NOTES | QUOTES
Her Majesty Shahbanou Farah Pahlavi
Institutional and Philanthropic Patronage
On Vision
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During the last decade of the Pahlavi reign, the Shahbanou was involved in artistic and architectural projects: building a home, a library, a secretariat, exhibition halls, museums and art centres, and in organising festivals, symposiums and conferences in arts and architecture. These projects each reveal the experience of a particular form of “modernity” predefined by the Pahlavis' socio-political and socio-cultural ideologies; a “hybrid” form of modernity shaped in a recurring theme of duality manifested on different levels between contemporary and traditional, universal and local, imported and native, authentic and mimetic, immutable and developing, and secular and religious.
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Recalling conversations the royal couple had with the poet-statesman, Léopold Sédar Senghor, about the meaning of being Iranian in historical terms, [Senghor] described the term “Iranité” as “a bridge connecting not only Iran’s past and future, but also the east and the west”. The Shahbanou said: “to us [the Pahlavis], this meant a cultural synthesis, a striving to bring together the best that humanity had offered in the past and would offer in the future with our own past and future.”
Her Majesty Shahbanou Farah Pahlavi
Institutional and Philanthropic Patronage
On Architecture
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Restoration and preservation of ignored artistic and architectural heritage was one of the Shahbanou’s major strides towards modernisation: “Architecture interested me not only from the aspect of design but also in social and cultural context. I strongly believed in the preservation of our architectural and urban heritage by incorporating influences and inspirations from the past, taking everything else such as climate, geography, and sociological aspects into consideration”.
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of the Shahbanou’s major strides towards modernisation: “Architecture interested me not only from the aspect of design but also in social and cultural context. I strongly believed in the preservation of our architectural and urban heritage by incorporating influences and inspirations from the past, taking everything else such as climate, geography, and sociological aspects into consideration”.
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The Shahbanou’s interventions with Iran’s Department of Antiquities protected hundreds of building sites from demolition while some four hundred of them were restored. Shahbanou Farah’s contribution was not limited to preserving these monuments. She also sought to put them to some practical use such as “headquarters for seminars, libraries, lecture or concert halls” in lieu of becoming just “museums”. One of these was the Abguineh Museum of Glass and Ceramics.
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Sympathy towards national culture resulted in convening international architectural symposia: “The Interaction of Tradition and Technology” (Isfahan 1970); “The Role of Architecture and Urban Planning in Industrialising Countries” (Shiraz 1974); and “The Crisis of Identity in Architecture” (Ramsar 1974) were a critical view of modern architecture’s anti-historical characteristics.
On Shiraz Art Festival
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“The Shiraz Arts Festival was a cultural product of the Pahlavis’ revolutionary program to “nurture the arts, pay tribute to the nation’s traditional arts and raise cultural standards in Iran [so as] to ensure wider appreciation of the work of Iranian artists, introduce foreign artists to Iran, [and furthermore] acquaint the Iranian public with the latest creative developments of other countries”.
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The mission of the Festival of Arts as cited by Shahbanou Farah was to start “a vigorous […] cultural and artistic movement in Iran” by introducing the latest artistic developments in contemporary performing arts to the Iranian public and professionals so as to make the national culture and traditional performing arts known worldwide. To organise the event, “the committee would start by studying traditional arts from around the world, the related cultures of the East, the rest of Asia, Africa, and the West but motivated by a clear sense of purpose which was the cultural intercourse between the most avant-garde and the most traditional while avoiding the popular, touristy, and folklore side of the genre”. Encouraging the encounter of Eastern and Western civilisations, the Festival attracted “cultural pilgrims” to stage an assemblage of “the most avant-garde” and “the most traditional” performing arts from all over the world in Shiraz: “True to its mission, the Festival’s ecosystem cut across time and other boundaries, refreshing the traditional, celebrating the classical, nurturing the experimental, and stimulating a dialogue across generations, cultures and languages, East and West, North and South. ”The international Shiraz Arts Festival sought a universal art by fostering “cultural intercourse between the old-world of the Orient and the Occident”.
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In a decade the event inspired sustained counter-argument debates in national and international media. Le Figaro stated that no artistic festival in the world could approach such a cultural interaction between the East and the West better than Festival of Arts; that the event attained its aims and objectives as expected, as highlighted in Le Nouvel, to provide an international platform to inspire cultures and traditions. The Observer said that gathering a society of prominent global artists in an outlying city of the Middle East was an avant-gardist approach; no generation has observed such an experiment variety of cultures. Tamasha journal said the central aim of the Festival was denoted as introducing innovative artistic experiments; and in fact, what the Festival appropriated was a radical and revolutionary struggle in performing arts that changed the norms and located the event at the center of endless antithetic criticism and artistic conflicts.
