Visual articulacy and periphrasis in the art of the unmentionable

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Iranian art
• Iran
• surrealism
• history
• censorship
• state control

Prelude

Beginning to see what is not there

One of the things that has long fascinated me about contemporary Iranian art is the way artists prompt the viewer to guess what is not on the canvas. It can sometimes be like a game, but such games in Iran have tended to have serious consequences. I experienced this first hand when, for the first time, I realised that open expressiveness might be dangerous. From the age of 16 I had participated in some group art exhibitions comprising representational paintings of flowers or rocks. It was only after going to university that it occurred to me that I should attempt to express my inner thoughts and weave them into my work. I took some pleasure and derived a sense of fulfilment from doing so. I was occasionally asked by family or friends what I meant in my work. I would evade such questions, with the naiveté of youth, and reply that if I wanted to explain the meaning, I would have used words instead of paint. It was around that time, while at university, that I took three of my canvases across Tehran to a biennial exhibition entitled Tajalli-ye Ehsās ‘The Manifestation of Feelings’ in the Niavaran Cultural Centre (1997). The canvases were heavy to transport, and I had to lug them from one taxi to another to reach the gallery. The curator inspected my paintings carefully, then announced that he would not be shortlisting them, with the remark, ‘Just take them home, before we both end up in Evin’. I thought he was joking, but his face told me he was in fact serious. The topic of the works was merely the personal reflections of a young person at the beginning of her twenties. I was suddenly embarrassed by the paintings and covered them up. I found a phone box to tell my mother that I would arrive home late because I would have to bring the paintings home. As I was talking to her, in my shame I felt the sky descend a little, leaving less air to breathe. I went straight home, to reflect on what had just occurred. It was a turning point, and I have never been quite the same since. Hitherto, none of my paintings had been laden with any political content, yet despite the absence of such an agenda, on that day I became aware of the need to keep anything personal discretely hidden or camouflaged. I relate this anecdote merely to illustrate why I think it is important to understand what is not there, and indeed why it might not be there: I have never since ceased to be aware of ‘what is not there’, and what takes its place.

Introduction

Artists’ un-Manifestos

To explain more fully what I mean by ‘what is not there’, that is, the ‘invisible’ or ‘inaudible’, I would say that the brief of the Editor to address this Special Issue theme prompted me to re-evaluate my own research on the legacy of Iran’s history, namely on the surrealist art of the 20th and 21st centuries. In my doctoral research (2008–2012) I was fortunate to have interviewed several contemporary Iranian artists during my fieldwork in Iran: I was then able to reconsider their memories and reflections from first-hand experience. In this essay I am interested in showing how artists use elements of the history of the past to participate in the ongoing history of the present. This is what I understand to be John Lukacs’s notion of a ‘participant history’ (mentioned in the Editor’s Introduction) (Lukacs 2008). In the first part of the twenty-first century, Iranian artists living in their own country have had to struggle and suffer for their own voices to be heard by their compatriots and, in order to ensure that their art would be seen, they have sometimes had to pay the price of making their works into, as it were, a silent movie where the sound of their own experience has been reduced to being inaudible. For this reason, I use the term ‘Un-manifesto’ to refer to a phenomenon in artistic communities that are subject to a particularly heavy degree of censorship. As Hamid Keshmirshekan has convincingly argued, following the work of Farsoun and Mashayekhi (1992):

[T]he Islamic Republic, assuming a hegemonic position in control of the State, took cultural transformation very seriously. It sought to institutionalize an Islamic political culture. It resulted in an Islamicization process to be instituted in accordance with the clerical Islamic culture – the Islamic Republic’s way to rehabilitate an Islamically ill society. (Keshmirshekan 2013, 146–147)

For the purposes of the present article, my term ‘un-manifesto’ is simply my way of denoting the obverse of a term used in common parlance to mean public statements of intent by cultural/political/philosophical thinkers of recent centuries. Four famous examples will suffice: Common Sense by Thomas Paine (1776); Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke (1790); The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848) and (close to my own heart) Manifeste du Surréalisme by André Breton (1924). They were all declarations published in order to create maximum exposure and impact. ‘Un-manifesto’, on the other hand, may be taken to be the act of declaration by not saying, that is by both visual periphrasis or allusion and verbal circumlocution. Philosophers, political activists and literary intellectuals all publish manifestos to make a verbally articulate impact on the world; artists, on the other hand, demonstrate their intent iconically, that is, using visual articulacy. This latter will sometimes be apparent in what is left unsaid, and even, occasionally, unmanifest or deliberately disguised.

