Elaine Sciolino

Since early October, L’Atelier des Artistes en Exil has used the 3,200-square-foot space to support about 200 exiled artists from around the world.

In a sense, L’Atelier, which depends on Paris City Hall for free work space, is itself in exile. It was forced by the city to leave its comfortable studio near Montmartre in June, then camped out in the annex of a cultural center in southeast Paris. Now, it will have to vacate its current location in December. It has no idea where it will go next.

“We don’t find the artists; they find us,” said Judith Depaule, an actress and theater producer who runs L’Atelier. “And they need a home, a real home, a permanent home, four or five times bigger than this one, so they can have space to paint, to rehearse, to sculpt, to film, to create their art.”

L’Atelier, a nonprofit association under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture, was started in 2017 to offer services and work spaces to artists of all origins and disciplines who have fled war, poverty and oppression. It has welcomed artists from more than 40 countries, including Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It operates with an annual budget of about 600,000 euros (about $662,000), mostly from public funds.

Volunteer French professors offer the artists free French lessons; volunteer lawyers give them free legal advice on how to obtain political asylum in France; other volunteers teach acting and writing skills. Museums including the Jeu de Paume and the Palais de Tokyo have lent their support.

“Because being a refugee is not a profession, because the role of art is to say and show things that are disturbing and to give voice to the oppressed,” reads the organization’s mission statement, “because it is through the voices of its artists that the cultures of imperiled countries can continue to be perpetuated, it is important that artists have the opportunity to continue practicing their art.”

Diane Kremer, program director, calls L’Atelier “a political movement.” At a moment when Europe is confronting the influx of a record number of refugees, she said, “We couldn’t stay indifferent to the tragedies around us.”

For Maral Bolouri, a contemporary artist and writer, France became home in 2018 after she left her native Iran and lived for a time in Malaysia and Kenya. She said that because of the political nature of her art and her explicit portrayal of female and male bodies, and that she is gay, she would not be welcome back in Iran.

L’Atelier helped her achieve asylum as a political refugee. “It was hyper-difficult, a real hell,” she said, moving between English and French. “Without the support of the Atelier, I wouldn’t have had a chance.”

Her current writing focuses on the immigrant’s identity in a country like France. “I’m welcome as long as I fit into the definition of being a good brown, Middle Eastern woman, a good immigrant,” she said.

Kubra Khademi, a 30-year-old native of Afghanistan, broke from conservative traditions when she studied fine arts at universities in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Lahore, Pakistan. “When I was 16, I already knew I didn’t want to get married, that marriage was my enemy,” she said, a stance that made her an oddity in her religious family. Khademi became a performance artist promoting the rights of women.

In 2015, after she walked through the streets dressed in what she called a “feminist armor” of metal, the shape of her breasts and buttocks exaggerated, she was forced to go into hiding and then fled the country for France. She received political asylum status and is now painting in watercolors.

One of her recent works shows a stylized nude woman, standing with her legs apart holding a small child by the hair in each hand; under her vagina is a small fire. The woman, she said, represents her widowed mother in Kabul, who married at 12 and had 10 children; she supported Khademi’s decision to pursue an education and become an artist.

“It is amazing to have a little bit of space to call my own, where I can work, store my paints and paintings, meet people,” Khademi said. “Of course, I speak to my mother every day.”

On the day I visited, Yannos Majestikos, 31, a sculptor and performance artist who grew up in and studied interior architectural design in Congo, was practicing his one-man show. He put his head inside a hollow, old-fashioned television set and strapped it to his chest. (He learned about television technology as a child from his father, an electrician.)

Barefoot, dressed in jeans and a black shirt, he moved and swayed, the television broadcasting images of prominent figures of the colonial and anti-colonial movements, including Leopold II of Belgium and Mobutu Sese Seko, a former president of Zaire, as Congo was once known, their contradicting speeches mixing together as they are played on the television speakers. He is pursuing political asylum status in France so that he can show his art around the world. “That is my dream,” he said.

Last year, L’Atelier got a psychological boost when Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, visited and said on Twitter afterward with a photo: “A profoundly moving visit to the @aartistesenexil in Paris. Through their works of creativity and courage, these artists are shining a light on the hardships that so many face as refugees.”

For the third year, L’Atelier will host a multidisciplinary festival that exhibits the artists’ work and includes some of their performances. The festival will be held throughout November at Paris’ National Museum of the History of Immigration and Cité internationale des arts, an artists’ residence in Paris.

For the Ministry of Culture, the artists-in-exile project fits into the long tradition of the city of Paris as a refuge for artists who sought protection from afar and made the city home — from Picasso and Samuel Beckett to Hemingway and James Baldwin.

It also underscores the commitment of the French government to counter arguments of the French far right that only French “patrimoine” or traditional cultural heritage, not foreign cultural influences, should be celebrated.

Last year, the Ministry of Culture organized an exhibit of the work of 15 refugee artists at the ministry’s Palais Royal headquarters. In opening the show, Françoise Nyssen, then the culture minister, summed up the L’Atelier spirit, saying, “Culture in France knows no boundaries.”

This article originally appeared in

A Paris Colony for Exiled Artists Needs a New Home

PARIS — On a forlorn stretch of the Seine near the Gare de Lyon station sits a small, dreary, government-owned red brick building that houses one of the most vibrant artistic communities here.

