At the Benaki Museum’s top floor gallery with its walls of a muted shade of aquamarine, Iranian born American artist Ali Banisadr pairs his paintings with some of the museum’s celebrated Chinese porcelains for a show entitled Ultramarinus – Beyond the Sea. The playful display that oscillates between East and West crystallized when Banisadr discovered in the museum’s permanent collection a sixteenth-century ceramic incense burner with a Persian inscription from Padnãma, the Book of Advice by the poet Farid-al-dīn Attãr (1145/46-1221). “I had actually made a painting with this blue in the past called Language of the Birds,” an allusion to the title of another work by Attãr that Bansidar loved. “It’s about this legendary bird named Simorgh, which is actually my Instagram name.” Banisadr first discovered the story as a young boy. “I don’t know. It somehow stayed with me.” The tale recounts the journey a flock of birds takes in order to find their ideal sovereign, the great Simorgh. “They want to find him because he has all the answers.” The journey is long and perilous and only thirty birds reach their destination, a lake where they see the great Simorgh in their own reflections. The divine leadership they were seeking was within them all along, as the name Simorgh reveals. “Simorgh in Persian means thirty birds. And so conceptually it [the vase] worked, and then visually I thought it’s very similar to my blue and white paintings, so why not include it in the show somehow. And then it became a larger thing, to include other vases.”
Image: Ali Banisadr, detail from The Gatekeepers, 2009
© Ali Banisadr