In this essay, I have focused on a number of works by six contemporary Iranian artists who have used various media and means to avoid state sanctions against them and their creative productions. I shall begin in this first section, Absence, with two artists, namely Masoumeh Mozaffari, and Shahpour Pouyan, who have, by different techniques, used emptiness and non-manifestation to remove graphic, figurative images that pin things down to manifest specifics. In the second section, Collage and Fragmentation, I shall first discuss Samila Amir-Ebrahimi, who uses symbols and quotations of literary references, and second Katayoun Karami, who defaces or obscures graphic identifiers. Both artists use different types of collage, specifically painted collage and photo-collage respectively, as creative techniques to ‘un-manifest’ their work. In the third section, Ambiguity and Enigma, I turn to two artists who use superimposition of layers of a narrative to create these effects, namely Alireza Espahbod and Mehrdad Mohebali. The six artists I refer to in the ensuing discussion all have different methods, some of which overlap or are technically similar, but are all artistically distinct.

Absence

Masoumeh Mozaffari (b. 1958, Tehran)

In art as in life, it may be said in general, absence so often draws attention to what is missing – for example in English there is the common expression ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’,¹ or in Persian, as Hafez put it, ‘I complain not of your absence – if there were no absence there would be no pleasure in presence’.² In this section I consider the work of two contemporary Iranian artists who have used absence and lacunae as some of the most eloquent elements of their work, for both political and aesthetic reasons.

Beginning with Masoumeh Mozaffari, in most of her paintings, she uses absence rather than presence as her most powerful motif – in fact, recently, she even had a series of paintings, and an exhibition, entitled ‘Absence’ (2021), in which absence, or the suggestion of absence, is the dominant (in)visible element in the series. Prior to this, for example, she had a similar idea in the series ‘In the Presence of Others’ (2014), or ‘In Some Other Place’ (2017), where the impression of absence and lack is in her actual painting technique, which is blurred and stripped of realism, tending to abstraction in the images. I have chosen to focus on an untitled painting in her earlier ‘Table’ collection, which I refer to as Spoons and Forks (Figure 1).³

Figure 1. Masoumeh Mozaffari, Untitled, ‘Table’ series, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 180 × 300 cm.

Mozaffari says of this large painting:

I worked on the ‘Table’ collection in 1388 (2009) and it was the last in the series, a table suspended in space, with a white tablecloth with spoons and forks that will sooner or later fall. Below, it is dark, underneath, the stairs are dark, dark as dark. I am afraid of that darkness that can swallow everything, everything that can drop into it.⁴

If I may be permitted to fill in some of the blanks, since the art historian is free to imagine what the artist is capturing in the painting, I venture to articulate a narrative of the scenario suggested in the still-life of the moment. The tablecloth depicted has previously been a flat surface of stability and calm, and the spoons and forks have just been disturbed, so this frozen moment of time depicts the process of being in various stages of instability and falling off the horizontal plane: some of the cutlery is still unmoved, apparently, while the rest is in a state of falling down into darkness. I suggest that it is as if the viewer is witnessing a frozen frame of a narrative unfolding in instability, the result of which is the collapse of everything in the picture, including the tablecloth itself, which is also going to end up falling. In our imagining we do not know if somebody is pulling the tablecloth, but it is significant that, as Mozaffari says, the tablecloth is ‘suspended’ over a descending staircase. We may also imagine that behind the silent painting there is a clatter of the spoons and forks in our fictive ‘soundtrack’, with a crashing upon the stairs down into the darkness of the void below, as they will surely fall into the unknown. Here it may be observed that, in the wake of actual photographs and newsreel footage of the early twenty-first century, the spoons and forks are reminiscent of the bodies of victims falling to their deaths from the Twin Towers in the much-recorded disaster images of 9/11: these have become universally remembered visual tropes, albeit contextually remote from this painting. This, of course, is only graphically alluded to, not literally ‘drawn out’ by the artist. Mozaffari’s painting is actually closer to a more local traumatic upheaval, namely the Green Movement of 1388/2009,⁵ which had been the most significant social uprising since the Iranian Revolution of 1357/1979. It was a political movement triggered by what the protesters regarded as the fraudulent election of June 12, 2009. Several prominent dissenting politicians were arrested in the aftermath, and subsequently many artists and writers left Iran and migrated abroad.⁶

To illustrate the political ‘un-manifesto’ reflecting current events of the time, I move to a previous diptych painting of Mozaffari’s in the same series, formed of two canvases, each a metre square (Figure 2).⁷ Mozaffari has an image of a man’s shirt and jacket hanging over the back of a chair, as if they have just been taken off, and a person is not present in the clothes. Again, a likely narrative is suggested to the viewer’s imagination that someone has been ‘taken out’ from the clothes and perhaps even from the house. A pen and a folded newspaper lie in front of the clothes, and below at the very bottom left of this same picture, a set of house keys is left on the table, which seem to form the shape of an open skeletal hand. Someone, it may again be imagined, has been taken away. Here, Mozaffari’s ‘un-manifesto’ is in the form of an absence or non-existence of a person. It is a reminder of the removal of activists or sympathisers by the authorities for questioning, or the house-arrests of the leaders accused as perpetrators of the protests. It is not idle fantasy to imagine that these scenarios are suggested by these paintings: I would argue that such narratives are intrinsic to the paintings, as if they were in the very brushstrokes or just under the surface. Mozaffari’s paintings are nostalgic and lonely, as if they are filled with trauma from the disturbances, and with longing for those who are missing – their presence looms despite their absence. The restraint she shows in her paintings is palpable but not very visible: her artistic circumlocution is discretion itself, and signifies a well-honed sense of taste and judgment.

