Aziz Art May 2016

A
ni
sh
Ka
p
o
or
Lake
Urmia
Iran
May 2016
A
Farsophone
London Legal Walk
Shirin Neshat
zi
z
A
rt
http;//www.aziz-anzabi.com

1.Shirin
Neshat
9.
Competition
10.Anish
Kapoor
17.
Competition
18.London
Legal Walk
20.Lake Urmia
Director: Aziz Anzabi
Editor and translator :
Asra Yaghoubi
Research: Zohreh Nazari

Shirin Neshat born 1957 is an
Iranian visual artist who lives in
New York City, known primarily for
her work in film, video and
photography.Her artwork centers
around the contrasts between
Islam and the West, femininity and
masculinity, public life and private
life, antiquity and modernity, and
bridging the spaces between these
subjects. Neshat has been
recognized countless times for her
work, from winning the
International Award of the XLVIII
Venice Biennale in 1999,to winning
the Silver Lion for best director at
the 66th Venice Film Festival in
2009,to being named Artist of the
Decade by Huffington Post critic G.
Roger Denson.
about the west, romanticized the
west, and slowly rejected all of his
own values; both my parents did.
What happened, I think, was that
their identity slowly dissolved, they
exchanged it for comfort. It served
their class”.
As a part of Neshat’s
“Westernization” she was enrolled
in a Catholic boarding school in
Tehran. Through her father’s
acceptance of Western ideologies
came an acceptance of a form of
western feminism. Neshat’s father
encouraged each of his daughters
to “be an individual, to take risks, to
learn, to see the world", and he
sent his daughters as well as his
sons to college to receive their
higher education.
Background
Neshat is the fourth of five children
of wealthy parents, brought up in
the religious town of Qazvin in
north-western Iran under a "very
warm, supportive Muslim family
environment",where she learned
traditional religious values through
her maternal grandparents.
Neshat's father was a physician and
her mother a homemaker. Neshat
said that her father, "fantasized
1

After graduating school, she moved
to New York and married a Korean
curator, Kyong Park,who was the
director and founder of Storefront
for Art and Architecture, a nonprofit
organization.Neshat helped
Park run the Storefront, where she
was exposed to many different
ideologies and it would become a
place where she received a much
needed experience with and
exposure to concepts that would
later become integral to her
artwork.
During this time, she did not make
any serious attempts at creating
art, and the few attempts were
subsequently destroyed. In 1990,
she returned to Iran. "It was
probably one of the most shocking
experiences that I have ever had.
The difference between what I had
remembered from the Iranian
culture and what I was witnessing
was enormous. The change was
both frightening and exciting;
I had never been in a country that
was so ideologically based. Most
noticeable, of course, was the
change in people's physical
appearance and public behavior
Education
In 1975, Neshat left Iran to study
art at UC Berkeley and completed
her BA, MA and MFA.
Work
Neshat’s earliest works were
photographs, such as the Unveiling
(1993) and Women of Allah
(1993–97) series, which explore
notions of femininity in relation to
Islamic fundamentalism and
militancy in her home country. As a
way of coping with the discrepancy
between the culture that she was
experiencing and that of the prerevolution
Iran in which she was
raised, she began her first mature
body of work, the Women of Allah
series, portraits of women entirely
overlaid by Persian calligraphy.
Her work refers to the social,
cultural and religious codes of
Muslim societies and the
complexity of certain oppositions,
such as man and woman. Neshat
often emphasizes this theme
showing two or more coordinated
films concurrently,

