By Mohammad Salemy
NOTE: I am posting this brief introduction in the hope of generating dialogue about “Iranian art” particularly in response to the planned symposium on Saturday October 26 at New York’s Asia Society titled Iran: Art and Discourse.
You have to be from a different planet to not know that Iranian Art is hot and sought after. For the last few years, particularly since Iran’s contested presidential election in 2009, the work of contemporary Iranian artists as well as works by the older generation of artists from Iran are being exhibited, if not bought and sold, in large quantities. Art administrators, curators and dealers are hopping on this trend, hoping to benefit or push their specific agendas through affiliating themselves with the history and present of Iranian art. There is of course nothing wrong with this surge, so long as, beyond the immediate benefits that it may bring to a select number of people involved in this cultural industrialization, it is productive and helpful to Iranian art and artists in the long run.
However, in my opinion as a curator from Iran, in most cases, this attention is not necessarily something to be celebrated because:
1- It ignores the real dynamics embedded in the works by Iranian artists, especially the younger ones, in order to celebrate profitable artworks and practices that are by default categorized as works representing a dialectics between modernity and Iranian/islamic traditions.
2- It often only supports Iranian artists who are interested in tangible, recognizable and fixed historical, cultural and artistic identities and unwilling to acknowledge the unrepresentability of Iranian culture through art. It is rarely interested in artists for whom Iran is only their point of departure and not a thing or a place to which they constantly refer or return.
3- It is not interested in works that seek to address universal themes and contemporary topics that are generally reserved for Anglo-European artists, contenting with a limited and circular portion of the art world for art from Iran by Iranians and about Iran.
4- It ignores or masks the politics of art and culture production in Iran and in the diaspora to produce clean myths about certain figures with specific cultural or even genetic lineages.
5- it ignores hard to exotify diasporic artists and instead limits the definition of Iranian art to what is mostly being produced inside the country or by those artists who can properly be referred to as Iranian.
6- It favours easy to digest social and discursive practices that for example have to do with women rights in general, but suppresses others that have explicit queer or anti Islamic content.
In the essay written for my exhibition at vancouver’s Access Gallery titled ENCYCLONOSPACE IRANICA (the essay is included in the exhibition catalogue published by Access Gallery), I have tried to focus on the history of networked computers and their interaction with cultural production by Iranians from around the world. I provide a different history for some of the most interesting artists and practices coming out of both Iran and the Iranian diaspora, arguing that:
a) Overall, the structure of the Iranian diaspora is gradually transforming the production of knowledge by Iranians from a local project into a global process, one only partially embedded in Iran and marginally concerned with a fixed Iranian identity.
b) Regardless of the insistence of institutions and individuals for whom the tangibility of Iranian identity translates into a higher margin of social and political power, the essence of Iranian culture today is no longer purely Iranian. Telecomputation, for better or worse, is making it increasingly difficult to speak about or identify core characteristics of contemporary Iranian culture without risking stereotypes.
c) In the absence of national or international institutions whose mandate is to support contemporary Iranian art, the Internet in and of itself has become an institutional space for facilitating contact and creating resources for Iranian artists regardless of their place of residence. These developments have on the one hand contributed to the international promotion of Iranian art but, on the other hand, are helping Iranian contemporary art to gradually break out of its culturally specific concerns and begin addressing universal themes and subjects in spite of a globalized art world that still encourages Middle Eastern artists to focus their practice on fixed or even predictable cultural identities.
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