Ali Divandari

Ali Divandari: Chairs, Coffins and the Politics of the Joke

Look through a decade of Ali Divandari's canvases and the same objects keep coming back: chairs, coffins, sheep, ants, aeroplanes, knights. They are not decoration. In the visual language of an Iranian artist working from the late 1970s onward, a chair is power and an ant is the person under it, and Divandari has spent forty years arranging them into images that are political and social in their argument and comic in their delivery. That combination — commentary that arrives as a joke — is the through-line of a career that began in a provincial newspaper cartoon and ended up on gallery walls in more than thirty countries.

Sabzevar and Diander

He was born on 6 September 1957 in Sabzevar, a city in Khorasan in Iran's northeast. His father had moved there before his birth, and the boy's childhood was split between the city and the family's ancestral village of Diander — the place he has since named as the primary source of his imagery. It is a genuinely rural origin, and it shows in the animals and implements that populate his work long after he became a Tehran professional.

He was drawing seriously by his mid-teens. His own account puts the start of his artistic activity around 1973 to 1975, while he was still at school, and he finished high school in 1976. That same year, on 21 September 1976, his first published work appeared in *Kayhan*, then one of Iran's two great national dailies. He was nineteen. Also in 1976 he mounted his first solo exhibition, at the Kavir Gallery in his home town.

The Long Degree

In 1979 he entered the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran to study graphic design. He left in 1991, during his final semester, without taking the degree. The dates are worth pausing on: a twelve-year enrolment that spans the revolution, the closure and reordering of Iranian higher education, and the entire eight years of the Iran–Iraq war. Whatever the private reasons, no Iranian artist of that generation had an uninterrupted education.

The professional career ran in parallel and did not wait for the diploma. By 1984 he was working through Iran's Institute of Graphic Design, and he went on to design more than thirty posters for cultural institutions. He worked as cartoonist, painter, graphic designer, sculptor and journalist — the plural job description that Iranian visual culture, with its small market and its long tradition of the artist-writer, has always encouraged.

Cartooning as an International Passport

The medium that carried him abroad was the cartoon. From the early 1990s Divandari began entering the international competition circuit, and the results accumulated: an honourable mention at the Yomiuri International Cartoon Contest in 1992; a special merit award at the third Okhotsk festival the same year; third prize at the World Cartoon Gallery in Skopje in 1993; first prize in the KARC world competition in China in 1999; second prize at the Saitama cartoon festival in Japan in 2015. He has counted more than forty international awards, running through 2016, and his work has been shown in over thirty-four countries.

This mattered practically as well as reputationally. In a period when Iranian artists had few routes into international exhibition, the cartoon salon — cheap to enter, judged on a single sheet of paper, indifferent to passports — was one of the very few that stayed open. Divandari used it thoroughly.

He also organised. In 1997 he served as secretary and executive director of the first international festival of human cartoon and nature held in Iran, and travelled to the Netherlands as the first Iranian participant at a meeting of European festival directors. That is a small administrative fact with a large meaning: it marks the point at which Iranian cartooning entered the international federation of the form rather than merely submitting to it.

The Painter

Alongside the drawings there is a substantial body of painting. His exhibition record includes some three hundred works across nine solo shows since 1976 and further group appearances from 1995, in Tehran, Sabzevar, Isfahan, Tabriz and Ardabil; a 1995 show at Tehran's Andisheh Gallery presented fifty works at once. The methods are eclectic — oil, acrylic, watercolour, mixed media — and so are the idioms: surrealism, action painting, cubism, outright abstraction, often in the same career and sometimes in the same room.

In 2001 the Rozane publishing house issued *Smile Monalisa*, a 270-page collection of his drawings and cartoons designed by Jamal Rahmati. He has also written: travel pieces and interviews with artists for *Kayhan* and *Hamshahri*, and articles on international cartoonists and museum collections — the working critic's side of a working artist.

Why Ali Is Called a Genius

He is not, on the available evidence, and no critic quoted in the sources uses the word. What Divandari has is something more specific and more useful to describe: a compressive intelligence. The satirical cartoon is the most demanding form of visual economy there is — one image, no caption if possible, and a political argument that must land in under two seconds and survive translation into languages the artist does not speak. Forty-odd prizes from juries in Japan, Macedonia and China are a hard external measure that his images do survive that crossing. The recurring symbolic vocabulary — chair, coffin, sheep, ant, aeroplane, knight — is the working method behind it: a private alphabet, built and refined over decades, that lets him say things about power without ever naming a power.

The counter-case is honest and straightforward. Divandari is a prolific and internationally decorated practitioner, not an innovator of the form; the surrealist and cubist idioms in his painting are borrowed rather than invented, and his stylistic range reads less as synthesis than as restlessness. He founded no movement and trained no identifiable school. The best claim for him is as a bridge figure — a village-raised artist from Khorasan who made himself legible to juries in Tokyo and Skopje during the years when Iran was least legible to anyone — and that is a real achievement without being genius.

Legacy

Divandari's significance is partly institutional. He belongs to the generation that kept Iranian graphic art connected to the world through the 1980s and 1990s by the unglamorous route of competitions, festivals and posters, and he helped bring the international festival apparatus into Iran itself in 1997. The paintings and the cartoons continue; the chairs and the ants are still there.

Achievements

• Movement: surrealism