creating stark visual contrasts
through motifs such as light and
dark, black and white, male and
female. Neshat has also made
more traditional narrative short
films, such as Zarin.
The work of Neshat addresses the
social, political and psychological
dimensions of women's experience
in contemporary Islamic societies.
Although Neshat actively resists
stereotypical representations of
Islam, her artistic objectives are
not explicitly polemical. Rather,
her work recognizes the complex
intellectual and religious forces
shaping the identity of Muslim
women throughout the world.
Using Persian poetry and
calligraphy she examined concepts
such as martyrdom, the space of
exile, the issues of identity and
femininity.
In 2001-02, Neshat collaborated
with singer Sussan Deyhim and
created Logic of the Birds, which
was produced by curator and art
historian RoseLee Goldberg. The
full length multimedia production
premiered at the Lincoln Center
Summer Festival in 2002 and
toured to the Walker Art Institute
in Minneapolis and to Artangel in
incorporate music, Neshat uses
sound to help create an
emotionally evocative and beautiful
piece that will resonate with
viewers of both Eastern and
Western cultures. In an interview
with Bomb magazine in 2000,
Neshat revealed, "Music becomes
the soul, the personal, the intuitive,
and neutralizes the sociopolitical
aspects of the work. This
combination of image and music is
meant to create an experience that
moves the audience."
Neshat was profiled in The New
Yorker magazine on October 22,
2007.
When Neshat first came to use film,
she was influenced by the work of
Iranian director Abbas
Kiarostami.She directed several
videos, among them Anchorage
(1996) and, projected on two
opposing walls: Shadow under the
Web (1997), Turbulent (1998),
Rapture (1999) and Soliloquy
(1999). Neshat's recognition
became more international in 1999,
when she won the International
Award of the XLVIII Venice Biennale
with Turbulent and Rapture, a
project involving almost 250 extras
and produced by

the Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont
which met with critical and public
success after its worldwide avantpremière
at the Art Institute of
Chicago in May 1999.
With Rapture, Neshat tried for the
first time to make pure
photography with the intent of
creating an aesthetic, poetic, and
emotional shock. Games of Desire,
a video and still-photography
piece, was displayed between
September 3 and October 3 at the
Gladstone Gallery in Brussels
before moving in November to the
Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont in
Paris. The film, which is based in
Laos, centers on a small group of
elderly people who sing folk songs
with sexual lyrics - a practice which
had been nearing obsolescence.
In 2009 she won the Silver Lion for
best director at the 66th Venice
Film Festival for her directorial
debut Women Without Men,
based on Shahrnush Parsipur's
novel of the same name. She said
about the movie: "This has been a
labour of love for six years.(...) This
film speaks to the world and to my
country."The film examines the
1953 British-American backed
coup, which supplanted Iran's
democratically elected government
with a monarchy.
In July 2009 Neshat took part in a
three-day hunger strike at the
United Nations Headquarters in
New York in protest of the 2009
Iranian presidential election
Exhibitions and film festivals
Since her first solo exhibition, at
Franklin Furnace in New York in
1993, Neshat has been featured in
solo exhibitions at the Museo de
Arte Moderno, Mexico City;
Contemporary Arts Museum,
Houston; Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis (2002); Castello di
Rivoli, Turin; Dallas Museum of Art
(2000); Wexner Center for the Arts,
Columbus; the Art Institute of
Chicago; the Serpentine Gallery,
London; Museo de Arte
Contemporáneo de Castilla y León,
León; and the Hamburger Bahnhof,
Berlin (2005). In 2008, her solo
exhibition “Women Without Men”
opened at the ARoS Aarhus
Kunstmuseum, Denmark, and
traveled to the National Museum of
Contemporary Art, Athens

, and to the Kulturhuset,
Stockholm. She was included in
Prospect.1, the 2008 New Orleans
Biennial, documenta XI, the 2000
Whitney Biennial, and the 1999
Venice Biennale. In 2012 Shirin
Neshat had a Solo Exhibition in
Singapore, Game of Desire at Art
Plural Gallery.A major
retrospective of Neshat’s work,
organized by the Detroit Institute
of Arts, was scheduled to open in
2013.
Since 2000 Neshat has also
participated in film festivals,
including the Telluride Film
Festival (2000), Chicago
International Film Festival (2001)
San Francisco International Film
Festival (2001), Locarno
International Film Festival (2002),
Tribeca Film Festival (2003),
Sundance Film Festival (2003), and
Cannes Film Festival (2008).
In 2013 she was a member of the
jury at the 63rd
Berlin International Film Festival
Recognition
Neshat was artist in residence at
the Wexner Center for the Arts
(2000) and at MASS MoCA (2001).
In 2004 she was awarded an
honorary professorship at the
Universität der Künste, Berlin In
2006 she was awarded The Dorothy
and Lillian Gish Prize, one of the
richest prizes in the arts, given
annually to “a man or woman who
has made an outstanding
contribution to the beauty of the
world and to mankind’s enjoyment
and understanding of life.”
In 2010 Neshat was named Artist of
the Decade by Huffington Post critic
G. Roger Denson, for "the degree to
which world events have more than
met the artist in making her art
chronically relevant to an
increasingly global culture," for
reflecting "the ideological war
being waged between Islam and
the secular world over matters of
gender, religion, and democracy,"
and because "the impact of her
work far transcends the realms of
art in reflecting the most vital and
far-reaching struggle to assert
human rights."
In 2015 Neshat was selected and
photographed by Annie Leibovitz as
part of the 43rd Pirelli Calendar
which celebrated some of the
world's most inspiring women.

