‘Therapy with My Exotic Self’

ABSTRACT

This is the text of a short provocation that was prepared for the roundtable discussion on ‘Decolonisation and Solidarity’ as part of the conference, Borderlines IX: Seeking Solidarity and Wonder Through Performance, which took place at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, on 30 June and 1 July 2022. The online publication of this text in Studies in Theatre and Performance 44.1 (2024) is accompanied by a video work by the artist titled ‘Therapy with My Exotic Self’.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonisation
• Iranian artists
• Iranian contemporary art
• exoticisation
• solidarity
• self-reflection

The video, available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2024.2339013.

Hamid Keshmirshekan (2010, 489), the Iranian art critic, dissects the exoticisation and resulting perception of identity (‘local, historical, imagined and collective identity and also self-identity’) of Iranian artists outside Iran. ‘Therapy with My Exotic Self’ is a video provocation that develops this examination of exoticisation by exploring a few of my own experiences of exhibiting work in European art galleries, which has been shaped by apparent curatorial and institutional desire to demonstrate a form of allyship with the Iranian artist, but which has resulted in a form of negative solidarity. This negative solidarity means that despite the allyship presented and the apparent nurturing and empowering desire to represent the ‘victim-artist’, groups of different artists are homogenized, trapped within a discourse of pity, and the curator basks in the self-important glow of white saviourhood. This white supremacy, both historically and currently, impacts opportunities for the artist, how they present and perceive themselves, and the ways in which they and their work are gazed upon.

This video provocation is shaped by Martin Berger’s depiction of how racial identity guides the interpretation of the visual world in Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berger 2005), and by Alice Procter’s deconstruction of dominant colonial narratives and histories of art and her emphasis on the stories absented from the art history canon in The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in Our Museums & Why We Need to Talk About It (Procter 2020). Working with reference to these sources, I will explore a few untold stories of the colonial, homogenising gaze within the context of Iranian contemporary art. Alongside this, the video provocation seeks to knowingly play with this form of negative solidarity and thus start to needle and challenge it.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Midland4Cities.