of exposure: loosening the threat of imagery, and perhaps subsequently, the threat of cultural difference.