A Geneva-based art project named "groupproject" recently gave an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Tehran, in collaboration with local artists. Groupproject are five individuals who are active in very different fields, ranging from web design, to film, to installation art, to architectural theory. The group as such was formed when I decided to move to Iran last year, and we agreed on the idea of a project of artistic exchange in Tehran.

We decided to try and meet with Iranian artists, designers, filmmakers, or anyone else who would be interested in spur-of-the-moment collaboration of any kind. The thematic backdrop, as it were, was to be the city of Tehran as an urban and architectural, but also as an historical and fictional space. But rather than present an urban study, or produce thematic artworks on the city, our main intention was to document a work-in-progress - to reflect on the actual process of exchange, the act of meeting people, of trying to discuss not only the city, but also the state of contemporary art in Tehran in comparison to Geneva, and suchlike.

After a few months in Tehran, I managed to get hold of an improvised exhibition space at the Museum of Modern Art, within the context of the Swiss Cultural Week held by the Swiss embassy (11th - 18th of June 2000), which included projections of Swiss-made movies, talks, a photo exhibit, concerts, music courses and suchlike.

In the end, in terms of concrete projects, we worked with eight different individuals, on video films, an audio installation, texts, and a poster design (which was never realized). But all in all, we met with three or four times as many, interviewing most of them on video, e.g. urban historian Kaveh Ehsani, performance artist Roxanna Shapour, painter Khosro Hassanzadeh.

This article shall focus on my collaboration with Elham Alirezai, a painter we met during the first week (for more information on the project as a whole, cf.: www.groupproject.net)

Ms. Alirezai is a 27 year-old abstract painter from Tehran. We met her at a meeting arranged by an industrious young man named F, an up-and-coming film critic and soon-to-be gallerist, who had gathered a large bunch of painters, sculptors and photographers to see if any of them were interested in our case. Incidentally, half the people at the meeting seemed rather taken aback by our idea of impromptu, quasi-artistic projects with no predetermined aim in mind, while others took to chastising us for cooperating with an institution like the Museum of Modern Art (a "Mafia"), and/or for being so pretentious as to think we could "understand Iran in two weeks".

After the meeting, however, Elham approached us and took the time to explain the difficult situation of woman artists when it came to the Museum of Modern Art, and suggested it be addressed in some way within the context of our exhibition. After a brief conversation on the merits of simplicity, legibility, and the NY Guerilla Girls, we agreed that statistics, slogans, and other textual fragments would be the most effective way to get her point across. Within a week, Elham and I had agreed on some two dozen examples, which she put down in farsi calligraphy on long rolls of paper, and hung up at various points throughout the exhibition space, on the fifth day of the exhibition.

Much of the material was "factual" in style, including lists of members of the museum's juries (it turns out they've been exclusively male), and statistics on how many woman artists were represented at the museum: e.g. the temporary exhibition "Iranian Painters of this Century" included 114 men and 13 women, the second biennial of sculpture 280 men and 132 women, the biennial of painting 343 men and 191 women, while the international exhibition of cubist and minimalist painting sported 36 men and no women at all.

A few of the banners had sarcastic, rhetorical questions written on them, others poetry, most of which had been written and published by Ms. Alirezai herself. Another included a text by the woman painter Mansureh Hosseini, entitled "Woman Artists, Ancient History", which argues that even primary, prehistoric art was painted by women. The text had been published by a state-supported all-women's gallery which sports the aptly "feminized" name of Tajali-e ehsas ("Manifestation of Feeling"). For the banner in question, Elham included passages which Tajali-e ehsas had censored.

The museum director, Sami Azar, deigned to visit the exhibition for a good ten minutes that day. After I'd given him my usual spiel on the way things had been working out, his first question was what those lists of names were (he pointed to the lists of jury members).

I explained the idea to him, and I admit that I was relieved to see he was trying to be responsive: "It's been estimated that over the past century", he said, "90% of the most famous artists were men, while over 80% of their objects of representation were women. So one might think modern art really were just a matter of men looking at women." When I told this to Elham, she disagreed with my impression of Azar being sympathetic to the whole thing, and she expressed this with a choice of words that I found uncivil. The overall response was mixed. Some women found it gratifying to see matters that were rarely addressed in public plastered all over the very space that - for them - had come to symbolize cronyism and curatorial machismo par excellence. Other visitors found the banners lacking in artistic merit, or "propagandistic".

Another reaction, one that was perhaps the most consistent response during the course of the entire exhibition - banners or no banners - was the accusation that we were putting down Iran.

A good example for something we would never have thought possible to classify in terms of good or bad press for Iran, but that was, indeed, widely regarded as humiliating, is that of a short video on the city buses, in which a cheerful, chubby woman is asked to tell an anecdote about Tehran's buses. She tells the story of the garbage bags they used to find every morning, in the women's section of different buses, with each bag containing parts of a man's body - first a hand, then another, and so on and so forth.

Admittedly, it's not the same thing as filming tulips and oriental palaces. Setting aside the fine points, and the way in which it was told, it's actually the type of story that could have happened anywhere.

In any case, for most of the museum staff, we were just another bunch of sensationalist foreigners out to diss Iran; an artistic CNN. The video films had been morbid enough, now, with Elham's writings, came the tired and typical display of the misfortunes of Iranian women for the outside world to gloat and wag their fingers at. A man in a suit was posted at the main entrance from 6 PM onward (the exhibition was until 8), telling visitors our exhibition was closed and that they should all go home.

One of the more illustrious participants in the Swiss Cultural Week was the celebrity Swiss-German writer Adolf Muschg, who held several public lectures. It appears that he was a little embarrassing and inept at times - comparing the Islamic Republic to the 3rd Reich and suchlike. The discussion on that occasion eventually turned to Iranians' "intolerance" when it came to foreigners criticizing their country.

Perhaps to make up for his earlier gaffe, Muschg decided to call this "the prerogative of any excommunicated country".