Women, Art, Freedom, Interview with Pamela Karimi

International Journal of Criminology and Sociology, 2020, 9, 285-299, 2020

There have been conducted a few numbers of researches with protest-related subjects in visual arts in a span between the two major unrests, the 1953 Coup and the 1979 Islamic Revolution. This study tries to investigate how the works of Iranian visual artists demonstrate their reactions to the 1953 Coup and progresses towards modernization that occurred after the White Revolution of Shāh in 1963. The advent of the protest concept has coincided with the presence of Modern and Contemporary art in Iran when the country was occupied by allies during the Second World War. The 1953 Coup was a significant protest event that motivated some of the artists to react against the monarchy’s intention. Although, poets, authors, journalists, and writers of plays were pioneer to combat dictatorship, the greatest modernist artists of that time, impressed by the events after the 1953 Coup, just used their art as rebellious manifest against the governors. Keywords: Iranian Visual Artists, Pahlavi, Political Freedom, Persian Protest Literature, the Shāh.

Middle East Journal of Art and Communication, 2011

This article analyzes the dominant dichotomy in cultural and artistic ideas which Iranian artists—like many non-Euro-American artists—have been forced to confront. These include the idea of ‘contemporaneity’: being imbued with the ‘spirit of the time’, particularly dominant in the minds of the so-called ‘Third Generation’; 1 and ‘specificity’, an underlying precept of compelling force. The first involves the idea that ‘postmodernist’ imagery is one of fragmentation and hybridization—the scattering of traditions and the recombination of their diverse elements (see Campbell 1999: 5). The second refers to the ever-present obsession with cultural and frequently social concerns with which Iranian artists are engaged, both within the country and across the diaspora. Contemporary debate on Iranian art reveals deep-rooted anxieties about national and cultural identity. It raises the important question: Is it possible to open up an art practice and discourse that is both contemporary and global, but also indigenous and specific? While this work reflects my own observations, it also relies heavily on the analysis offered in interviews with artists, philosophers, critics, curators and some former administrators in artistic affairs. It finally focuses on four artists through a study of their works and ideas about the aforementioned issues.

2017

Iranian contemporary visual artist and filmmaker, Shirin Neshat gives us a unique lens into contradictions within Islamic feminism. She uses her situation as a culturally-hybrid individual to mediate the dichotomy construed between Eastern and Western cultures and male and female relationships. Special attention is paid to her use of art as a window into systemic socio-political and gender issues she observes from the vantage point of her “third space” locus. In her photographic and cinematic work, she creates provocative juxtapositions built on binaries to expose biases. Her work is equally political and personal. She uses it to critique societies and to construct her own cultural identity. As an actor in the supranational women’s rights movement, with the support of the Art World, she raises gender consciousness across cultures via her artistic provocation. Islamic feminism navigates the space within this chasm and Islamic feminist art is a visual articulation of its carefully con...

Iranian Studies, 2007

This article deals with the emerging discourses and concerns that have dominated the Iranian art community mainly since 1997. It discusses the existing, or rather conflicting, views of the current situation of the visual arts in Iran as expressed in recent artistic events, productions, and exhibitions as well as in critical reviews.2 It does not fully discuss the variety of artistic genres in Iran, but examines the dominant ideas from the main opposing factions of cultural and artistic thought. It also aims at identifying the structural changes in Iranian art as well as the prevailing artistic policy of recent years.

Saqi Books, 2013

Complex, innovative and thought-provoking, Iranian art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries offers fresh insight into a culture and society that have been much misunderstood in the West and elsewhere. In this new, comprehensive study, featuring 379 full-colour images, Hamid Keshmirshekan considers the dynamics at play for Iranian artists as they confront their cultural past as well as issues of contemporaneity and cultural specificity. He contends that the twentieth century in particular proved a crucial period in the art and culture of Iran; it was then that the legacies of tradition and modernism came under critical review, and artistic concerns revealed themselves as indivisible from ideological ones.

Liaoning Creative Press Ltd, 2011

For almost forty years, discussions about contemporary Iran have been overshadowed by political issues and the tumultuous atmosphere of the Middle East. Media coverage of the Islamic Revolution (1979), the Iran hostage crisis (1979-1981), the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), presidential elections (1997, 2009, 2013) and the Iran nuclear deal (2015) on the one hand, and the explosive growth of social networks propagating political and human rights issues on the other, marginalized to some extent the art and popular culture produced within Iran’s geographical borders. After Hedayat and Farrokhzad, new generations of Modernists are introduced to Persian literature. Women find a new voice in cinema and popular literature. Many bestsellers are written by women, ranging from the secular novels of Pirzad and Rahimi to the ideologically charged war narratives of Hoseyni and Abad. Post-revolutionary Iran announces international painters like Farshchian and film directors who have been Oscar, Golden Globe, Cannes and Berlin festival winners, such as Farhadi, Kiarostami, Majidi, Panahi, Makhmalbaf and others. This seminar thus seeks to explore the complexities of Iranian contemporary art and culture, discuss its religious, artistic, and sociopolitical dimensions, and even trace the emergence of discourses perhaps neglected to some extent by Western academia until now. Advocating a comparative cultural approach, this seminar aims to reflect the apparent contradictions between subversive and reinforcing discourses embedded in many cultural products in a seemingly inflexible structure. The process of their cultural formation may well reflect not only what might be considered Iran’s 'central values' but also the continuously evolving and revisionist qualities of those beliefs as acted out in culture. Our seminar will address these new possibilities: the less immediately perceptible narrative versions of Iran as produced by Iranians themselves for (inter)national audiences, whether in Iran or in its diaspora, as manifested in post-Revolution literature, cinema, music, fine art, popular culture and mass media.