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9

Sir Anish Kapoor
CBE RA born 12 March 1954 is a British-Indian sculptor. Born in
Bombay,Kapoor has lived and worked in London since the early 1970s
when he moved to study art, first at the Hornsey College of Art and
later at the Chelsea School of Art and Design.
He represented Britain in the XLIV Venice Biennale in 1990, when he
was awarded the Premio Duemila Prize. In 1991 he received the Turner
Prize and in 2002 received the Unilever Commission for the Turbine Hall
at Tate Modern. Notable public sculptures include Cloud Gate
(colloquially known as "the Bean") in Chicago's Millennium Park; Sky
Mirror, exhibited at the Rockefeller Center in New York City in 2006 and
Kensington Gardens in London in 2010; Temenos, at Middlehaven,
Middlesbrough; Leviathan, at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2011; and
ArcelorMittal Orbit, commissioned as a permanent artwork for
London's Olympic Park and completed in 2012.
Kapoor received a Knighthood in the 2013 Birthday Honours for
services to visual arts. He was awarded an honorary doctorate degree
from the University of Oxford in 2014.In 2012 he was awarded Padma
Bhushan by Congress led Indian government which is India's 3rd
highest civilian award.
10

Career
Anish Kapoor became known in the
1980s for his geometric or
biomorphic sculptures made using
simple materials such as granite,
limestone, marble, pigment, and
plaster.These early sculptures are
frequently simple, curved forms,
usually monochromatic and
brightly coloured, using powder
pigment to define and permeate
the form. "While making the
pigment pieces, it occurred to me
that they all form themselves out of
each other. So I decided to give
them a generic title,
A Thousand Names, implying
infinity, a thousand being a
symbolic number. The powder
works sat on the floor or projected
from the wall. The powder on the
floor defines the surface of the
floor and the objects appear to be
partially submerged, like icebergs.
That seems to fit inside the idea of
something being partially there."
Such use of pigment characterised
his first high-profile exhibit as part
of the New Sculpture exhibition at
the Hayward Gallery London in
1978.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, he
was acclaimed for his explorations
of matter and non-matter,
specifically evoking the void in both
free-standing sculptural works and
ambitious installations. Many of his
sculptures seem to recede into the
distance, disappear into the ground
or distort the space around them.
In 1987, he began working in stone.
His later stone works are made of
solid, quarried stone, many of
which have carved apertures and
cavities, often alluding to, and
playing with dualities (earth-sky,
matter-spirit, lightness-darkness,
visible-invisible, consciousunconscious,
male-female, and
body-mind). "In the end, I’m talking
about myself. And thinking about
making nothing, which I see as a
void. But then that’s something,
even though it really is nothing."
Since 1995, he has worked with the
highly reflective surface of polished
stainless steel. These works are
mirror-like, reflecting or distorting
the viewer and surroundings. Over
the course of the following decade
Kapoor's sculptures ventured into
more ambitious manipulations of
form and space. He produced a
number of large works, including
Taratantara (1999)

