ABBAS KIAROSTAMI at the Aga Khan Museum (77 Wynford) to March 27. 416-646-4677. $20, stu/srs $15, free Wednesday 4-8 pm. Rating: NNNN
For its first solo commission, the Aga Khan Museum presents Doors Without Keys, an installation by Iranian filmmaker and Renaissance man (poet, painter, photographer) Abbas Kiarostami, best known for his quiet, neo-realist films in which drama emerges from seemingly simple situations.
Printed on canvas and mounted like paintings are 50 life-sized photographs of old wooden doors that Kiarostami shot over a 20-year period in Iran, Morocco, Italy and France. Startlingly realistic, the doors appear tantalizingly three-dimensional in the dramatically lit space, which is divided by cloth walls into a labyrinth of dead-end streets. A soundtrack of birdsong and children’s voices cinematically evokes a bucolic setting, and Kiarostami’s poems about locks and doors grace the walls.
Some doors are reinforced with rough salvaged wood, others studded with nail heads. Many sport coats of peeling paint in weathered shades of Mediterranean turquoise. Most are closed with a primitive system of padlocked chains threaded through holes drilled into the wood. Though they come from different countries, they live together in remarkable harmony.
A screening room next to the installation plays some of the auteur’s shorter films. The early shorts involving child-centred stories that I saw last month perfectly illuminated the poetic sensibility behind Doors Without Keys. The changing program currently features Five, a 2003 film shot in five long takes on Caspian Sea beaches. (A Kiarostami film retrospective runs Sundays at the museum for the show’s duration and from February 25 to April 3 at TIFF Cinematheque.)
Wandering around this dreamlike imaginary village is at once a peaceful visit to another time and a more foreboding experience of possibly abandoned dwellings with all entries barred.
The symbolism of locked doors resonates on many levels. As Kiarostami’s poem says: “Today I will stay at home / and open the door to nobody, but / the house of my mind stays wide open….”
art@nowtoronto.com