Figure 2. Masoumeh Mozaffari, Untitled, ‘Table’ series, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 200 × 100 cm.

Shahpour Pouyan (b. 1979)

Shahpour Pouyan has worked in many styles, but I shall focus on a principal element of his work, which is sometimes overshadowed by his more notorious images of phallicism or monstrous creatures. In other works he had been using the device of creating ambiguity, allusion and suggestibility: in so doing, Pouyan is removing the historical markers and pointers to specific historical and cultural references. A pervasive motif of absence and space in his work is most completely de-picted in his series ‘Miniatures’ (2010). Starting with original miniature paintings from the medieval period (Figure 3) we see that⁸ Pouyan removes all the figurative contents (Figure 4),⁹ leaving only empty spaces, foliage, tents and architectural structures.

Figure 3. Shahpour Pouyan, N^o.1 Hunting, ‘Miniatures’ series, 2010, original miniature on paper (sixteenth century), 18 × 15 cm.

Figure 4. Shahpour Pouyan, N^o.13 Hunting, ‘Miniatures’ series, 2010, mixed media and collage on board, 18 × 15 cm.

The artist himself says in a statement about ‘Miniatures’:

By removal of figures, I wish to have exposed the void camouflaged by the aesthetics of these miniatures: the lack and the sublime camouflaged by the beautiful. By disrupting the apparently perfect interlocking of the subject and the context, the context itself comes to the front, in all its details, beauty and authority … They are possible landscapes never painted, fabricated documents of a real world hidden behind a constructed narration, illustrating the possibility of narratives never realised or illustrated.¹⁰

In removing the contents of the picture (taken from a medieval image in a masnavi on the subject of the game of polo),¹¹ the human riders, spectators and the horses are obliterated from the canvas, leaving only two minaret-like forms in the foreground and the Persian verses above and below the painting. The viewer is left to populate the empty space with a narrative of what might be imagined. This is reminiscent of Aristotle’s ancient axiom natura abhorret vacuum ‘nature abhors a vacuum’,¹² that is that the human imagination will populate a blank space with imaginary elements. Here, in the light of Islamic and other religious traditions that practise iconoclasm (as images are seen as idolatrous), Pouyan’s blank spaces are all the more poignant. In notes to one of his exhibitions there is a statement about his work as follows:

The choice of what to represent is simultaneously a decision of what to discard or hide. … Pouyan attempts to recover what is left unseen in Persian miniatures. Art historians have focused on the de-emphasized landscape and egalitarian distribution of figures in Persian Miniatures, yet the socio-political context of these miniatures does not fit this claim. It says something rather different; it tells a story of the superiority of tradition and patterns of life over the freedom of the individual. By removing the figures in works … Pouyan draws attention to the subtleties⁣, camouflaged in the aesthetics of these miniatures … ¹³

Pouyan is using deletion and omission to reinvent and reuse the particularities of the historical and traditional contexts, to suit his own intentions and to allow the viewing public to fill in the void with their own imagined and wished-for contents. He is an artist who finds himself using surrealist strategies not because he wishes to be a surrealist, but because he feels the need previously felt by surrealists to express his artistic freedom. Pouyan is not actually defacing the original miniature paintings, but updating them to our own present context, which we can supply for our own time. Just as we can, as art historians, imagine the narrative that is encapsulated in the freeze-frame moment of a painting, so we can also reassess the narrative provided in history to accord with the necessity of present circumstances. As Pouyan himself says, ‘By removal of figures’ and a ‘constructed narrative’ of the original work, he has allowed to come to the front ‘possible landscapes never painted, fabricated documents of a real world hidden behind a constructed narration, illustrating the possibility of narratives never realised or illustrated’. This sums up the point I am arguing about strategies of camouflage, disguise and periphrasis in the present essay. Pouyan could indeed be one of the ‘new generation’ whom Keshmirshekan has identified as being one of

 … a variety of voices that are accompanied and valued in contrast to the existing models introduced by the State, in which the social arena is dominated by a single worldview. (Keshmirshekan 2013, 153; Farhi 2007)

Collage and fragmentation

Samila Amir-Ebrahimi (b. 1950)

