The Museum of Contemporary Art was opened in 1977, during the rule of the former Shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. His wife, Farah Pahlavi, was one of the most famous connoisseurs of paintings and contemporary arts. Through the museum, I wanted to turn Tehran into a global cultural attraction.
But the museum was closed two years later, in 1979, with the outbreak of the revolution, and its doors remained closed until last June, when it reopened at the end of the reformist President Hassan Rouhani’s rule.
The museum is located meters from Vali Asr Street, one of the most dense and popular streets of the Iranian capital, Tehran. Despite the crowdedness of the area, this did not prevent connoisseurs of contemporary art from flocking to it, especially by students and intellectuals.
Nazleen Borhami, a student at the Faculty of Arts at Tehran University, told Sky News Arabia that the museum gives her and dozens of her friends and her generation an “alternative space” to what is in the country.
“Inside the Museum of Contemporary Art, we can find what is similar to us in arts, literature and cultures, outside of all the harshness of the city streets,” she says.
She added, “This museum connects us to what is going on and what the world produces, and it is perhaps the only window available to us as Iranian youths, who are watching everything, including our pages on social media.”
By contrast, hardliners in Iran threaten to close the Museum of Contemporary Art. Among them, the Minister of Culture, Mohammad Mehdi Esmaili, who stated that with the closure of the museum, the minister is known to have criticized what he describes as the “deviation and secularism” of the cultural scene in Iran.
The museum includes many paintings that provoke the ire of hardliners in Iran, such as a painting prostrating to Farah, the wife of the former Shah of Iran, by international artist Andy Warhol.
Art critic Hajar Omrani explained in an interview with “Sky News Arabia” the reasons for the Iranian authorities’ fears of the museum.
Omrani says: “The rulers know that the class that revolves in the space of the Museum of Contemporary Art is intractable to them, in the sense that it may be a class that is radically opposed to the ruling authority.”
He continued, “The museum will also create a channel for international cultural institutions to communicate with international intellectuals, artists, and sponsors of international arts and culture, which constitutes a double pressure on the ruling authority and its control mechanism over society as a whole.”
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