A35-metre-high piece installed in
the Baltic Flour Mills in Gateshead,
England, before renovation began
there; and Marsyas (2002), a large
work consisting of three steel rings
joined by a single span of PVC
membrane that reached end to
# end of the 3,400-square-foot
(320 m2) Turbine Hall of Tate
Modern. Kapoor's Eye in Stone
(Norwegian: Øye i stein) is
permanently placed at the shore of
the fjord in Lødingen in northern
Norway as part of Artscape
Nordland. In 2000, one of Kapoor's
works, Parabolic Waters, consisting
of rapidly rotating coloured water,
was
shown outside the Millennium
Dome in London.
The use of red wax is also part of
his repertoire, evocative of flesh,
blood, and transfiguration. In 2007,
he showed Svayambh (which
translated from Sanskrit means
"self-generated"), a 1.5-metre
block of red wax that moved on
rails through the Nantes Musée
des Beaux-Arts as part of the
Biennale estuaire; this piece was
shown again in a major show at the
Haus Der Kunst in Munich and in
2009at the Royal Academy in
London.Some his work blurs the
boundaries between architecture
and art. In 2008, Kapoor created
Memory in Berlin and New York for
the Guggenheim Foundation, his
first piece in Cor-Ten, which is
formulated to produce a protective
coating of rust.Weighing 24 tons
and made up of 156 parts, it calls to
mind Richard Serra’s huge, rusty
steel works, which also invite
viewers into perceptually
confounding interiors.
In 2009, Kapoor became the first
Guest Artistic Director of Brighton
Festival. Kapoor installed four
sculptures during the festival: Sky
Mirror at Brighton Pavilion gardens;
C-Curve at The Chattri, Blood
Relations (a collaboration with
author Salman Rushdie); and 1000
Names, both at Fabrica. He also
created a large site-specific work
titled The Dismemberment of
Jeanne d’Arc and a performancebased
installation: Imagined
Monochrome.The public response
was so overwhelming that police
had to re-divert traffic around
Curve at the Chattri and exercise
crowd control.

In September 2009, Kapoor was
the first living artist to have a solo
exhibition at the Royal Academy of
Arts. As well as surveying his
career to date, the show also
included new works. On display
were Non-Object mirror works,
cement sculptures previously
unseen, and Shooting into the
Corner,a cannon that fires pellets
of wax into the corner of the
gallery. Previously shown at MAK,
Vienna, in January 2009, it is
a work with dramatic presence
and associations and also
continues Kapoor's interest in the
self-made object, as the wax builds
up on the walls and floor of the
gallery the work slowly oozes out
its form.
In spring 2011, Kapoor's work,
Leviathan,was the annual
Monumenta installation for the
Grand Palais in Paris. Kapoor
described the work as: "A single
object, a single form, a single
colour...My ambition is to create a
space with in a space that
responds to the height and
luminosity of the Nave at the
Grand Palais. Visitors will be invited
to walk inside the work, to immerse
themselves in colour, and it will, I
hope, be a contemplative and
poetic experience."
In 2011, Kapoor exhibited Dirty
Corner at the Fabbrica del Vapore
in Milan.Fully occupying the site's
"cathedral" space, the work
consists of a huge steel volume, 60
metres long and 8 metres high, that
visitors enter. Inside, they gradually
lose their perception of space, as it
gets progressively darker and
darker until there is no light, forcing
people to use their other senses to
guide them through the space. The
entrance of the tunnel is gobletshaped,
featuring an interior and
exterior surface that is circular,
making minimal contact with the
ground. Over the course of the
exhibition, the work was
progressively covered by some 160
cubic metres of earth by a large
mechanical device, forming a sharp
mountain of dirt which the tunnel
appears to be running through.
Public commissions
Turning the World Upside Down,
Israel Museum, 2010

Kapoor's earliest public
commissions include the Cast Iron
Mountain at the Tachikawa Art
Project in Japan, as well as an
untitled 1995 piece installed at
Toronto's Simcoe Place resembling
mountain peaks. In 2001, Sky
Mirror, a large mirror piece that
reflects the sky and surroundings,
was commissioned for a site
outside the Nottingham Playhouse.
Since 2006, Cloud Gate, a 110-ton
stainless steel sculpture with a
mirror finish, has been
permanently installed in
Millennium Park in Chicago.
Viewers are able to walk beneath
the sculpture and look up into an
"omphalos" or navel above them.
In the autumn of 2006, a second
10-metre Sky Mirror, was installed
at Rockefeller Center, New York
City. This work was later exhibited
in Kensington Gardens in 2010 as
part of the show Turning the World
Upside Down, along with three
other major mirror works.
ArcelorMittal Orbit, London
Olympic Park, 2012
In 2009, Kapoor created the
permanent, site-specific work
Earth Cinema for Pollino National
Park, the largest national park
in Italy, as part of the project
ArtePollino – Another
South.Kapoor's work, Cinema di
Terra (Earth Cinema), is a 45m long,
3m wide and 7m deep cut into the
landscape made from concrete and
earth.People can enter from both
sides and walk along it, viewing the
earth void within.Cinema di Terra
officially opened to public in
September 2009.Kapoor was also
commissioned by Tees Valley
Regeneration (TVR) to produce five
pieces of public art, collectively
known as the Tees Valley Giants.The
first of these sculptures, Tememos,
was unveiled to the public in June
2010. Temenos stands 50 metres
high and is 110 metres in length. A
steel wire mesh pulled taught
between two enormous steel
hoops, it remains an ethereal and
an uncertain form despite its
colossal scale.In 2010, Turning the
World Upside Down, Jerusalem was
commissioned and installed at the
Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The
sculpture is described as a "16-foot
tall polished-steel hourglass " and it
"reflects and reverses the Jerusalem sky
and the museum's landscape, a likely
reference to the city's duality of celestial
and earthly, holy and profane".

