2017- Pigment inkjet print on photo paper, 60 x 90 and 40 x 60 cm
The work takes as its point of departure Noriyuki Haraguchi’s Matter and Mind, the oil pool in the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Kamran Diba, the museum’s architect, recounts that at its inauguration the Shah did not believe that the pool was actually filled with oil and dipped his finger into it to check. The conversation — Golshiri believes — took place in English, where ‘oil’ could refer both to the substance filling Haraguchi’s work and to petroleum — two things distinguished in Persian as roghan (روغن) and naft (نفت).
This ambiguity is bound to the history of the museum itself, which emerged from Iran’s petrodollar economy. Petroleum financed the Shah’s project of cultural modernisation, yet once displaced into the museum and transformed into the material of an artwork, ‘oil’ had become almost unrecognisable to him.
When Haraguchi returned to Tehran to clean and restore Matter and Mind, Golshiri entered the museum while it was closed and photographed the surface of the pool. Reflected upside down in the oil were Keikhosro Khoroush’s portraits of the Islamic Republic’s two Supreme Leaders, Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei. Khomeini’s portrait was very probably among the museum’s earliest acquisitions after the 1979 Revolution.
The photograph thus brings together different meanings and histories of oil. The oil used by Haraguchi is not the petroleum Iran exports, yet both Matter and Mind and Khoroush’s portraits entered a museum sustained by Iran’s petrodollar economy. In the photograph, the portraits of the two leaders appear immersed in oil, just as the Shah had once dipped his finger into Haraguchi’s pool.
The title Oil on Canvas plays on the conventional description of a painting’s medium. Here, ‘oil’ moves between oil paint, the material of Haraguchi’s sculpture, and petroleum, bringing the language of painting, the museum, and the political economy of oil into a single phrase.
چاپ رنگدانهای روی کاغذ عکس، ۹۰ × ۶۰ و ۶۰ × ۴۰ سانتیمتر
کامران دیبا، معمار موزهی هنرهای معاصر تهران، در خاطراتش میگوید در افتتاحیهی موزه محمدرضا شاه پهلوی باور نمیکرده ماده و فکر اثر هاراگوچی حوض پر از روغن/نفت است، پس خم میشود و انگشت در آن فرو میکند. چهار دههی بعد، هاراگوچی به موزه باز میگردد و حوض را تمیز میکند. چند روز از پس از این گلشیری به سراغ این اثر میرود که انعکاس چهرههای سرنگون دو رهبر ایران را ثبت کند. او بر این باور است که گفتوگوی بالا به انگلیسی انجام شده. در انگلیسی یک لغت برای نفت و روغن وجود دارد