KEY POINTS:
Beirut lies flattened beneath you, its streets and alleys incised out of old rubber; the city mapped in tyres and viewed from the dangerous skies.
Nearby, a concrete tower block rises in three dimensions to head height, a perfect miniature of the artist's former home rendered in humble tile grout.
Peer through the windows and you see that everyone has gone, evacuated after the 2006 bombings.
Typical Iranian Wedding, as the painting is called, takes the form of a diptych: women on the left, with nothing more than a solitary chicken to dine on beneath the bare bulbs, men stuffing their faces in a palace of varieties and blue cigar smoke on the right.
In Baghdad, a car crashes into an American security wall, flames rage, a statue's head rolls in the dirt. In Ramallah, everybody's music clashes with everybody else's in a sound soup of chanting, hectoring, lamenting and bopping as night falls in the rickety encampments.
Tiny lights glow in the tiny rooms of this sprawling model; the TV antennae twist into gesticulating figures. F-16s lie in wait behind a border of cardboard.
London's Saatchi Gallery's major show of contemporary art from the Middle East, which runs until May 6, was never going to be intricate patterning or calligraphy.
Only someone who has forsworn television news for decades could assume that a ban on representation still holds in Islamic cultures. Consider those statues, consider those wall-sized portraits of ayatollahs.
But it is still amazing how far into politics this art bravely goes and it is no overstatement to speak of bravery in this case.
One of the artists represented here, who lives in Tehran, is muffled in the gallery's publicity shot to conceal his identity. Another, the gifted Tala Madani, has escaped Tehran for Amsterdam but still refused to have her face revealed in a photograph.
The Iranian artists are particularly excoriating, especially those who have remained in the country while somehow managing to show their work in secret.
At a distance, Ramin Haerizadeh's photo-based images look like blown-up Persian miniatures, with their jewel-rich colours and delicate arabesques, but their satire is gleefully savage. What appear to be women are in fact men, half-naked: a harem of bearded mullah voluptuaries.
What a taunt this would be in an uncensored society, but over and again, these artists protest against the daily constraints on freedom.
Veiled women with graters, sieves and irons instead of faces; veiled women whose features are fading fast like exposed negatives; ranks of veiled women, kneeling in prayer, who turn out to be empty husks of tinfoil when you stoop to look into their eyes. Identical, faceless, made of kitchen materials: no getting away from the message.
And much of the work in this show takes the form of direct one-liners, more or less blunt, more or less the kind of bull-point art Saatchi has tended to favour since the 90s.
The worst work here is a shambolic hybrid of eastern content and western style - Tehran prostitutes fashioned out of stuffed tights and melons; public funerals with overtones of Martin Kippenberger.
The show's curator talks of "robust independent art scenes from Marrakesh to Tehran", but how robust can any art scene in the world honestly claim to be when it plays hard to the international fair and biennale market?
But there are some truly independent minds here, from Marwan Rechmaoui, whose metaphors of Beirut are so acute in their use of materials, to the 28-year-old Tala Madani. Her paintings are brilliant parables of Tehran, from the hairdresser to the mosque, the street cafe and ice-cream parlour.
But this is not immediately apparent, for she has invented a way of painting that turns up on classic Islamic idioms - pattern, repetition, complex abstraction - to achieve the double entendre.
Audacious, passionate and acutely drawn, Madani's paintings are modern Caprichos; moral in their fancy, coruscating in their invention and more original than anything by the new young artists generally favoured by the art world.
- OBSERVER