The playfulness of collage or assemblage of disparate elements has fascinated artists for centuries: its creative possibilities are realised in the act of assembly and are at the same time accidental and contrived. They also allow the viewer of the image to work out the design and meaning of the resultant whole, which is literally greater than the sum of its parts. It is notable that one way in which surrealist artists have made an impact on contemporary Iranian art was through collage, increasingly so in recent years since digitisation of images has both sped up the process and made the result more sophisticated. As Elza Adamowicz has said in her study of surrealist collage, from the beginning automatism and collage were presented as two distinct techniques for producing a surrealist text. She quotes Breton’s explanation of the nature of the surrealist image and explains:

It is, as it were, from the fortuitous juxtaposition of the two terms that a particular light has sprung, the light of the image, to which we are infinitely sensitive. The value of the image depends upon the beauty of the spark obtained; it is, consequently, a function of the difference of potential between the two conductors. (Adamowicz 1998, 5; Breton 1969, 37)

Collage is a strong feature of the work of the painter Samila Amir-Ebrahimi: two examples suffice to demonstrate her use of photo-painting collage and oil painting (that creates the effect of collage) which has affinities with this very literary principle of surrealist collage. One of her photo-painting collages expresses her feminist point of view all the more strongly by featuring two texts in an image entitled Sad Promenade (1999) (Figure 5).¹⁴

Figure 5. Samila Amir-Ebrahimi, Sad Promenade, 1999, photo-painting collage, 45 × 60 cm.

It is an exercise in cross-cultural intertextuality: the upper text is a translation by Forough Farrokhzad, Iran’s most celebrated female Iranian poet,¹⁵ of a verse of the Dresden born writer Ossip Kalenter (1900–1976), entitled Der seriöse Spaziergang. At the bottom Farrokhzad has translated into Persian another verse, by the World War I poet / physician, Wilhelm Klemm (1881–1968). Amir-Ebrahimi has inscribed the verses above and below the collage-painting.¹⁶ It is a sombre work, like the title. The scene is a room with an open doorway. Two women stand in silhouette profile, one black on a white background, the other white on a dark background: but they are in fact one figure that has been cut out of the other. Similarly, to the right of the image, there are two shadowy female figures, and they also seem to be one figure that has been cut out of the other, ‘both’ looking away into darkness. Surrealist positive and negative space is suggested but is secondary in the presence of the sadness and isolation of the women. It is a good example of how a formerly surrealist technique has been put to use in a work that apparently has no pretensions to being surrealist. Amir-Ebrahimi is using several types of media and various international voices, bringing together three different poets, and mixing painting with cut-out and collage, just as the voices of the poets are blended in juxtaposition. The women are doomed to be restricted in the ‘little house’ that is not a home. There is, however, the light of hope in the darkness that the woman might be able to walk out across the threshold.

A second instance of Amir-Ebrahimi’s collage painting is an example of a delayed reaction to censorship that has a political coherence for the informed or inquisitive viewer. Azadi Square (Figure 6) was painted in 2010, again after the tumultuous Green Movement demonstrations, following the 2009 election, when Azadi Square in Tehran became iconic as a central place of assembly and focus in Western Tehran.¹⁷ In the foreground a young woman gestures as if whispering to a young man: he is smoking a cigarette, the smoke of which drifts upwards over a birds-eye-view image of Azadi Square, thus recalling the security forces’ shooting at the demonstrators. Behind them a family table is set, but with no food, at the end of which an elderly man looks away, as if at a television, but is actually turned to Azadi Square, set in a green landscape, empty of crowds. An aerial view of Tehran’s streets is bathed in an eerie red light: two soldiers or basijis, indicated by boots and fatigues, loom from the top left and right, casting their shadows over the city. Fragments of two interiors are set in the centre left and right. This painting has none of the obvious features that popularly signal ‘surrealist’, that is, the antirational, automatic and unconscious symbolism that many artists across the world nowadays use to create the effect of strangeness. Amir-Ebrahimi’s Azadi Square may be seen as an image of a disintegrated mirror, in front of which the two young people stand. It is a ‘staged picture’, and the viewer is present with them in the implied narrative, apparently able to hear the couple’s stage-whispering, as the young woman’s hand is cupped towards the viewer. They are sharing their view of a ‘smashed’ Tehran. To the left is a small downward facing image, seen vertiginously from a great height down into the void of the staircase. To the right is another small downward facing image that may be a prison cell or interrogation room, to judge by the bars on the window, the high stool, computer, screen and keyboard. The effect of Amir-Ebrahimi’s painted collage is sudden and dramatic, plunging the viewer down into a new, politically critical perspective (the artist is reacting quietly and subtly to events). The central figure of the elderly male faces a sanitised image of the Azadi Square monument, devoid of protesting crowds: yet it is depicted as if the figures in the painting are viewing it from above on a screen.

Figure 6. Samila Amir-Ebrahimi, Azadi Square, 2010, oil on canvas, 100 × 150 cm.

