IN CULTURE AS IN OIL, AZERBAIJAN’S RICHES ARE GETTING GLOBAL ATTENTION
by Emma Crichton-Miller

The International Herald Tribune
November 28, 2009 Saturday
France

One of the newest frontiers on contemporary art is Azerbaijan where,
since the collapse of the Soviet Union, rich energy resources have
given the country a rich new cultural life.

In the ever-expanding world of contemporary art one of the newest
frontiers is Azerbaijan where, since the collapse of the Soviet Union,
rich energy resources have not only given the country growing clout
in international politics, but also a rich new cultural life.

For many years, Azeri art was dominated by one great figure – Tahir
Salakhov, now 81.

Despite working within the confines of the Soviet system, Mr. Salakhov
nevertheless dared to pioneer a version of "severe realism" more
truthful to the grim realities of workers’ lives than the bright
certainties of Socialist Realism. As head of the Soviet Art Union,
he sheltered many dissident artists, while also championing the
work of Western artists like Francis Bacon, Robert Rauschenberg,
James Rosenquist and Giorgio Morandi.

Now vice president of the Russian Arts Academy, he was this year given
his first major retrospective in Moscow. From Feb. 18 to Feb. 25 he
will have his first solo show in London, at Sotheby’s.

"He is an iconic figure for Azeri artists," said Nasib Piriyev,
who this winter is directing a festival of Azerbaijani arts in London.

Running from Nov. 25 to March 7, the Buta Festival will introduce
Londoners to Azerbaijan’s most celebrated musicians, artists, poets
and filmmakers – including Mr. Salakhov.

Just as many Russian oligarchs have plunged enthusiastically into
the roles of patron and collector, funding a vigorous renaissance of
contemporary art in Moscow and St. Petersburg, so, too, the last 10
years have seen a renewed excitement among Azeri artists and patrons.

Azerbaijan supported a pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, following
up last year with two exhibitions in Germany, and this year, from Nov.

10 to Nov. 29, a display of 26 artists, "Baku Unlimited," in Basel,
Switzerland.

Designated an Islamic Capital of Culture this year, Baku, Azerbaijan,
has also hosted a series of art exhibitions, including an international
modern art biennial. And in September, a new Museum of Modern Art,
the initiative of Mehriban Aliyeva, wife of President Ilham Aliyev,
opened with more than 800 exhibits. There has been talk of tempting
the Guggenheim’s director-at-large, Thomas Krens, into building a
Guggenheim in Baku.

Many of the Azeri artists included in the Buta Festival have already
achieved substantial recognition on the world stage, including the
violinist Gidon Kremer; the conductor Ion Marin; the Montreal Jazz
Festival-winning musician Shahin Novrasli; the London-based poet Nigar
Hasan-Zadeh, and the Baku-born scriptwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov. Mr.

Ibragimbekov, who works closely with the Russian director Nikita S.

Mikhalkov, has film credits that include "Urga," translated into
English as "Close to Eden," which won the Golden Lion at the Venice
Film Festival in 1991, and "Burnt by the Sun," which won an Oscar
in 1995.

Newer, perhaps, to international audiences, the award-winning
photographer Rena Effendi contributed to the recent Istanbul Biennial.

An exhibition of Azeri artists in the church crypt of St Martin’s in
the Fields, near Trafalgar Square in London, meanwhile, will introduce
less familiar names.

Buta means bud, a key decorative element in Azerbaijani decorative
art; and as the flame-decorated festival Web site suggests, this
new budding of Azerbaijan’s artists is predicated upon the great oil
wealth that has revived Azerbaijan’s position in the world since the
breakup of the Soviet Union. Wealth from oil and gas has enabled an
emerging generation to travel abroad for education and also to perform,
publish or display their work.

Among those responsible for this new cultural flowering, Mr. Piriyev,
the scion of a prominent Azerbaijani family, is emblematic.

Mr. Piriyev’s father worked for years for the gas giant Gazprom in
Moscow, before moving back in 2006 to Baku to found the Azerbaijan
Methanol Co., or Azmeco. Mr. Piriyev worked as vice president of
finance and development in the new company until September, when he
became its chief executive.

In three years Azmeco has grown into the country’s largest
private-sector business. Further family interests include oil and
gas refineries in Uzbekistan, the Kyrgyz Republic and Afghanistan.

But while Mr. Piriyev’s leverage may derive from his business interests
and wealth, his real interest, he said in an interview, has always
been the arts.

As a small boy, he said, he remembered Baku under Soviet rule as a
place rich in culture, a crossroads between East and West and between
Islam and Christendom: "Baku was a very literate town and people were
obsessed with education and culture. There were many artists – Jews,
Russians, Armenians – and chess schools on every corner of town,"
he said.

But after the collapse of the Soviet Union and particularly during the
subsequent conflict with Armenia over Nagorno Karabakh, the artists,
along with many others, left, leaving Baku drained of its cultural
lifeblood.

In Moscow, Mr. Piriyev "grew up as a Russian citizen, reading Russian
literature and listening to Russian music."

Yet it was in Moscow – after stints in Britain for studies and in
Central Asia for business – that the idea for Buta germinated. Moscow
is home to the largest community in the Azeri diaspora, "and the
whole idea of Buta is to support Azeri art outside in the world."

In 2005 he founded a not-for-profit organization, the Buta Art Center,
dedicated to the promotion and celebration of Azeri culture, with a
state-of-the-art workshop and studio in Baku supported by a publicity
and funding structure in Moscow that channels financial support from
Azeri businessmen and manages cultural events worldwide. Buta has
also taken over the running of Art November in Moscow, a month-long
festival of art and music now in its 16th year.

For those not able to travel to Baku to witness its cultural
renaissance, an exhibition of recent work by the photographer Rena
Effendi, "Pipe Dreams," will run from Dec. 17 to Jan. 16 at Host
Gallery, near the Barbican area of London. Her photographs document
the often harsh lives of people living along the 1,700-kilometer,
or 1,000-mile oil pipeline that runs from Baku, on the Caspian Sea,
through Tbilisi in Georgia to Ceyhan on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.

Just as Mr. Salakhov found inspiration for his grim realism in the
oil workers and fisherman of Azerbaijan, so Ms. Effendi shows, with
compassion and sharp insight, 21st-century lives still in thrall to
black gold.