Pegah Behroozfar: “Social curatorial work interests me because I have always been concerned with social issues”
Mahsan: From a BA in Statistics to becoming one of the talented curators in the Iranian art scene? How did this career shift happen, and what first drew you to the art world?
Pegah: Art, art, art!
I believe art needs no reason to get interested in and move towards, even there is no specific date to refer as a time of beginning. I can say that since childhood, I have been interested in art, and while studying mathematics, I pursued learning and training different multimedia.
Since I studied Statistics, I was keen on archiving and categorizing, and the lack of archiving in Iranian visual arts led me to curating. After having learned curatorial knowledge and studied various articles by the greatest curators like Obrist, Megan Johnson, Paul O’Neill, and so on, I found that besides curating, I had a passion for art management, and since then, I have indeed found my favorite career. I really love curating, and I took passionate steps in that direction.
Mahsan: You have studied various courses like drawing with pencil/charcoal, painting, photography, curatorial studies, and more. What were you trying to achieve from these courses, considering they are entirely different fields of art?
Pegah: These periods took place at different times; since my field of study was mathematics and then statistics, I just entered the world of art for recreation and fun and did some painting and drawing. Practicing photography was a path to escape the difficulties of life. I even had my own studio, and I made a living by working there part-time.
Later, I realized how much I was fond of fine art photography, which gradually led to my passion to become an artist, and that pushed me to get to know Iranian visual art. This evolution was simultaneous with my taking up some courses in curating and was a kind of improvement in my self-perception. I realized that I was not eager to be an artist but a curator.
Mahsan: You began your curatorial journey in 2015 as the lead curator for Direct Vision, a major project that featured 120 artists across 22 group exhibitions over four years. Could you share how your curatorial journey started? What inspired you to enter this field?
Pegah: Social curatorial work interests me because I have always been concerned with social issues. I assume that it flourished in me according to my personal characteristics as well as my studies in statistics with an approach to human studies, not mathematics.
Therefore, the projects with a social approach that are research-based and continuous have been interesting to me, and what I see is in my mindset. This structure has created the Direct Vision project. In those years, Instagram, as a photo-based platform, became a platform for presenting gallery photos in private social media, with its tempting Polaroid camera logo. That tempted me to focus on the controversial subject of whether the real place of a photo as a piece of art by a professional photographer is in an art gallery or on Instagram.
This project included two parts, research, and display. In the research part of this project, I collected articles and interviews that I conducted with photographers and with the officials of successful and well-known photography pages of that day.
In the display part of each group exhibition, there were 5 photographers, and a set of 9 photos from each artist was presented in a frame in the form of an Instagram profile page along with the artist’s real profile on Instagram, including the ID, the number of followers, and a profile photo.
The number of these exhibitions was about 18, and the number of works presented was about 810. After a while, I realized that the rest of the artists were also presenting their artworks in other media in the Instagram space, so I included them in the display project: painting and sculpture design, but with a different way of presenting a real work alongside a photo printed from the page. The Instagram profile of each artist became a display of the differences between artists’ works against the sameness of Instagram frames.
These shows were held at different café galleries, and my goal was to address the public and not only the audience of the gallery. The photo exhibitions were in the Markov Café Gallery, located in the Qasr Prison, which has now become a museum. The walls where the profile frames were installed. The walls were solitary cells, and installing large Instagram profile pages on the walls of solitary cells created a strange tragedy.
Direct Vision Project, Curated by Pegah Behroozfar, Tehran, 2015
Mahsan: You have mentioned that your goal is to expand your activities internationally and introduce Iranian artists to a global audience, as many are currently far from achieving international sales. What do you believe is the reason for this limited exposure and sales for Iranian artists? What efforts are needed to change this situation for artists in Iran?
Pegah: There are many reasons, but the major reason is the financial problem of artists inside Iran. The dropping rate of our currency compared to the rest of the world means a lot of money for the presence and sale of Iranian artists’ work.
Another issue is the problem of the Iranian government system, which does not support artists and those involved in the art field. Therefore, everything depends on personal and private investment with a low budget. The problems of Iranian artists’ international relations can be a reason as well.
There are thousands of problems with leaving the country and entering another country, both inside and outside. In my opinion, to change this scenario, despite the great distance we have in the universal competition and the dominant restrictions, the factors of timing, proper education to attend the international domain, and some luck are essential.
Mahsan: Having worked together on the Pelekan Project, could you, as the main curator, tell us about the project and its impact on the development of cognitive and social-emotional skills in children through art?
Pegah: The Pelekan (staircase) project was a project about childhood and child art under my curation. This project was organized with a focus on the art of playing education and the museum in cooperation with the Association of Iranian Painters and the Iranian Artists Forum in 6 galleries.
This project included a research component, which involved studying the Reggio Emilia approach and investigating various approaches within Iran. Project researchers Somayeh Dadras and Nasibeh Heidari, along with you as one of the researchers, were involved in this investigation.
The project featured four specialized meetings with experts in the following areas:
The show included several parts: Exhibition of children’s works of art in collaboration with several children’s educational groups that specialize in art education.
Exhibition of the works of several children left behind from school who had created a work of art with the influence of Picasso’s work. Showing the content of the Children’s Museum in line with the relationship between child education and art, which examines the history of visual art and child education in Iran.
An interactive part with children that included the arrangement of workshops and games, the display of the works of an artist who was a researcher and teacher with experience in the field of children’s art, and the mutual impact of years of education on their art. Absolutely, referring to some important words like children, art, education, and the mutual effects of these topics shows the social and cultural importance of this event.
Pelekan Project, Curated by Pegah Behroozfar, Iranian Artists Forum, Tehran, 2023
Mahsan: You have completed multiple projects, including interviews with prominent Iranian curators and a series on “Iranian Female Artists in the 80s”. Could you tell us about the most memorable experience from each series and why it was important to you?
Pegah: As I mentioned earlier, the same explanation of the lack of a coherent archive of visuals and not recording the history led me to the obligation to record the oral history of the unwritten and unspoken history that was available and sometimes available!
The story of my interviews with the curators in Iran is an interesting one. Exactly after passing the curatorial courses, the feeling of not knowing enough about this topic and what happened in Iran prompted me to conduct these interviews. And all these interviews became a free classroom for me to use the experiences of the curators who worked in this field before me and later became my friends.
In total, I did more than 100 interviews, some of them were with female painters of the 1980s, and some were related to the production of visual art podcasts. These interviews have been comparable to the teachings of exceptional teachers, without any exaggeration.
Mahsan: You have worked with multiple galleries and curated many exhibitions. What are your views on the Iranian art scene, and where do you see it in the coming years?
Pegah: Nothing to say! The world is in an unfavorable situation after the COVID Pandemic. Similarly, Iran’s social, political, and economic conditions are very variable, all of which have a significant impact on Iranian art.
However, I hope! Iranian artists are very hardworking, and the visual history of Iran has shown that art in Iran does not give up, and despite all the barriers, like a plant looking for light, it has always continued with strength.