<h1>PARIS — I visited the ancient Persian city of Susa only once, in 1982, on a trip to Iran’s western border during the Iran-Iraq war. The Iraqis had attacked a huge swath of Khuzestan province,where Susa is, and the Iranians wanted to show the destruction to the outside world.</h1>

In the Old Testament, Susa is best known as the place where Esther outwitted Haman to save the Jews from annihilation. It is also the site of the 250-acre palace complex built by Darius the Great in the fifth century B.C. The Iraqi strikes had badly damaged the ruins of the palace’s audience hall.

When Darius became the ruler of the Persian Empire, he made Susa his permanent capital. One of the oldest cities in the world, it became a commercial, bureaucratic and political hub that was as important as Persepolis, a largely ceremonial site about the same size, which Darius also built.

Even before the Iraqi attacks, however, there would have been little for us to see in Susa. Over the centuries, invaders captured, plundered and destroyed the palace complex.

Starting in 1885, French archaeologists carried out wide-ranging excavations there. Most of the artifacts they discovered — tens of thousands in all — ended up in the Louvre.

“France made a very clever diplomatic agreement and had a monopoly,” said Julien Cuny, curator of the Persian collections at the Louvre. “For decades, only the French could dig, and everything they dug up was allowed to come to France.”

It was only after Reza Shah came to power in Iran in 1925 that a new agreement was negotiated, and from 1928 on, the discoveries were shared by the two countries. The 1979 Iranian revolution put an end to such joint projects.

These days, the Louvre considers the remnants of Susa among its most prized holdings. But unlike its blockbusters, including the Mona Lisa (the museum’s most-visited work of art, for which it has placed signs from the main pyramid entrance to the painting itself), and the Islamic collection (which has its own 30,000-square-foot modernist wing), the Darius palace rooms are little-visited and hard to find.

To get there, you take the escalator by the Passage Richelieu entrance under the pyramid, turn right and enter the Near Eastern Antiquities section, an unwieldy collection that spans 9,000 years, from prehistory to the early Islamic period, and covers an area from North Africa to Central Asia and the Arabian Peninsula.

Then you walk straight until you reach a flight of stairs. You climb the stairs, continue through Room 231, turn left at Room 305 and keep walking until your destination: several rooms, starting with 308. If there is a more direct route, I haven’t found it.

It is worth the journey. The story of Susa is little-known, even among some Iranian visitors, who often confuse it with that of Persepolis, Cuny said. In late 2018, the Louvre installed an interactive 3D display in French, English and Spanish, at which visitors can take a virtual visit of Susa, beginning with the Great Gate to the large courtyard, and continuing into the palace’s column-lined audience hall and throne room.

The centerpiece of the main Persian room at the Louvre is the upper part of what was a nearly 70-foot-tall limestone column, decorated at the top with two kneeling bulls. Thirty-six of these columns once supported the roof of the 128,000-square-foot audience hall, or apadana, at Susa. The column was pieced together from several fragments that were found on the site.

Susa was a center for artistic brickmaking. Large, decorative friezes of polychrome glazed bricks, some of them molded into bas-reliefs, line the walls, pieced together like giant puzzles from thousands of fragments. One frieze shows bearded, richly clad archers carrying bows, quivers and spears as they march. Others depict muscular lions, their mouths open wide as they bare their teeth; griffons with lions’ heads, bodies and forelegs, the hind legs of an eagle and the horns of a ram; and winged bulls. The friezes use dazzling glazes of turquoise, green, brown, white and yellow.

One of the most unusual objects in the Louvre collection is a handle of a fourth-century-B.C. vase in the shape of a winged ibex. It was made in silver and gold, so delicately that it seems to be flying. There are also clay accounting tokens (representing quantities of goods) and pottery; carved cylindrical seals; gold jewelry with semiprecious stones; terra cotta figurines; and metal, clay and ivory sculptures. Fragments of black-and-white floor tiles from an unknown composite material show that they had been made to look like marble.

If you leave the Darius palace rooms and retrace your steps, you will come upon another treasure uncovered in Susa: a 7-foot-tall black stone stele in the shape of an index finger, standing alone under spotlights. Carved into it in cuneiform script is the Code of Hammurabi, the Babylonian system of law in ancient Mesopotamia. Dating from about 1750 B.C., the stele was plundered and taken back to Susa in the mid-12th century B.C.

It consists of 282 laws, including ones governing trade, slavery, theft, interest rates, the presumption of innocence and the principle of “eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” with graded punishments determined by the violator’s social status.

Unlike much of the Louvre, the Near Eastern Antiquities section is gloriously free of crowds. The Code of Hammurabi, however, has been added to the French elementary school curriculum, and on any given day, there may be several classes of students sitting at its base, as museum curators tell its story.

“You ask me why I am interested in Iran, well, it’s because it was the center of the world,” Cuny said. “The Persian Empire — the center of the world in that era. You enter these rooms, and you have arrived in Persia.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="cd39d140-173c-4773-a6e9-350af8af8922" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/arts/persian-collections-louvre-susa.html">The New York Times</a>.

Even before the Iraqi attacks, however, there would have been little for us to see in Susa. Over the centuries, invaders captured, plundered and destroyed the palace complex.

Discovering Persia in Paris

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Elaine Sciolino

Articles written by the author

A Paris Colony for Exiled Artists Needs a New Home

Discovering Persia in Paris