Exhibitions

One of the most important and oldest disciplines of the Arts is Illustration, which mankind has utilized throughout history, particularly through the illustration of old stories and tales, to convey his beliefs.
 Iran, similar to other regions of ancient civilizations, has a rich history of interesting myths and stories based on Iranian ideology, dating back to prehistory; which one of the most famous stories in this country was related to a wise woman who told one thousand and one stories for saving her life! She conveyed a lot of historical, traditional and social beliefs and behaviors through the stories which can be a great resource for doing researches for nowadays scholars. Those stories and myths had been saved through the decades under title of a book named One Thousand and One Nights.
 Although Iran is a very rich country in tales and old stories, there is a weird scarcity of artistic works which can be rooted in some crucial reasons. The most significant reason for the dearth of Iranian mythological and storied illustrations is the extraordinary holiness that people attributed to their tales and myth’s characters before Islam’s appearance. This situation became worse after that historical event, the Islam emersion, which was resulted in stopping of the illustration of Iranian stories by the artists, because of the very important Islamic strict rule that making pictures of human faces became forbidden for a long time after Islam’s kingdom on Iran! 
 Therefore, nowadays by considering the scarcity of Iranian old tales’ illustrations, in an effort to popularize and make known the rich forgotten history of Iranian myths, illustrating them is an effective approach. Using the famous stories as the title of illustrations and for making them more popular not only among the Iranian people, but also for the rest of the worlds, can be a great progress as the first step of this process.
 We all hope that this procedure will be continued by the other artists and art lovers.

Maryam Rasoulzadeh
August 2017