Cloud Gate
at the Millennium Park, Chicago
Also in June, Kapoor's Orbit was
announced as the winning proposal
for an artwork for the 2012
Olympic Games. The Greater
London Authority selected
Kapoor's sculpture from a shortlist
of five artists as the permanent
artwork for the Olympic Park. At
115 metres tall, Orbit is the tallest
sculpture in the UK.
Soon to be completed is a granite
monument to commemorate the
British victims
of 9/11 in New York’s Hanover
Square.
When asked if engagement with
people and places is the key to
successful public art, Kapoor said,
“I’m thinking about the mythical
wonders of the world, the Hanging
Gardens of Babylon and the Tower
of Babel. It’s as if the collective will
comes up with something that has
resonance on an individual level
and so becomes mythic. I can claim
to take that as a model for a way of
thinking. Art can do it, and I’m
going to have a damn good go. I
want to occupy the territory, but
the territory is an idea and a way of
thinking as much as a context that
generates objects.

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17

18

http://www.farsophone.org.uk

Lake Urmia is an endorheic salt
lake in Iranian Azerbaijan, Iran and
near Iran's border with Turkey.The
lake is between the provinces of
East Azerbaijan and West
Azerbaijan in Iran, and west of the
southern portion of the Caspian
Sea. At its full size, it was the
largest lake in the Middle East and
the sixth largest saltwater lake on
earth with a surface area of
approximately 5,200 km² (2,000
mile²), 140 km
(87 mi) length, 55 km (34 mi)
width, and 16 m (52 ft) depth.[5]
The lake has shrunk to 10% of its
former size due to damming of the
rivers that flow into it and
pumping of groundwater from
the area.
Lake Urmia, along with its once
approximately 102 islands, are
protected as a national park by the
Iranian Department of
Environment.
long cores from Lake Urmia has
revealed a nearly 200 kyr record of
vegetation and lake level changes.
The vegetation has changed from
the Artemisia/grass steppes during
the glacial/stadial periods to oakjuniper
steppe-forests during the
interglacial/interstadial periods.
The lake seems to have had a
complex hydrological history and its
water levels have greatly fluctuated
in the geological history. Very high
lake levels have been suggested for
some time intervals during the two
last glacial periods as well as during
both the Last Interglacial as well as
the Holocene. Lowest lake levels
have occurred during the last
glacial periods.
Ecology
Lake Urmia is located in Iran
UNESCO Biosphere Reserves in Iran
See also: Geography of Iran and
Environmental issues in Iran
Palaeoecology
A palynological investigation on
20

Modern ecology
Lake Urmia is home to some 212
species of birds, 41 reptiles, 7
amphibians, and 27 species of
mammals, including the Iranian
yellow deer. It is an internationally
registered protected area as both a
UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and a
Ramsar site. The Iranian Dept. of
Environment has designated most
of the lake as a National Park.
The lake is marked by more than a
hundred small, rocky islands, which
serve as stopover points during the
migrations of several wild birds
including flamingos, pelicans,
spoonbills, ibises, storks, shelducks,
avocets, stilts, and gulls. A recent
drought has significantly decreased
the annual amount of water the
lake receives. This in turn has
increased the salinity of the lake's
water, lowering the lake viability as
home to thousands of migratory
birds including the large flamingo
populations. The salinity has
particularly increased in the half of
the lake north of the causeway.
By virtue of its high salinity, the lake
no longer sustains any fish species.
Nonetheless, Lake Urmia is
considered a significant natural
habitat of Artemia, which serve as
food source for the migratory birds
such as flamingos.In early 2013, the
then-head of the Iranian Artemia
Research Center was quoted that
Artemia Urmiana had gone extinct
due to the drastic increases in
salinity. However this assessment
has been contradicted.
Falling level and increasing salinity
The lake is a major barrier between
two of the most important cities in
West Azerbaijan and East
Azerbaijan provinces, Urmia and
Tabriz. A project to build a highway
across the lake was initiated in the
1970s but was abandoned after the
Iranian Revolution of 1979, having
finished a 15 km causeway with an
unbridged gap. The project was
revived in the early 2000s, and was
completed in November 2008 with
the opening of the 1.5 km Urmia
Lake Bridge across the remaining
gap.The highly saline environment
is already heavily rusting the steel
on the bridge despite anticorrosion
treatment. Experts have warned
that the construction of the
causeway and bridge, together with
a series of ecological factors, will
eventually lead to the drying up of the
lake

