I always feel underqualified when I’m asked to play art critic, but I made an exception when the Aga Khan Museum invited me to preview a new installation by Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.
In addition to his work as the director of Taste Of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us and Ten, Kiarostami is a respected poet and photographer he’s exhibited work at the V&A Museum in London, the Pompidou centre in Paris and MOMA in New York. And now he’s designed the Aga Khan’s first solo exhibition, which officially opens tomorrow (Saturday, November 21) and runs through March 27, 2016.
The installation is called Doors Without Keys, an exhibition of some 50 photographs. The museum’s second-floor gallery has been converted into a sort of labyrinth through the arrangement of walls and scrims a visitor wanders through the space, encountering each new image – printed on canvas, ranging from seven to eight feet in height – in relative isolation.
There are wooden doors that have been repaired over the years, with planks of a different texture peeking out a corrugated metal door has the colour and texture of new denim. Some doors have multiple locks, the keyholes creating a narrative of technological refinement another is painted over with a gorgeous Mediterranean beachfront.
The sounds of creaking hinges and distant birdsong provide a subtle soundtrack the walls of the exhibition offer snippets of poetry and commentary. But the experience of walking and wondering is key.
Speaking through a translator in his brief comments before the preview, Kiarostami said he’d been working on this project for a while, though he wasn’t fully conscious of what it would be when it was finished. On his travels through Iran, Italy, Morocco and France, he found himself fascinated by older wooden or metal doors.
“What’s going on behind them?” he remembers himself wondering. “Who’s waiting outside to come in? Who’s passing by? Newer doors have peepholes and windows, but these don’t it marks a way of being that’s no longer there.”
The project reflects “the empathy we can feel” for a household we don’t know, and, of course, that same empathy is at the core of Kiarostami’s film work, which is also being celebrated this week.
A selection of Kiarostami’s early shorts runs on a loop within the Doors Without Keys installation, and the Aga Khan Museum will host a screening of Kiarostami’s 1987 drama Where Is The Friend’s Home? tonight (Friday, November 20) at 7:30 pm, followed by a conversation with Kiarostami and co-curator Peter Scarlet. And on Monday (November 23), Kiarostami will be hosted at TIFF Bell Lightbox for an In Conversation With session at 7 pm.
That’s not the end of it, either. The Aga Khan Museum and TIFF Cinematheque are preparing parallel retrospectives of Kiarostami’s films for the new year, so keep an eye out for those. And if you find yourself staring a little longer than usual at a closed door on your way home tonight, well, this exhibition might be something you want to see.
