The Family Series (2010-2014). All photos taken and provided by the author.
As a museum worker, visiting museums I do not work at is still work. I cannot shut off my “Museum Brain.” As I wander through exhibitions, I wonder how curators acquire art, how designers engineer a space to lay out an invisible path for museum-goers, and what treatments conservators carried out on the art on display. Sometimes though, I try not to analyze an exhibition but to treat a museum like a library, with art for me to study. This is what brought me to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia: to see Mounir Farmanfarmaian: A Mirror Garden, to study Farmanfarmaian’s art. So I try my hardest to switch off my “Museum Brain” and to not think of how museums work. Instead, my “Art History Brain” turns on.
Untitled (Muqarnas), 2012.
Mounir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1922-2019) was an Iranian artist that curators working in namely North American and Western European contexts love to love, maybe because her mirror art draws on ayneh kari, a method using finely cut mirrors to bedazzle shrines and palaces with mirrors for centuries in places that are now called Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. Farmanfarmaian’s most famous works are large pieces made of mirror and colored glass flecked cheekily with glitter. Her art has a hint of capital-i Islam, through the connection to shrines, enough so curators feel like they’ve marked off the diversity box on their checklist. In these museum spaces, Farmanfarmaian’s work is often described as East Meets West, Contemporary Meets Islamic/Sufism.
The term “Sufism” is often used by non-Muslims to signal to other non-Muslims that they’re talking about “the safe Islam,” an Islam which is pacifist and so focused on the spiritual that it is not political; it’s a far cry from what Sufi thought actually is, which is, as with all things in Islam, full of variance and certainly never devoid of politics. But we Muslims –when in the minority in societies like the U.S. – are expected to feel grateful enough to have even been given space in museums. That’s also why the description “contemporary art” is used to frame the art of someone like Farmanfarmaian: it softens the blow of Iranian or Middle Eastern for audiences who still find those parts of the world scary, it hints at assimilation. These are the ways in which politics and history weaves through art museums.
Mirror Ball (1974) (in the back) Final Disco 5 (2018).
I try to focus on the art again. As I meander through the galleries – laid out to give a biographical narrative of the last 50 years of Farmanfarmaian’s life– I’m drawn not simply to her immense mirrored constructions but her works on paper. These sketches of geometric patterns were placed between the large mirror pieces to show that geometry is the central axis through Farmanfarmaian’s art. To me, she didn’t simply use geometry, but was a mathematical genius in the way many people who embroider fabric or construct ceramic mosaics are geniuses. But my thoughts come back to the framing of art and Islam: Who gets to be seen as a genius in museums? Is it just artists who score big on the art market?
Geometric (2013).
If I’m thinking of all these criss-crossing questions of how art gets to museums and why people go to them, my “Museum Brain” never did shut off. It is in full gear as I’m doing a final round of the exhibition before I head back to see friends in Atlanta. I notice one of the smaller mirror pieces isn’t properly lit. It was lit when I came in. But as if on queue, a scissor-lift rolls off of a freight elevator and the crew member on the lift begins switching out the light bulb. I wave hi and I love how they staggered the lights opposite an entire series of geometric pieces, which throws light back onto the bare wall opposite them, all because of the crew’s careful angling of the spotlights on the ceiling. They tell me how much fun it was to work with Farmanfarmaian’s art before we say goodbye.
