The Cultural Politics of Art in Iran

Nahidi, Katrin (2023): The Cultural Politics of Art in Iran. Modernism, Exhibitions, and Art Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Abstract

Modernist Iranian art represents a highly diverse field of cultural production deeply involved in discussing questions of modernity and modernization as practiced in Iran. This book investigates how artistic production and art criticism reflected upon the discourse about gharbzadegi (westoxification), the most substantial critique of Iran's adaptation of Western modernity, and ultimately proved to be a laboratory for the negotiation of an anti-colonial concept of an Iranian artistic modernity, which artists and critics envisioned as a significant other to Western colonial modernity. In this book, Katrin Nahidi revisits Iranian modernist art, aiming to explore a political and contextualized interpretation of modernism. Based on extensive fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, Nahidi provides a history of modernist art production since the 1950s and reveals the complex political agency underlying art historiographical processes. Offering a key contribution to postcolonial art history, Nahidi shows how Iranian artistic modernity was used to flesh out anti-colonial concepts and ideas around Iranian national identity.

• Item Type: Monograph
• Faculties: History and Art History > Department of Art History > Art History
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 320 Political science; 700 Arts and recreation > 700 Arts; 900 History and geography > 950 History of Asia
• ISBN: 978-1-00-936137-8 ; 978-1-009-36140-8
• Place of Publication: Cambridge
• Annotation: Gesamtumfang: xiv, 287 Seiten
• Language: English