Curated by Linda Komaroff
6 May - 9 September
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art, a groundbreaking exhibition of both historical and contemporary Iranian works that highlight ways in which artists have used and continue to use the past as a metaphor for the present day. This notion is revealed in art and literature in which ancient kings and heroes are used in later contexts as examples of virtue or as objects of derision, while long-gone Shi'ite saints are evoked as champions of the poor and the oppressed. The exhibition examines this appropriation of the past, largely in the context of the present including a large scale concrete poetry by Ramin Haerizadeh based on two significant newspaper headline during the Iranian Revolution.