turning it into a salt marsh which
will directly affect the climate of
the region.
Lake Urmia has been shrinking for a
long time, with an annual
evaporation rate of 0.6m to 1m
(24 to 39 inches). Although
measures are now being taken to
reverse the trend the lake has
shrunk by 60% and could disappear
entirely.Only 5% of the lake's water
remains.
Bridge construction over Lake
Urmia in 2005
On 2 August 2012, Mohammad-
Javad Mohammadizadeh, the head
of Iran's Environment Protection
Organization, announced that
Armenia has agreed on
transferring water from Armenia
to counter the critical fall in Lake
Urmia's water levels, remarking
that "hot weather and a lack of
precipitation have brought the lake
to its lowest water levels ever
recorded". He added that recovery
plans for the lake include the
transfer of water from Eastern
Azerbaijan Province. Previously,
Iranian authorities had announced
a plan to transfer water from the
Aras River, which borders Iran and
Azerbaijan; the 950-billion-toman
plan was abandoned due to
Azerbaijan's objections.
In July 2014, Iran President Hassan
Rouhani approved plans for a 14
trillion rial program (over $500
million) in the first year of a
recovery plan. The money is
supposed to be used for water
management, reducing farmer's
water use, and environmental
restoration. Several months earlier,
in March 2014, Iran's Department
of Environment and the United
Nations Development Programme
(UNDP) issued a plan to save the
lake and the nearby wetland, which
called for spending $225 million in
the first year and $1.3 billion
overall for restoration.
The Silveh Dam in Piranshahr
County should be complete in
2015. Through a tunnel and canals
it will transfer up to 121,700,000
m3 (98,700 acre·ft) of water from
the Lavin River in the Little Zab
basin to Lake Urmia basin annually.
In 2015, president Hassan
Rouhani’s cabinet approved $660
million for better irrigation systems
and steps to combat
desertification.

Environmental protests
The prospect that Lake Urmia may
dry up entirely has drawn protests
in Iran and abroad, directed at both
the regional and national
governments.
Desalting of Urmia Lake
Protests flared in late August 2011
after the Iranian parliament voted
not to provide funds to channel
water from the Araz River to raise
the lake level. Apparently,
parliament proposed instead to
relocate people living around Lake
Urmia.
More than 30 activists were
detained on 24 August 2011
during an iftar meal.On 25 August,
several soccer fans were detained
before and after the Tabriz derby
match between Tractor Sazi F.C.
and Shahrdari Tabriz F.C.. for
shouting slogans in favor of
protecting the lake, including
"Lake Urmia is dying, the Majlis
[parliament] orders its execution".
In the absence of a right to protest
publicly in Iran, protesters have
incorporated their messages into
chants at football matches.
Further demonstrations took place
in the streets of Tabriz and Urmia
on 27 August and 3 September
2011.Amateur video from these
events showed riot police on
motorcycles attacking apparently
peaceful protesters.According to
the governor of West Azerbaijan, at
least 60 supporters of the lake were
arrested in Urmia and dozens in
Tabriz because they had not
applied for a permit to organize a
demonstration.
On May 5, 2016, Leonardo Di
Caprio posted a photo of "a
dilapidated ship dock remains on
dried up Lake Urmia" on his
Instagram page stating: "It used to
be the biggest salt lake in the
Middle East, but it now contains
five percent of the amount of water
it did two decades ago due to
climate change, dam construction
and decrease in precipitiation."

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