International Magazine of Studio Glass

‘In my country we have a saying’, the Iranian Saman Kalantari says, ‘every man carries his luggage with him’. We gather experiences sweet and bitter and these make us into what we are. Rarely however do we meet someone who has already gone through such shocking phases in his life and possesses the ability to reshape them into high quality works of art as this ‘Persian’ as he prefers to call himself. Saman creates installations and works in glass often combined into one. The result always offers food for thought. It is the delicate network of emotional associations and reflections that surrounds the objects he places together that articulates the message. And subtle his art is indeed in spite of the weighty themes he chooses. Often he combines his works with quotations from the universal declarations of the rights of man. His own experiences thus mesh with the general and thus he tells tales that not merely give expression to his own private life story but transforms them into something of worth to all of us.

Saman Kalantari is a glass and video artist as well as a political refugee from Iran. In his youth he lived through the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini and his family suffered the consequences of religious dissension in an absolutist state. From day to day Saman experienced the ambivalence of being shunned and locked out and at the same time being able to go and study English and create art. His choice for the English language was dictated by the desire to broaden his horizon and get into contact with the world outside. Working as a tourist guide would offer him this opportunity. Born in Shiraz and later on living close to the ruins of the ancient city of Persepolis he developed an interest in ancient ceramics and based his own artistic works, his vase-forms and bowls, on age old forms and patterns. He worked with a solitary old potter, assisting him and at the same time exhibiting his own creations. Iran was a strange place in those days. Islam forbids the creation of images but nonetheless in 2000 staged a national sculpture biennale. Saman was officially invited to participate and sent in two pieces. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Teheran exhibited them. Soon however the situation worsened. Saman became ever more aware of the strain this put on his personal life and the danger he was exposed to. Time to face the inevitability of leaving the country and unfortunately also his aging parents.

The bitterness of this farewell we can hardly imagine but Saman would not, as the saying goes, ‘go silently into the night’. Better to go out with a bang than with a whimper he thought. Therefore he staged a final exhibition of which the main work was a room covered from the inside with pictures of friends who had suffered from the persecution and had been arrested, disappeared, committed suicide or already fled the country. This he combined with personal letters he had written to them or received from them. Saman was standing at the door of the room and would let visitors of the art gallery into it for two minutes to see this grueling pageant of terror and persecution, then they had to leave again. It was Samans ultimate effort to leave all his memories behind.

Of course he would not officially be allowed to emigrate but, thanks to Iranian ambivalence again, 5000 euros bought him a visa. With almost no luggage he boarded the plane for Italy where he knew he had friends. Things would be different from now on and new horizons would open up for him so he thought.

Of course visions had been playing through his head of what it would be like to enter the free world he had dreamed about, but it turned out to be a bitter deception. He ended up being restricted in many ways just like in Iran. He was not allowed to work and bureaucratic regulations forbade his moving around freely. Sure he was a political refugee and there were European regulations for receiving people like that but welcome he was not and on top of this watched, checked and controlled all the time, feeling helpless and a captive like at home. The similarities with the way things went in Iran struck him and in his artwork he went looking for things the two countries have in common. This eventually inspired him to create the installation ‘fragile security of the state’ consisting of fused glass and video. We see a picture of a demonstrator in Teheran who raises his arms holding the blood stained T-shirt of a fellow demonstrator aloft. Not his active demonstrating got this man in jail, no act of his own, but the fact that a journalist took a photo of it and published it abroad. In the back of the picture we see the Iranian Flag which also happens to be the Italian, the same colors. Next to it Saman placed three pieces of glass. The bottom one was striped yellow an black, recalling Saman’s own ‘western’ T-shirt he used to walk around in arousing distrust and suspicion with the special police who consider this to be a gesture of disloyalty to the state and a threat to state security. The second piece of glass is striped black and white like a prison suit, and the third shows the stripes of the Italian/Iranian Flag with the registration number Saman received as a political refugee. Here several meanings are overlapping, the similarities are stunning and make you ponder what in the end the difference is and how fragile is freedom.

Another installation expresses that same fragility of freedom. We see an expanding blue sky with little white clouds floating in it giving a feeling of unrestricted liberty of movement. Here the sky is not a limit but negates all barriers. Little paper planes fly in front of it spreading their wings one of them carrying the rays of the sun on top of it. Paper is very perishable and so is freedom. One blow may cripple it or smash it completely. One of the freely flying objects is a bird soaring, perhaps an eagle and another a ‘plane’ folded out of the cover of a letter, like the one children play with. This ‘letter-plane’ seems to express the free flight of thought but also to transmit messages and emotions over great distances. The work has no title but is accompanied by two quotations from the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man” saying; ‘Everybody has the right to move freely within a state and to choose his dwelling place’ and ‘Every man has the right to leave every country including his own and to return to his country” [nr. 13].

