Aidan at Art Moscow: the Sufi Beloved is Feminine

by Walter Robinson - ArtNet Magazine
Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Art Moscow, May 17-21, 2006--Aidan the artist, curator, dealer and teacher at the Surikov Art Institute is a member of the Russian art elite, as her father is Tair Salakhov (b. 1928), a celebrated member of the Soviet Academy of Arts who during the 1960s advocated the "Severe Style," which posited a forceful neo-realism in distinct contrast to the polished propaganda of official Soviet art.

The range of Aidan’s artistic output is as eclectic as her professional life, including film and video works, sculpture, drawings and paintings on canvas and even a kind of readymade.

Thus, a certain personal resonance attends Aidan’s use of academic drawing techniques as well as imagery from Islamic culture. One of the major installations in her show, Qa’Bah (2002), features a large black cube in a darkened room, rigged so that a video of a woman’s eyes look out through an opening, transforming the hard-edged cube into a veiled female face. On the walls are projections of a Sufi dancer spinning. As the deluxe, bilingual catalogue explains, god tends to be highly masculine in many religions, but in Sufism, "God is always the Beloved, always the Feminine."

The exotic image of eyes staring out from a horizontal opening in a veil recurs in drawings and paintings, as do other folk and religious images -- graceful hands in the style of Persian miniatures, for instance, or the image of the minaret, in both paintings and architectonic wall sculptures. "She likes the beauty of veiled women," suggests Khripun. "It’s more about esthetics than religion." In any case, Khripun notes, Aidan’s work embraces Russia’s rich tradition of Orientalism -- Turkish, Persian, Tatar, Uzbek, Tadjik and more.