Final Week to See BAHAR BEHBAHANI: Let the Garden Eram Flourish Solo Exhibition at the Hood Museum of Art

The solo exhibition Bahar Behbahani: Let the Garden Eram Flourish, on view at the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire through this Sunday, March 12, presents a suite of new paintings, an installation, and a video from Persian Gardens-an ongoing series begun four years ago by Iranian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Bahar Behbahani. Curated by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, the show is organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, and supported by the Evelyn A. J. Hall Fund and the Cissy Patterson Fund.

Particularly relevant given the United States' current political climate, the exhibition has engaged invigorating conversation about geopolitics, borders, history, and more, with attendees at the private and public openings, and talks and events held in conjunction with the show. The various media coverage about Behbahani's Let the Garden Eram Flourish includes a conversation between the artist and Cathy Byrd on the latest episode of Fresh Art International, which touches upon the notion of Persian gardens as a metaphor for Iran's fraught histories, past and present. Works in the exhibition, both personal and cathartic for the artist, enable Behbahani to resolve her conflicted emotions about the late Donald Wilber-a scholar of Persian architecture and gardens, who was also a CIA secret agent, who was the purported mastermind of a 1953 military coup in Iran that ousted democratically elected, beloved, and pro-national prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. This singular mid-century event reshaped Iran's modern history and continues to impact the present.

The exhibition runs concurrently with Behbahani's highly acclaimed installation at the Shanghai Biennale Why Not Ask Again? - Maneuvers, Disputations & Stories, curated by Raqs Media Collective (running through March 12, 2017), and following her solo show Garden Coup at Thomas Erben Gallery, New York-which received critical acclaim from Hyperallergic.

ABOUT BAHAR BEHBAHANI

Multimedia artist Bahar Behbahani (b. 1973, Tehran, Iran)-recently featured in The New York Times-lives and works in New York City. She is known for her long-term conceptual dialogue with memory and loss, representing her chronic displacement and longing. Through her lyrical work across mediums, Behbahani stages a contemporary cultural critique by layering and juxtaposing allusions to past and present sociopolitical circumstances with a language of her own experience. Since 2000, her work has been featured internationally in institutions and biennials including the Biennial of Contemporary Painting of the Islamic World (2002) and The Painting Biennial (2004), both Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. (2007); Tribeca Film Festival, New York (2008, Official Selection); Queens Museum of Art, NY (2010); Sharjah Biennial, UAE, and MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (both 2011); Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2012); and the Honolulu Biennial, Hawaii (2014, Prologue Exhibition). Solo exhibitions include such venues as the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI; Etemad Gallery, Tehran, Iran, and New York University Abu Dhabi. Behbahani was awarded an Art Omi International Artists Residency by The Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 2013 and the Art and Culture Network Program Grant from the Open Society Institute, Budapest in 2011. In 2007, her video Suspended was selected 'Best in Show' by Carrie Springer, Senior Curatorial Assistant, Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Queensland Museum, Australia; Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; and Columbia Hospital, New York; as well as numerous private collections. She is currently an artist in residence with Time Equities' Art-in-Buildings program, examining the construction of 50 West. Behbahani's work has been shown at Thomas Erben Gallery in 2011 as part of Iran Via Video Current, and in 2016 in the solo exhibition Garden Coup. Her film Behind the Mirrors was recently shown in the Fireflies in the Night Take Wing Video Art Survey organized by curators Barbara London, Kalliopi Minioudaki and Francesca Pietropaolo-with Artistic Director Robert Storr at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, Athens.

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