Freedom yes, however restricted in Europe, but Saman’s personal memories, his true luggage, the images and emotions he had tried to shake off with his last exhibition in Teheran would not leave him. In the end what haunted him had to be dealt with and being an artist this meant that he had to transform both the sweet images of a past long gone by and his nightmares into something transcending the personal plane. Art is not the ‘most personal expression of the most personal emotions’ if it were, no message would ever be able to reach another human being. Saman decided to investigate and express general themes embedded in his own experience. One truth he learned the hard way was that the family is the natural basis of society and has a right to be protected by the state and the society, another line from the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man but no theoretical ideal to Saman. He created another installation with glass, photo’s and several loose objects, a number of them collected in an old worn out wooden box.

A glass hand is clutching a grenade, we see a severed foot enveloped in rags a glass head with spectacles and a gagged mouth, a loose glass hand with two pointing fingers and then there is the box like a reliquary holding a baby photo a picture of a blindfolded man and several glass parts of faces and a glass hand. All fragments of a human life under threat of death and annihilation, some executed in transparent glass as to stress fragility and the intangible aspect of them, making it almost impossible to protect them. Other parts like remnants saved from the destruction and carefully sheltered and brought together in the box as if one tried to hold on to both sweet and bad memories that unfortunately are impossible to separate from each other. A message accessible to all but presented by someone who experienced the truth of it and through his great artistic talent knows how to make something we all know in theory into a direct and shocking fact we cannot evade or circumvent. The beauty of true art combined with a deep content we all too easily tend to forget or push far from of our thoughts.

Saman Kalantari is faced with the dilemma that the ‘luggage’ he carried with him from a far away land and that he wanted to leave behind turns out to be the very source from which his art springs, a well of inspiration that he needs to survive and to fully be what he really is, a citizen of two worlds. At the same time his artistic work is the only thing that enables him to occasionally bridge the gap between both and makes his life into a unity.

Not that his coming to Europe was only a flight from one captivity into the next. Saman sees the difference clearly, enjoys the prevailing freedom of expression even though when it comes to Islam this seems currently to be on the wane and gratefully acknowledges his debt to many good people that helped him. One thing Europe offered him was the possibility to go and study for two years at the glass-school Vetroricerca in Bolzano Italy. Here he refined his art and learned many new glass techniques that enabled him to better express himself and ‘unpack’ his luggage. In 2007 he graduated and today lives and works in the City of Bolzano. He is slowly building up his life again and partly works in a museum, partly devotes his time to his art. His conditions are still far from ideal and prevent him from working full time as an artist. Nonetheless he creates impressive pieces that are not easy to forget once you have seen them. He staged an exhibition with the title ‘Limoo-Shirin’ referring to those Persian lemons that initially taste sweet then turn very sour as it may be with memories and with his multi-layered works of art. Time has not dulled his experiences but has also taught him the relativity and oftentimes the vanity of things. An installation from 2007 expresses this in a very melancholy fashion. We see a small table decked with the picture and medals won by a fallen soldier. The photo shows him proudly wearing the decorations he has been awarded but at the same time it is evident that he has died and is no more. A last letter, a picture of his wife or beloved remain on the table that has been covered with the Iranian/ Italian flag and small candles burn in commemoration of his lost life. The medals, a number of ‘stars’ and the soldiers so called ‘dog-tag’ Saman made out of thin glass to stress the futility of it all, of war and the irony of much sacrifice and heroism in the service of questionable causes. It is a monument not only to a man who perished on the battlefield but also to the bitter uselessness of many human exploits. With this installation goes a text, again taken from the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man. It states that man’s education must be directed towards full unfolding of one’s potentialities and that this should contribute to respect for human rights, understanding, tolerance and friendship between all nations, racial groups and religions. A man like Saman Kalantari does not use such texts lightly. He knows what he is talking about and feels the gravity of what he is saying and quoting from first hand experience. This is what fuels his passionate endeavors in art, the medium most suitable to him to communicate with others and with the world. In recognition of his talent the Glass Company of Bulls Eye, awarded him a prize for young and upcoming talent. We will be hearing from him again and hope that the deepening and the development of his artistic potentialities will result is ever more excellent works of art.

Frans Jeursen, Amsterdam