It may be remarked that the scene is a particular strategy of dealing with censorship, not by opposing it but by using allusive, iconic symbols that the artist had carefully composed around recent events. The questions it poses to the viewer are, ‘What is declared in this picture?’, and ‘What is camouflaged, symbolised and made secret?’. My reply to the first question is, ‘Almost everything’, and to the second, ‘Almost everything’. The camouflage in Amir-Ebrahimi’s ‘un-manifesto’ takes the form of mixing up different points of view, from the realistic inter-personal ‘human’ perspective to the high-level aerial shots, which are reminiscent of surveillance cameras and interrogation rooms. From a purely graphic perspective, the whole painting mixes a range of points of view, from the central realistic one of the main participants, to the peripheral and mysterious bird’s-eye view images.

Katayoun Karami (b. 1967)

Katayoun Karami also uses collage, but in the medium of photography. Considering that she is a female Iranian artist living and working in Tehran, her work is a brave statement of her views and position. Karami’s work N^o.2 of the photo-collage series ‘Censorship’, 2004¹⁸ is an extraordinary graphic image that speaks most directly to the institution of censorship in Iran.

In N^o.2 (Figure 7), Karami has apparently photographed herself naked, with dishevelled hair over her face and shoulders, with the photograph of the body defaced by black marker-pen: a Tehran vehicle number plate obscures the breasts. As was the practice shortly after the Iranian Revolution, as a makeshift solution, people used to alter photographs in identity documents, by obscuring the offending areas in black marker-pen over what must not be seen. It was a temporary act of self-censorship, as a practical convenience, in imitation of the legitimised defacing by state officials censoring pictures or texts in books which were deemed inappropriate. In Karami’s image, the impression is of a police identity photograph of a felon, as if the artist has already been charged with an offence. The clichés of the dissolute female, masking of her body, number plate and identity photograph, all coalesce in a collage that is an indictment of censorship. This picture graphically unveils and re-veils the artist simultaneously, and the image is an ironic comment on the state of censorship and society. It is multi-layered semiotically: the numberplate is a sign of masculine authoritarian imposition on her body, and her hair functions as a veil over her face.

Figure 7. Katayoun Karami, N^o.2, ‘Censorship’ series, 2004, C-print photo (handmade colouring with marker), 50 × 74 cm.

Other pictures from this series show Karami’s face as a jigsaw puzzle from which pieces have been removed from her hands and eyes. In ‘Censorship’, N^o. 3 her eyes are blanked out and a strange hand smothers her mouth (Figure 8).¹⁹

Figure 8. Katayoun Karami, N^o.3, ‘Censorship’ series, 2004, C-print photo (double exposed during print process), 50 × 74 cm.

A silhouette figure also appears behind the face, as an alternative, dream-like apperception of the picture, in an optical illusion of a female torso in profile. Nicholas Harrison recalls what Freud said in ‘The Censorship of Dreams’ about censorship as drawing attention to what is left out (using the analogy of blanks in a newspaper):

In these empty places there was something that displeased the higher censorship authorities and for that reason it was removed – a pity, you feel, since no doubt it was the most interesting thing in the paper – the ‘best bit’. (Freud 1989, 171; Harrison 1995, 105)

Harrison also comments:

The image is notable for highlighting the perverse way in which complicity is established between the censor and the recipient of censored material … over which aspects of the material are considered ‘important’ and ‘interesting’: how, in other words, a circle of censorship binds them together. (Freud 1989, 171; Harrison 1995, 105)

Karami’s series ‘Censorship’ is self-censored in order to show what appears when something is missing. The missing jigsaw piece defines itself by its absence, like the silhouettes or negative spaces in other painters’ works (see Figure 5, Amir-Ebrahimi’s Sad Promenade). The fact that this series was produced in post-Revolution Iran makes it an example of the wilful bypassing of censorship displayed to a private/semi-private audience, altogether avoiding the scrutiny of the censor. Were it to be offered to a state-run gallery, it would immediately be banned, but the private galleries are usually veiled from, and not of much concern to, the State authorities. The physical veil became a double-sided symbol: one can be behind the veil, and also confronted by it. Moreover, the veil actually became a criterion that determined the categories of public and private space. Karami’s ‘un-manifesto’, it could be said, is the closest we have seen to an outright manifesto: she uses the absences and defacements of her works in a courageous and skilful way, so that her art is articulate and explicit, while at the same time subtle and full of double-entendre. In Figure 8, the hand could either be the woman’s own, trying to muffle a painful scream, or someone else’s, suffocating and silencing her. Karami’s strategy is therefore highly confrontational, facing censorship with the results of censorship – yet it is all deeply ironic.

