Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art Names New Director
Tehran deputy tradition minister for inventive affairs Mahmud Salari on March 20 introduced Ebadorreza Eslami-Kulai as the following director of the Tehran Museum of Modern Artwork. Eslami-Kulai replaces Ehsan Aqai, who was dismissed final week within the wake of an accident wherein an aerial performer was dragged facefirst by means of a 1,200-gallon vat of waste oil comprising the 1977 work Matter and Thoughts by vaunted Mono-ha artist Noriyuki Haraguchi. Although each acrobat and paintings suffered minor harm, and although the museum has provided no touch upon the March 14 firing of Aqai, it’s broadly believed that his unceremonious departure is carefully linked to the oleaginous incident.
(Fortuitously) shirtless and clad in a harness, Yaser Khaseb was suspended earlier than onlookers above the shallow, inky black pool within the establishment’s hovering stone atrium for the efficiency Cat of the Silk Highway, as a part of the opening festivities celebrating the exhibition “Panj Ganj,” themed across the work of twelfth-century Iranian poet Nizami Ganjavi. A colleague charged with guiding the acrobat’s peregrinations apparently made an unlucky misjudgment as Khaseb hovered the other way up, simply inches from the shiny onyx floor, and, per a video posted Khaseb’s Instagram, swung him splashing into the liquid, splattering the ground across the pool and leaving Khaseb kneeling and gasping at its edge. A smattering of unsure applause from the assembled guests greeted the spectacle.
The work by Haraguchi, who died in 2020, is the one extant one in all its variety; over the course of his profession, the Japanese artist constructed about twenty of the swimming pools at numerous places around the globe. Resembling a sophisticated sheet of stone when undisturbed, the seven-inch-deep, Matter and Thoughts has been twice restored, in 1996 and in 2017, the contents of the oblong fourteen-by-twenty-one-foot trough both totally partially replenished.
Khaseb, for his half, was regretful but additionally philosophical about his dunking. “A murals could be reborn in touch with different works,” he noted. “From the interplay between two works, a brand new work could be produced.” And, on this occasion, a brand new director.
