6 - The Politics of Art Practice in Contemporary Iran

Summary

This chapter looks at the issue of ‘belonging’, which itself is related to localised historical and cultural settings, and fuels a complex debate in the art of Iran today. I will explore the strategies pursued by artists in the Iranian context, and the wider politics of art practice relating to this fundamental yet unresolved question. I argue that the lack of an effective presence of public platforms during recent times, such as academies or museums, has left individual artists to generate their own artistic strategies that are relevant to the demands of contemporaneity – the concept that was fully explored in Chapters 1 and 5. In this chapter, I examine this concern through the works of a number of artists, situating them with reference to the concepts of identity, ethnicity and transnational contemporaneity. With reference to selected works, I also consider how artists enact a politics of resistance to explicit ethno-cultural identity markers – that is, to reductive cultural views that tend to perceive their works as geopolitical reflections. Influenced by contemporary discussions on globalised art, their art practice aims to revisit a well-established debate within art-historical discourse: namely, whether art should have creative autonomy, or whether it is only ever determined by its context. Within the contemporary art scene in Iran, just as within social movements, political interventions with aesthetic dimensions have mobilised a range of approaches; experiments that are more open to reflexivity and individual subjective interpretations. As will become clear, for some artists, artistic practice is an intellectual and activist project that serves as a fitting site for the possibility of responsible and socio-political art. This attitude is closely aligned with the belief that art must have an intellectual function and should contribute towards representing society, if not serving it.

In the second part, through four case studies of artists’ works, I examine how artists act against the erasure of contextual frames, which demonstrates an awareness of the fact that contemporary art is capable of transcending the politics of location. I will discuss the current dilemma of how contemporary artists in Iran have responded to Iran's social and cultural complexities.