Ambiguity and enigma

Alireza Espahbod (1951–2007)²⁰

Art has always been full of ambiguity and ambivalence, sometimes to the point of inscrutability and incomprehensibility, which has provoked widespread interest by psychologists and historians of art.²¹ For the artist who is evading the condemnatory scrutiny of the State censor, such ambiguity and ambivalence are more matters of survival than merely stylistic features. Such artists’ playfulness is serious, not whimsical. In this section I consider the work of two artists who exemplify the use of ambiguity and enigma in their artworks to reconfigure and refashion history in the contemporary world. Alireza Espahbod was prolific over a career of more than 30 years, ranging over a variety of styles spanning both the period of the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic in Iran. According to a prominent Iranian art critic, Javad Mojabi, Espahbod found his own particular surrealist way of painting, moving between social realism and conceptual art.²² He remained in touch with his roots in fine art, rather than moving into popularism and propagandist art: he uses visual puns and symbols. These symbols do mean something in a particular picture, but another distinctive feature of his work is in the serialisation of meaning in a sequence of several pictures over a period of years. Whereas symbolic content and structural inversion in a single painting create a sense of immediate narrative continuity, this symbolism is made more powerful by being extended (and thus encrypted) by the passing of time in a sequence of works, which the historian can juxtapose and make explicit, with the benefit of hindsight.

Espahbod depicts the suffering of repression in two remarkable, related pictures, Untitled (1986) (Figure 9)²³ and Escape (Figure 10).²⁴ In the first, untitled, monochrome, moon-like picture (Figure 9), the mouth is censored by a black line, the open eye is staring and expressionless; where the other eye should be, there is just a large crater, like the eye-socket of a skull, shrouded in dark clouds. On the left, the Moon’s ‘eye’ is framed by folds, which at the same time suggest both a veil and stress-lines. The Moon ‘sits’ upon a white sheet or cloth. In Escape (Figure 10), the open eye of a self-portrait is staring in apparent surprise, illuminated by one of Espahbod’s signature swooshes of bright colour; a white cloth lies beneath the bright red stool, drawn as if to suggest a creature crouching there. There are three clues to interpreting these two enigmatic paintings. First, just before the Revolution, in late 1978, a sensational rumour spread across Iran that the image of Ayatollah Khomeini’s face could be seen on the surface of the Moon, (Chelkowski and Dabashi 1999, 4) which suddenly acquired a new meaning. Whereas the crescent moon is significant for all Muslims, as determining the beginning of each lunar month especially in the holy month of Ramadan, the full moon has a significance among Shi’i Muslims because the Hidden Imam is born in mid-Sha’ban when the Moon is full. Khomeini in the Moon somehow linked him with the Hidden Imam, as if he were his deputy (jāneshin) selected by God. A slogan was widely used in the first decade after the Revolution: khodāyā! khodāyā! tā enqelāb-e mahdi, khomeini rā negahdār, ‘O Lord, O Lord, until the Revolution of the Mahdi, watch over Khomeini!’ This was chanted every day, from school morning assemblies to Friday prayers. Sometime afterwards, Khomeini’s title was changed from Ayatollah to Imam.²⁵

Figure 9. Alireza Espahbod, Untitled, 1986, oil on canvas, 100 × 70 cm.

Figure 10. Alireza Espahbod, Escape, 1987, oil on canvas, 100 × 70 cm.

The second clue is that Escape also alludes to the collective illusion of the phenomenon of Khomeini in the Moon, for he always spoke from a chair that was covered by a white cloth, which has here been removed and is revealed as blood red. Admittedly, it is a stool not a chair, but this difference is part of the subtlety of the allusion: if Espahbod had drawn the actual chair of Khomeini, it would have been too obvious, and the work would have been banned. It is an instance of Espahbod’s using veiling (Figure 9) and unveiling (Figure 10) to reveal something concealed. Lastly, it would seem that the artist is alluding to Luis Buñuel’s short film of 1929 Un Chien Andalou, in which, famously, a razor blade is held before a girl’s eye, instantly followed by footage of a cloud passing in front of the Moon as if it slices the Moon and, by metaphorical association of the image, the girl’s eye.²⁶ Here, in Espahbod’s two paintings separated by a year, the artist refers to a similar but inverted metaphorical sequence, in which the blind eye of the earlier painting is opened and surprised by the unveiled chair in Escape. The blue swoosh is a symbol of this enlightenment, like a bolt from the blue. However, and significantly for this consideration of censorship, with hindsight our juxtaposition of the paintings reveals the full story that would have previously been unavailable, except to those few who could somehow read the meaning at the time. The two pictures form a collage of two canvases of identical size separated by a year: the elapse of time and the ‘buriedness’ of the symbolic meaning in each picture, are the encrypting factors, as their subversive meaning emerges only if they are juxtaposed as a narrative sequence.

