Exhibition and Private View | The Garden of Mystery | Taha Afshar, Monir Farmanfarmaian and Y.Z. Kami 2023

About This Festival

‘The Garden of Mystery’ opens at Asia House, on Wednesday 22 November until Friday 1 December 2017, in celebration of the 700th anniversary of Gulshan-i Raz, one of the greatest works of Persian (Sufi) poetry, written in the early 14th century by Mahmoud Shabistari. Featuring contemporary art by young emerging artist, Taha Afshar, the exhibition is supported with additional work by one of the most prominent Iranian artists of the contemporary period, Monir Farmanfarmaian from Tehran as well as Y.Z. Kami, who lives and works in New York. The works on display, by artists living internationally and born in disparate decades, differ in style and execution, but share a connection and resonance with core themes within Sufi literature and practice.

The Garden of Mystery is now considered to be one of the greatest classical Persian works of the Islamic mystical tradition known in the west as Sufism. From the opening verse, the poet delves straight into recurring themes of the poetry: the heart, soul, contemplation and illumination.

The spiritual themes presented in this poetry mirror ideas explored by not only Renaissance masters, but also the Romantics, several Modernists and a selection of post-war and contemporary western and eastern artists. For example, if you take a work like “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” by Kandinsky you can see how important redefining painting’s role in exploring man’s inner spiritual struggle was for his vision for Modern art. In this context, Shabistari’s work provides another lens and framework to capture man’s journey, relationship with his heart and the cosmos.



Monir Farmanfarmaian (b. 1924) was the subject of a major career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2015. Her work relies on mirrors to reflect and redirect light, as is done to embellish shrines to elevate the sanctity of holy spaces. Whilst decoratively complex, the use of geometric patterns and tessellations points to a far deeper conceptual agenda. The proliferation of arabesque abstract decoration enhances a quality that could only be attributed to God, namely, the doctrine of tawhid, or Divine Unity. Farmanfarmaian’s work not only relates to the tradition of Sufi literature by means of the aesthetic references to decorate architectural motifs associated with Sufism, but also conceptually through its play with light. The mirror of the heart is referred to by Shabistari and other Sufi authors as a metaphor.



Y.Z. Kami