Minoo Emami's "War Collection" covered in the Harvard Gazette

July 2, 2015

Minoo Emami's exhibit "War Collection" is on display through August 19, 2015, at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Room 102 (sculpture), and CGIS Knafel, Fisher Family Commons (paintings). The Harvard Gazette covered the exhibit opening in a June 24th article:

Emami’s paintings interrogate war and its lasting effects. For Emami, the conflict in question was the Iran-Iraq War of the ’80s, and the prosthesis is her husband’s. At 18, Emami married a wounded soldier in the Tehran public hospital, and his injury sparked her creative venture, an attempt to document “his struggle for a decent and normal life,” she said.

“I never thought I would show these to anyone,” said Emami, now a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “They were just for me, just for us.”

The paintings also record what it means to be an Iranian woman and wife. In her large-scale works — “War Collection,” on view at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies through Aug. 18 — Emami pairs images of prostheses with familiar household items. While hosting a dinner party for her husband and another veteran, she recollected that after a few drinks (“Yes, we do drink”), the men removed their prostheses and rested them against a wall. Emami was flustered as she moved from kitchen to salon, finding that their artificial limbs were in the way.

“They’re always a permanent subject, and a permanent presence in the life of the person who is an amputee,” she said.

Read the full article on the Gazette website.