There are similar repeating patterns and graphic themes throughout the range of his paintings and drawings – some paintings can be identified from their titles as referring to certain social issues, such as, Freedom, Hunger I and II, Thirst,²⁷ or where there are clear metaphors of some strong social or philosophical comment: the suppression of women in Sneer and their innocence in Maryam;²⁸ the brutality of the social order in Origin of Species; and oppression and danger from ‘above’ in Molten.²⁹ Nobody who sees Molten can avoid thinking of Magritte and his many umbrellas. In both types of work, however, where the subject is verbally specified or visually alluded to, the narrative of the picture may be quite open to interpretation. Other works, however, have titles which provoke curiosity and suggest a mood, such as Ghazal (1991), Nightmare (1987) and Turquoise Blue (1988) (and also Blue Face, Metamorphosis I & II, Shot to Death, etc.).³⁰ In none of these does Espahbod appear to be moralising to the viewer. He is the one asking the question, playfully setting a puzzle for the viewer to solve. The question or enigma may not take place in a single picture, but as with Untitled and Escape, one can see some correspondence in the pictures, even a narrative sequence, which raises the question not of what each picture means, but of what is going on. There is a conceptual collage in such works. His ‘un-manifesto’ is of the conceptual variety, closely, yet covertly, linked to actual events that had been taking place in Iran.

Mehrdad Mohebali (b. 1960)

Like Espahbod, Mehrdad Mohebali has had a prolific career: he has moved through a variety of styles, reflecting contemporary European artists such as Hockney and also abstract, cubist, still life, abstract figurative, and impressionist artists, as if he were in search of a style. He did not have recourse to surrealist styles and techniques until 2005 at the end of Khatami’s presidency: quite suddenly Mohebali began to produce work with distinctively surrealistic features. Untitled: N^o.221³¹ is painted in a surrealist style as it juxtaposes two disparate scenarios, one domestic, one theatrical/external. In the foreground a sofa stands centrally on a rug, against a background of mountains painted as if they are part of a theatrical backcloth: there is a doorway in the mountainside, revealing another plane of depth, where a woman in an adjacent room stands looking out of a window. In Untitled: N^o.101³² he repeats the same image of sofa, doorway, room and woman, but the ‘stage set’ background of the 2005 painting is replaced by a lake, which floods the foreground, with a shoreline of trees and mountains in the distance. A line of white cloths or sheets (an image that recurs in many of his works, sometimes as envelopes or white squares) hangs above the foreground. The repetition of the structure indicates to the viewer a surrealist intention in his pictures, as if together they form a collage sequence, like the paintings of, for example, Espahbod, or one could cite Dalí’s, Ernst’s and Magritte’s repetitions and variations of elements that deliberately form a vocabulary of their own style. The surreal sequence continues as white cloths form a link to Untitled: N^os.224 and 225 (both 2005),³³ which themselves are a collage sequence. In N^o.225 a row of what are apparently seven ‘chairs’ and five ‘tables’ runs across the bottom of the painting: in fact, the tables have no legs and only two of the chairs and tables are fully painted in, the other chairs are frames only, and the tablecloths are floating white squares. The background is a Tuscan type of landscape in muted half-light. N^o.224 is similar in the foreground, with six white shapes reminiscent of tablecloths, but no chairs. In the middle ground there is a boat on a shore with European trees, and in the background a lake and a distant shoreline. Seeing both sets of paintings, the viewer has a sense of déjà vu, in a way that is similar to Hedayat’s repetition of scenes in The Blind Owl,³⁴ evoking impressions in the reader/viewer that are only allusions. The technique of combining the domestic scene and nature at large is repeated in several paintings, setting up patterns of repetition (furniture and floods, sofas and deserts etc.).

Having established a visual language in paintings such as those just mentioned, Mohebali uses what has now become familiar to introduce some new element into his works, such as in Progressive Present.³⁵ This painting has a brightly lit sofa situated on water, striped by a deep shadow, in front of which several half-submerged television sets show contemporary images of Khatami and other public figures: overhead an aeroplane is flying away – a reminder to Iranians of the possibility of emigration. This detail may be compared with the 2010 diptych painting Memory of Migration.³⁶ In this image, at first sight one may not even see the giant shadow of an airliner looming over a desert. Again, as in the previous painting, it is a reminder of aerial migration out of Iran. The shadow is simultaneously the presence and absence of the plane and its image, just as the supposed passengers present on board are now in the process of absenting themselves from home. The white rectangles in neat rows scattered across the desert could be letters or documents necessary for the process of migration.

In his later paintings Mohabeli has been using a rather different style, taking some risks by including images of women unveiled and in various states of undress or nudity that would be condemned by the censor. One of the more risqué of his works depicts what appears to be a private party (Mourning, 2010) (Figure 11).³⁷ This is a funeral wake, or an anniversary of a deceased person, as is indicated by the types of food on the table and the fact that everyone is wearing black. However, the subject of the painting is absent: the deceased. The wide-angle view is an impossible scene in Iran, largely because of the central triangle of the semi-naked woman in underwear, the woman opening her bosom, and the religious man reading the Quran. This ‘could not happen’ and is as imaginary as the massive shadow of the aeroplane over the desert. The collage of characters is surreal in its impossibility. Mohebali emphasises the erotic even more in some of his other pictures, for example, most graphically in the daring (for Iran) Persistence (2010) (Figure 12),³⁸ where one young woman adjusts her headscarf while revealing to the viewer the form of her barely covered vulva under a triangle of intense light; in the centre panel the foreground displays an enigmatic image of an armchair in front of a large empty plain (again with strewn papers) before a backdrop of mountains; in the far right part of the painting, another veiled woman reveals herself to herself (and to the viewing public), just as the veiled upper body of the woman on the left exposes her abdomen to all. One can only imagine (again) what the artist intends, but the narrative is not so clear as in the previous examples. To be sure, although Mohebali is playing with these elements, he is serious about the suspense into which he throws the viewer. In an interview I conducted with him in 2009, Mohebali put it like this:

