Maryam Farhang ◄

Chapter 1
I am an artist from Iran. Iran is one of the oldest cultures in this world. Much older than the so–called
western culture. For a moment let use think about culture. What means cultural behaviour? If we go back in history of mankind for many thousand years, we find cultural behaviour as a necessity for the development of human societies, of humanity. With the change to agriculture people settled down on land and in houses of their own property. If you own a thing you also easily can loose it or it can be taken away. One can say this could be the beginning of social conflicts and war. Probably also of patriarchy system, of men’s physical and women’s emotional power. Since then millions of people were killed and had to die. They were not able to deal in a better way with their emotional conflicts than to kill each other. It took many thousand years to develop what we call civilization or in another word, culture. People had to learn to listen to each other, with respect and interest. That means to renounce prior, natural drives and to learn how to deal with emotional frustration.
We should learn the language of empathy and love, first to love oneself and second to love others in a true way. Especially children are not our property, they are the love and the peace of our future.

Chapter 2
Who talks about war? Countries producing weapons talk about war and have an interest in not stopping discussions about war. We know that fear makes people dependent to those in power. Especially the power of deadly weapons.
Propaganda in media, virtual world and social networks defines war. Their goal is to conquer public will and emotions to justify the continuation of war and killing. Advertisements do not show the real truth of societies.
For mindfulness, we should seek the truth beyond propaganda. We should question ourselves, developing self awareness and analysis of facts.
What is war? Who is the victim? Who is the aggressor? Who produces and supports terrorists? Who is propagating xenophobia? Which countries have financial interests in destruction, chaos, killing and war? What are the emotional and cultural aspects, what are the economic aspects of wars?
Developing our mindfulness helps not to simply accept all the media news. We should learn to criticise the news and not support war because of fear. We should demand the stop of manufacturing deadly weapons.
We should believe in the power of culture, art, science, empathy and love.
Governments should invest a lot of money into culture, education, sciences, schools and universities.
If the people of culture, art and wisdom will unite with each other, sooner or later we will have the ability to convince politicians to act against war, patriarchal systems and racism. Keeping negotiating!
It is not a question of who wins or who loses a war, but how to stop the war!
The international cultural community should take the definition of the battlefields from the responsibility of powerful countries and demand peace and negotiations. We have to learn to renounce our egoistic personal desires and interests (Ego).
For me, the utopia of a world is to stop the production of weapons of war, propaganda and illusionary or fake enemies. Our language should be the language of empathy and love. True art comes from the heart and it will open hearts.

Ein ergänzendes Kapitel sowie weitere Arbeiten der Künstlerin sind auf https://tatsachen.at publiziert.

Self-portrait of war
I was born during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). The eight years of war has been a crucial factor shaping my emotional landscape ever since. Facing war in Middle-East where I live is part of our daily news. During my trip to Europe I could not get rid of it. Now a new war at European borders sends me its pictures every day.
Recently I came across a ruin of an ancient Italian villa near the Austrian-Italian-Slovenian border, which brought back memories of ruins from the Iran-Iraq war.
I looked at myself in the mirror at the remains of a beautiful but abandoned house to be destroyed, I was afraid of the frame in front of me, is it a memory of the past or am I standing in the future of my life? A mirror with a patriarchal world structure that gains its power in destruction, death and war!