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ABSTRACT
For reasons of personal safety, artists are not always allowed to mention directly and articulately events in history and the issues that arise therefrom. One of the skills of the artist is to employ suggestiveness and allusiveness in regard to what they are contemplating. This method is used in contemporary Iranian art. Here I take a number of examples from six contemporary artists who have used different means to fly under the radar of state authorities to be expressive without being explicit. In each of these the central idea is allusion as a way of not mentioning the precise subject so as not to incriminate the artist. In time, a shared imaginary of the unmentionable becomes the characteristic ‘language’ of the Iranian artist. My subject is a study of visual periphrasis in Iranian art in the modern period. This first appeared long ago in literary form in classical Persian poetry and has recently re-emerged in several modernist and contemporary movements in the art of protest and polemic in periods of repression and state censorship. I argue that this is concealed in the barely observable, or in what is missing altogether, and is present only in allusion and suggestion.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The earliest recorded form of this saying occurs in a Latin lyric by the Roman poet Sextus Aurelius Propertius in his Elegies.
2 Hafez ghazal 254, az dast-e gheybat-e to shekāyat nemikonam / tā nist gheybati nabovad lezzat-e hozur.
3 Titled bedune ‘onvān ‘untitled’, perhaps as another layer of a strategy of disguise – since naming is to some extent an indication of meaning and intention. Masoumeh Mozaffari, Untitled, ‘Table’ series, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 180×300 cm.
4 bayan.projects, a project from Nian Art Gallery on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CJJhs_QF6Et/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link, accessed December 2023.
5 Referred to as the Persian Awakening or Persian Spring in some sectors of the Western media. (See, for example, Dabashi Citation2011); and also, https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2010/11/victims-of-economic-sanctions-the-people-and-the-green-movement.html__;!!PDiH4ENfjr2_Jw!GjfGnuoa4an9s_0-WaLPFeC5eiBZpNYq6WKFYcuSHX0PUeu_5nFG3jNQX8xe7De17ABNXO5bSeJaCqcbzYj8e6bDwOw3hEI$, accessed December 2023.
6 One of these artists was Shahpour Puyan, the subject of the next section.
7 Masoumeh Mozaffari, Untitled, ‘Table’ series, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 200×100 cm.
8 Shahpour Pouyan, No.1 Hunting, ‘Miniatures’ series, 2010, original miniature on paper (16th century), 18×15 cm.
9 Shahpour Pouyan, No.13 Hunting, ‘Miniatures’ series, 2010, mixed media and collage on board, 18×15 cm.
10 Artist’s statement, also cited in Shirin Gallery NY, exhibition catalogue, My name is not rouge, November 2013, 31.
11 An early Safavid period (16th century) Tabriz school manuscript, Hālnāme-ye Arefi, ‘Ball and Polo Stick’, currently in the Hermitage Museum. See the image here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chovgan#/media/File:Polo_game.jpg, accessed December 2023.
12 Attributed also to European natural scientists.
13 See https://www.copperfieldgallery.com/shahpour-pouyan-history-travels-at-different-speeds.html, accessed December 2023.
14 Samila Amir-Ebrahimi, Sad Promenade, 1999, photo-painting collage, 45×60 cm.
15 See, for example, Milani Citation1992 and Afary Citation2009, 228–233.
16 The upper verse can be translated into English as ‘Oh, sad promenade inside a little house!’ (hence the title of the work, Sad Promenade). The lower verse can be translated into English as ‘In the future there will be no one I once loved left in the world’.
17 Samila Amir-Ebrahimi, Azadi Square, oil on canvas, 2010, 100×150 cm. See Dabashi, ibid.
18 Katayoun Karami, No.2, ‘Censorship’ series, 2004, C-print photo (handmade colouring with marker), 50×74 cm.
19 Katayoun Karami, No.3, ‘Censorship’ series, 2004, C-print photo (double exposed during print process), 50×74 cm.
20 See further Foroutan Citation2016; DOI: 10.1080/00210862.2017.1323470, accessed December 2023.
21 See, for example, two studies of ambiguity in art: Bonnar et al. Citation2002, 683-691; and https://www.mi.sanu.ac.rs/vismath/igor/index.html, accessed December 2023.
22 Javad Mojabi, speaking at the artist’s memorial, reported in http://asre-nou.net/1385/esfand/6/m-spahbod.html, accessed December 2023.
23 Alireza Espahbod, Untitled, 1986, oil on canvas, 100×70 cm.
24 Alireza Espahbod, Escape, 1987, oil on canvas, 100×70 cm.
25 See, for example, Amir Arjomand Citation2022, 188.
26 It is worth mentioning that Sadegh Hedayat, the father of Iranian Surrealism, may well have seen Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou in 1929 when it was first shown in Paris. It is a fact that ‘eye’, more than any other significant noun, along with their related actions of opening and closing and looking, dominates Hedayat’s most famous work, The Blind Owl.
27 These paintings and a few others relevant to the discussion in this section, may be viewed online at https://goo.gl/photos/eWG2am5u1Gf8Spr29, accessed December 2023; referred to as Online Espahbod Images hereafter.
28 See Online Espahbod Images, see previous note.
29 See Online Espahbod Images.
30 See Online Espahbod Images.
31 This painting and others not illustrated in this article can be viewed online at https://photos.app.goo.gl/pAj1RAsYwCD5YoLQ6, accessed December 2023; referred to as Online Mohebali Images hereafter.
32 Online Mohebali Images, see previous note.
33 Online Mohebali Images.
34 See Hillmann Citation2003.
35 Online Mohebali Images.
36 Online Mohebali Images.
37 Mehrdad Mohebali, Mourning, 2010, acrylic on canvas, diptych, 500×150 cm (each panel 250×150 cm).
38 Mehrdad Mohebali, Persistence, 2010, acrylic and oil on canvas, triptych 200×100 cm (middle panel: 100×100 cm, side panels: 100×50 cm).
39 In a field interview, Summer 2009.
40 For example, Ali-Akbar Sadeghi: see Foroutan Citation2015; DOI: 10.1080/00210862.2015.1062251, accessed December 2023.
41 See further Dalvand Citation2008.
42 Specifically, the protest against the killing of Mahsa Amini and the rise of the Women-Life-Freedom; see further Sadeghi-Boroujerdi Citation2023; https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957231159351 accessed December 2023.
43 As the Editor Hamid Keshmirshekan quotes him in his Introduction; Keshmirshekan, Introduction, ibid.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Aida Foroutan
Aida Foroutan was trained as a painter and graduated with a BSc in Industrial Design from the Alzahra University of Tehran. She relocated to Sweden in 2000, where she worked in theatre and museum curation and exhibited her paintings in Sweden and Germany. A book of her poetry, Forbidden Peace, was published in Stockholm in 2003. She moved to the UK in 2007 to do her Masters degree in Theatre Studies at the University of Manchester, then a PhD there (2008-2012) in Art History, entitled ‘The Reception of Surrealism in Iranian Art and Literature’. She has published a number of scholarly articles for peer-reviewed academic journals and one for a Festschrift. Before the pandemic, she convened a successful international conference ‘Modern Iranian Art and Architecture in the Shadow of the Classical Persian Past’ at the John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester. She currently teaches Persian at the University of Manchester.