We are suspended. We see ourselves like that, we really are not on any common ground of realism, we are suspended above realism, so that our reality is surreal, and surreality is all we know as the real.³⁹

His assertion of his use of surrealism is serious, and thereby different from that of other artists: he does not contrive to make a humorous or playful point, as do many surrealists, including artists such as Shahpour Pouyan. Like others,⁴⁰ Mohebali creates a stage, furnishes it with objects and populates his paintings with characters. However, the situation of his paintings is often an exercise in dislocation: whereas many figurative artists situate their scenes as either ‘interiors’ or ‘exteriors’, Mohebali often situates them somewhere ambiguous, that is both inside and outside, and enigmatic.⁴¹ Just as he easily metaphoricises and dissolves the boundaries between public and private, external and internal, so also, he shows no shyness of crossing boundaries into forbidden territory, for example depicting overt eroticism, or bringing the sacred and profane into close proximity. Intimate, domestic scenes take place in public spaces or in external landscapes. Reality is as diaphanous and translucent as women’s undergarments that veil, reveal and conceal all at once. His version of the un-manifesto could be said to be highly transgressive, in juxtaposing clashing opposites.

Figure 11. Mehrdad Mohebali, Mourning, 2010, acrylic on canvas, diptych, 500 × 150 cm (each panel 250 × 150 cm).

Figure 12. Mehrdad Mohebali, Persistence, 2010, acrylic and oil on canvas, triptych 200 × 100 cm (middle panel: 100 × 100 cm, side panels: 100 × 50 cm).

Conclusion

From un-manifesto to un(hidden)-manifesto

Let us briefly consider the broad implications of this essay for understanding contemporary Iranian art in the context of censorship and political repression. What is the relevance of the subject I have focused on in what I have called ‘visual periphrasis’, and the notion of ‘un-manifesto’ in the examples of the paintings that have been discussed? Emphatically, if recent events in 2022/3⁴² have directed global attention to the issue of the veiling of women in Iran, I would claim that these and other similar circumstances have given rise to global concern about the drastic restriction and suppression of protest by repressive governments with regard to popular expression. In the contemporary climate, engagement with interpretation of the present, and independent reflection, with the intention to discover truths of both the past and present, are unavoidable and irresistible. Consequently, artists are more than ever before using specific techniques and strategies of ‘un-manifesto’, as discussed in the three groups of examples above, namely (1) absence, (2) collage and fragmentation, and (3) ambiguity and enigma. When John Lukacs (Lukacs 2008)⁴³ writes that ‘our knowledge is not only personal; it is also participant’ (my emphasis), we may respond, that this knowledge applies as much, if not more so, to the history of the 20th and 21st centuries. Crucially, it would appear to be the case that the closer artists are to the historical scenario under consideration, in the limiting and restrictive conditions of censorious societies, the less they are able to reveal explicitly what they are engaged in doing artistically and socio-politically. We are, as artists and art historians, by definition participants still living through and personally involved in our current histories. When state authorities can actively bite back to chastise those who declare their manifesto, threatening imprisonment and worse, it is then that, for the prudent, un-manifestos will become the un(hidden)-manifestations of their participation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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.

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 2011); 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, N^o.1 Hunting, ‘Miniatures’ series, 2010, original miniature on paper (16th century), 18×15 cm.

9 Shahpour Pouyan, N^o.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 1992 and Afary 2009, 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, N^o.2, ‘Censorship’ series, 2004, C-print photo (handmade colouring with marker), 50×74 cm.

19 Katayoun Karami, N^o.3, ‘Censorship’ series, 2004, C-print photo (double exposed during print process), 50×74 cm.

20 See further Foroutan 2016; DOI: 10.1080/00210862.2017.1323470, accessed December 2023.

21 See, for example, two studies of ambiguity in art: Bonnar et al. 2002, 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 2022, 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 2003.

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 2015; DOI: 10.1080/00210862.2015.1062251, accessed December 2023.

41 See further Dalvand 2008.

42 Specifically, the protest against the killing of Mahsa Amini and the rise of the Women-Life-Freedom; see further Sadeghi-Boroujerdi 2023; https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957231159351 accessed December 2023.

43 As the Editor Hamid Keshmirshekan quotes him in his Introduction; Keshmirshekan, Introduction, ibid.