The modern and contemporary art of Iran has often been understood, and positioned by commercial institutions, as decorative or ethnic - hence the focus on calligraphy and veiled women. While at a scholarly level it has been characterised as a comment on the socio-political context of the country: repressed inside Iran and, among artists in diaspora, as a focus for a complex identity discourse. Viewing Iranian art as neither a commodity, nor an illustration of theory, Fereshteh Daftari approaches the modern art of Iran as a democratic space where pluralism - a range of different styles and ideas - can thrive. This art historical exploration offers new insights into Iranian art, from the late 19th century Qajar period, via the Saqqakhaneh movement of the 1960s and into the contemporary world. In the process the author comments on the concept of modernism in a non-Western environment. She takes both a specific and a panoramic view of Iranian art to expose new themes like the subversive appropriation of traditional art, whilst also tackling more perennial issues like gender. With experience as an international curator, Daftari analyses the way Iranian artists have been represented outside the country and discusses the different routes by which modern Iranian art has been introduced to a Western audience, explaining the process by which Iranian art has developed and how it navigates between the individual and the political.
About the Author
Curator and scholar Fereshteh Daftari received her PhD in Art History from Columbia University (1988). During her tenure at the Museum of Modern Art (1988 - 2009), she curated a number of exhibitions including Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking (2006), the first treatment of diasporic artists from the Islamic world by a major institution. Her curatorial work in the field of Iranian modernism includes Between Word and Image at New York University s Grey Art Gallery in 2002, and Iran Modern at the Asia Society Museum in New York in 2013. Additionally, with several exhibitions, she focused on contemporary art: Action Now, the first exhibition of contemporary Iranian performance art held at the Cité Internationale des Arts, in Paris (2012); Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish Artists at the University of British Columbia s Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver (2013); and Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, the Museum of fine Arts in Houston (2017) and soon at Asia Society, New York (2020).
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