The photograph is a form of time travel. It circulates across time, prints, publications, and screens. The photograph’s scale and meaning is always malleable, adapting to its context and the associations the viewer brings. Ariyo Bahar, a Toronto-based artist, combines images from a popular pre-revolution magazine and family album that visually articulates seventy years of the feminine Iranian experience. Ettela’at Banovan اطلاعات بانوان¨, which translates to “Ladies Information,” was an Iranian women’s publication that was active from 1957 to 1979. Bahar honours the past by using the shorthand Banovan for this series of photo collages which began in 2020 and is recontextualized as this year’s Catalogue Commission. These cut, cropped, and pasted artworks reveal the fragmentation of identity, memory, and family. Bahar queries the role photography plays in narrating feminine liberation and how oppressive ideologically codes are performed in order to survive.
Chelsea Yuill
Could you speak to how you began creating this body of work?
Ariyo Bahar
I started working on this project in the winter of 2020, during my last semester of studies at the Toronto Metropolitan University. It began with a series of preliminary questions around photography’s relationship to memory, the family snapshot, and the photo album. In retrospect, I was also dealing with the news and aftermath of Flight PS752, which deeply shocked and affected the Iranian Canadian community. All of this led me to explore the complex relationships between personal and familial memories and the larger historical narratives that one encounters through images about Iran.
CY
How do you see photography’s role in making personal, familial, and collective memories?
AB
Within the context of family photography, I think the snapshot and portrait are powerful in shaping personal and cultural memories. Often associated with sentimentality and conformity, the family album is emblematic of a family’s history, values, and desires. The photos and the magazines I worked with to produce Banovan belong to the family of a close friend who generously shared their archive with me. They had brought their family photos, mostly taken out of albums to save luggage space, when they immigrated to Canada in the 1990s. As a person living in a diaspora, these personal photographs represent a way of life – within the privacy of a family setting – that I could relate to. Despite the fact that these are not of my own family, looking at them conjured memories of growing up in a specific cultural environment that has a long history but has been overshadowed by dominant narratives of oppression and religious extremism. As for the magazine, I view these pages as source material of a time when my grandmother’s generation was coming of age.
CY
Photography’s interplay between revealing and concealing, public and private, performative and intimate are pronounced in this series. How do you reconcile the contrast in feminine expressions in the magazine alongside the family snapshots?
AB
Ettela’at Banovan was produced as a family guide and its primary target audience was young women. It was published weekly and covered news on celebrities, royal families, health, beauty, style, along with educational articles and interviews. Ultimately, the magazine aimed to educate Iranian women to be modern, progressive, and fashionable. Similar to magazine photos, there is a degree of performativity in family photos. It is possible to imagine the women in the family photos reading the articles in Ettela’at Banovan. When juxtaposed through collage, the two sources echo one another in pose and posture, or create distortions that further unsettle and add complexity to our reading of them. Either way, for me, the cut is the most significant part of the collages. It disrupts the continuity of the original image pointing to women and families whose lives have been fractured by dominant ideologies.
CY
How do you see the magazine, photo album, and catalogue functioning together?
AB
It’s fascinating to see the collages in different contexts and at different scales, from exhibition prints that were closer in size to the original magazine pages, to large murals that subtly bring out the textural quality of printing, to the thumbnail size seen on smart-phone screens, and now on the pages in this catalogue. It’s as if they are coming full circle, returning to the pages of the publication while also regaining that intimate experience of looking at family photos. The majority of the images in Banovan span the 1950s to 1980s. Seeing them now, published here, adds another layer of complexity when considering Iranian women’s continuous fight for liberation since the 1979 revolution.
