Publications
A selection of my published work is listed below. I am currently completing my book manuscript, Unreadings: Contemporary Iranian Art and Art History’s Monolingualism, which examines how Iranian artists navigate and resist the interpretive constraints of metropolitan art history.
“Topographies of the Unseen: Visualising the Borderland in Hamzehian and Mortarotti’s Eden”
Articulations (November 2024), peer-reviewed digital journal of the Cluster of Excellence 2020: “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective,” Freie Universität – Berlin
Topographies of the Unseen examines Eden, a multimedia project by Anush Hamzehian and Vittorio Mortarotti, as a critical interrogation of the border and its representational politics. The work unfolds in Agarak, the last Armenian village before the Iranian border, a site that serves both as geographic threshold and symbolic proxy for the artists’ inquiries into exile, proximity, and the limits of belonging. While borders are conventionally understood as material delimiters, this essay foregrounds their ideological function and affective residues, drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorization of the borderland as an “emotional residue” of political severance. Eden resists the metaphorical recuperation of the border as mere site of passage or exchange and instead foregrounds its violences and ambivalences through a visual poetics of opacity, absence, and disorientation.
Through large-format photographs and video installations, Hamzehian and Mortarotti deliberately eschew realist narration, unsettling the viewer’s spatial orientation and disrupting the reified aesthetics of social-documentary. Their work subverts the demand for legible difference imposed by global art markets and challenges the identitarian consumption of border imaginaries. Eden foregrounds the insufficiency of representation in capturing the lived contradictions of the border, instead producing a dialectical space where the socio-political and the personal, the figural and the Real, collide.
“Introduction: Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn,” Co-written with Joshua I. Cohen (Stanford) and Vazira Zamindar (Brown).
ARTMargins, vol. 12, no. 2 (special issue on Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn), edited by Joshua I. Cohen, Vazira Zamindar, and Foad Torshizi (June 2023): 3–17. MIT Press
When taken as a conglomerate, the postcolonial, the global, and the decolonial might signal a coordinated “decolonizing” action—one of breaking with the Eurocentric, patriarchal, and nationalist foundations of art history. Yet from a disaggregating perspective, these three terms and their respective domains cannot be seen as synonymous or entirely harmonious. What particularly demands scrutiny is the tendency to dismiss the postcolonial, or announce its demise, by claiming it has been superseded by other paradigms, namely the global and the decolonial. This introductory essay, and its accompanying special issue of ARTMargins, seeks to trace the postcolonial, global, and decolonial as they have intersected with scholarship in art history over the past five decades, and to challenge postcolonialism's presumed obsolescence in the wake of the global turn. Postcolonial thought, we argue, has given rise to a generative series of critical interventions in art history at least since the 1970s and 1980s, and has proven to be nuanced and self-reflexive. Postcolonial lines of inquiry not only continue to offer ways of critically exploring colonial-era and subsequent artistic practices, but also allow for interrogations of formations of art and the discipline of art history as colonial forms of knowledge. As such, postcolonialism still vitalizes debates within the discipline regarding the constitution of its own objects, lineaments, and methods.
“Loquacious Objects: Contemporary Iranian Art, Autotranslation, and the Readings of Benevolence”
Grey Room, no. 90 (Winter 2023): 94–118. MIT Press
The debates stirred up by Amir Mobed’s artworks, among others, bear witness to their effective use of performance as a means to advance a didactic sociopolitical criticism. From readings of his performances in light of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil to critiques of apathy and inaction as complicity with violence, Mobed’s performances are usually interpreted as successful renditions of sociopolitical positions and seldom, if ever, discussed as works of art and imagination. His works, I contend, are characteristic examples of how moral and sociopolitical messages have found an ever-increasing currency in contemporary Iranian art since the early twenty-first century. They epitomize the works of a generation of young Iranian artists who present readily available messages to their viewers. The delivery of particular political messages becomes the primary function of these works of art, which has important ramifications beyond the instrumentalization of art for political mobilization. One such implication concerns the burden placed on works of art to present a legible—meaning, “universally” legible—message. This message must include few vernacular nuances and complexities, its transmission guaranteed by heightened visibility. The terms and horizons of this legibility, on a “global” stage, are primarily set by the language of metropolitan art criticism and the curatorial discourses that permeate the prominent art institutions, located largely in the West. The pressure on non-Western artists for hypervisibility is directly associated with a readership, a consumer base, that relies heavily on identitarian stereotypes; therefore, it is more persistently operative among artists from the margins. When displayed in Euro-American centers, works of art from the non-Western world are frequently deracinated from their historical contexts and reduced to legible surfaces charged with representing the cultural alterity of their ethnogeographic origins in a language palatable to the Western public.
“The Affective Feminism of Ghazaleh Hedayat”
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 41 no. 1 (May 2021): 106–121. Duke University Press
This article examines the works of the Iranian contemporary artist, Ghazaleh Hedayat. It argues that her turn from figural representation to nonfigural abstraction and consequently to what Laura Marks has called “haptic visuality” demonstrates a careful and systematic aesthetic strategy that attempts to confront and at times even exit representation. It shows that Hedayat's works since the early 2010s offer an affective approach to feminism in contemporary Iranian art that doesn't hinge on representational modes of expression, which are often susceptible to assimilation into identitarian narratives and inadvertently complicit in various forms of marginalization (gender, ethnic, etc.). Hedayat's affective feminism not only complicates clichéd interpretations of her work as a non-Western woman, but it also materializes a new form of knowledge more in tune with feminism. Focusing on the female body as a site of pain, friction, tension, love, maternality, and, more significantly, as a site where self and its other—both in terms of gender and ethnicity—encounter each other, Hedayat undermines visibility by way of pushing it across the borders of sight into the realms of visuality, haptic experience, and proprioception.