Exchange. His oil paintings have been exhibited in the Surrealists' Exhibition at the Persepolis Gallery at the Shiraz Art Festival. Saqqakhaneh movement In the 1950 and 1960s, a new subgenre of Iranian art called the Saqqakhaneh school (also known as Saqqā-ḵāna, Saqqa-khaneh, Saqakhaneh, Sahakhanah) was pioneered by artists Hossein Zenderoudi, Parviz Tanavoli, Faramarz Pilaram, Massoud Arabshahi, Mansoor Ghandriz, Nasser Oveisi, Sadeq Tabrizi and Zhazeh Tabatabai. Artists associated with Saqqakhaneh successfully combined western art stylistic traditions and local symbols including calligraphy, zodiac signs, astrolabes, amulets and talismans in order to devise a distinctly local visual language. Religious motifs, such as the hand or a bowl, also featured prominently in Saqqakhaneh works. Saqqakhaneh school is a movement of neo-traditional modern art that is found in Iran, rooted in a history of coffee-house paintings and Shiʿite Islam visual elements. The word Saqqakhaneh originally referred to a type of water-fountain shrine found locally, and came to represent a movement characterised heavily by symbolism. Other motifs found throughout the region were incorporated into the artistic movement – the hand being a prime example. In scholar Karim Emami's articles on “Saqqā-ḵāna Paintings,” he defined in which a, "combined religious imagery and traditional decorative elements with modern painting techniques, played a significant role in drawing the attention of the media and art connoisseurs to the genre". A visual language was created by drawing on the history of the Shi'a Islamic culture, specifically the saqqakhana, a small public area in which water is given to strangers often decorated with symbols and offerings. The artists of this genre were re-appropriating these symbolic traditions associated with the saqqakhana but with a modernist stance. By the late 1960s into the 1970s he Saqqakhaneh school artists of Iran had international prominence and this helped pave the way for the opening of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in 1977. The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art boasting an important collection of both Western and Iranian artists. The Iranian revolution by 1979 halted the dynamics of the Iranian arts scene. It has been debated by various scholars after the publication of Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism (which posed similar questions), was the Saqqakhaneh movement affected by the postcolonial view of Iran or rather, did it intensify Orientalism. In 2013, Layla S. Diba and Fereshteh Daftari co-curated the exhibition, Iran Modern (2013) shown at the Asia Society in New York City. The exhibition was the