Des portes sans clés. Des clés sans portes. Abbas Kiarostami et la promesse du passage

This paper discusses some hermeneutical problems relating to an installation by the famous Iranian director, photographer and artist Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016), Doors without keys, presented at the Aga Khan Museum of Toronto during the winter of 2016. The authors provide a reading based on the idea that Kiarostami’s Doors can be interpreted as a significant manifestation of the cognitive processes involved in the spectator’s experience of a contemporary art museum. In order to substantiate this theory, the two parts of the article proceed in a complementary way. The first part explores some of the hermeneutical options given to the visitors, dealing especially with the “philology” of the relevant processes of cultural transfers and translations, and focusing especially to the apparently compelling, but actually non-necessary, relations with the aesthetics of classical Persian poetry. The second part locates the installation in the habitat of contemporary art, finally showing how much Doors without keys calls for an idea of the aesthetic experience which can’t be confined in any culturalist perspective: an experience revolving around the phenomenological and proprioceptive dimensions of the observer, and their creative and bewildering implications.