Foad Torshizi

The Unveiled Apple: Ethnicity, Gender, and the Limits of Inter-discursive

Interpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art
In the past two decades, Iranian contemporary art has been eagerly embraced by
international art venues. The transportation of artworks from Tehran to mostly
western European and North American cultural centers entails inter-discursive
translations that will render them legible for their reception in a new context. This
paper argues that bound up in these translations are performative acts of language that
label these artworks as markers of ethnic alterity, unexplored localities and most of the
time associates them with issues of gender and femininity (and therefore limited to the
vocabulary of veil, plight of women and sexual inequality). Looking at a seven-
minute piece of video-art by Ghazaleh Hedayat entitled Eves Apple (2006), the
article examines this predicament and the possibilities for the artists to circumvent it.
It argues that Hedayats video enables an observation of the performative dominance of
Western discourses of art history that mark the limits of inter-discursive interpretation
in disciplines such as art history and art criticism.
In memory of Mohsen Ebrhim (19512010), author, poet, and translator of the
works of Dino Buzzati and Italo Calvino into Persian.
Among the many quandaries that contemporary visual artists from the non-West are
facing today is the question of how to reckon with the problem of creating any piece
that is not re-articulated and interpreted as an immobile reductive signier of their
ethnicity and historical background in the Western contexts of the reception of
their works. Now, more than thirty years since the publication of Edward Saids
(1978) Orientalism,
1
more than twenty years after Timothy Mitchells (1989)
Foad Torshizi is a doctoral student at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African
Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University in the City of
New York, New York, USA. This essay beneted enormously from the comments of Melissa Rose Heer,
Jane M. Blocker, Hamid Dabashi, Catherine Asher, Robert Silberman, Hamid Reza Severi, Negar
Mottahedeh, Farbod Honarpisheh and my fellow panelists at the MESA annual conference in 2010
in San Diego. I should like to thank them all for their help and generosity. I am solely responsible for
all of the remaining shortcomings in this essay.
1
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
Iranian Studies, volume 45, number 4, July 2012
ISSN 0021-0862 print/ISSN 1475-4819 online/12/04054921
2012 The International Society for Iranian Studies
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2012.673830
Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,
2
and fteen years after Nstor Garca
Canclinis (1998) Remaking Passports: Visual Thought in the Debate on Multicul-
turalism,
3
still the marginalization of artists of the non-West remains as vexing and as
forceful as it has always been.
4
This situation, thus far, has given rise to various strat-
egies that seek to resist and decentralize the dominant narratives, which have continu-
ously rendered the non-West as secondary to the West. Perhaps, in the realm of
contemporary art, this is most clearly visible in how artists of the non-West are
removed from the contemporariness of contemporary art and their artworks are con-
stantly demoted as representations of the xed image of their locality. This removal is
most visible in two different discursive tropes: rst, in Western art criticism literature
5
there is a tendency to portray non-Western and, specic to this paper, Iranian art as
tethered to long-established ethnic, religious and national traditions and, second, there
is a refusal of this literature to interpret such artworks as equally advanced in compari-
son to current Western art practices and styles.
To invoke this literature in the context of the reception of the contemporary art of
Iran, it sufces to recall how the discourses of contemporary art history have often sha-
dowed the work of Iranian artists through an inexorable fabricated relation to their
countrys ancient history or its current political situation. While one should relentlessly
question the validity of historical periodization such as ancient, medieval and modern,
this very ancient history of Iran is an ahistorical Orientalist trope posing as historical
authenticity. Moreover, in many instances Iranian artists are accused of drawing from
their Western prototypes. Examples are not hard to nd: Shirin Neshat is compared
to Cindy Sherman;
6
Vahid Sharian is called the Iranian Jeff Koons in the New York
2
Timothy Mitchell, Orientalism and Exhibitionary Order, in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicho-
las Mirzoeff (London and New York, 1998), 495518. First published in 1989 in Comparative Studies in
Society and History 9 (CSSH) 31 (Cambridge).
3
Nstor Garca Canclini, Remaking Passports: Visual Thought in the Debate on Multiculturalism,
in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London and New York, 1998), 18089.
4
I nd it necessary to acknowledge that this situation is also extendable to other marginal divisions of
the so-called global world, such as women in a highly phallocentric social order, or minorities of sexual
orientation in dominantly heteronormative societies and is not limited to the binaries of West versus
non-West.
5
It is necessary here to draw a line between some art-historical academic writings that are fully aware of
the politics of marginalization and have consistently contributed to a corpus of critical account on these
politics and the uncritical literature predominantly emanating from galleries, museums, curatorial initiat-
ives and public media. I do not mean to imply that all of the accounts written in the Western context of
reception of Iranian art have been uncritical and in lack of a clear understanding of relations of power. In
fact the works I have mentioned earlier, i.e., Saids Orientalism and Mitchells Orientalism and Exhibi-
tionary Order, were both produced in this context. While I remain critical of many scholars who suffer
from the lack of a critical approach to the politics of display and representation, I maintain that the lit-
erature I am reexamining and critiquing here is mostly produced outside academia, in galleries, museums
public educational programs and public media, all of which have the advantage of incommensurably more
public exposure than academic literature.
6
See Mitra Monir Abbaspour, Trans-national, Cultural, and Corporeal Spaces: The Territory of the
Body in the Artwork of Shirin Neshat and Mona Hatoum (MA thesis, University of California, River-
side, 2001).
550 Torshizi
Times;
7
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art nds a juxtaposition of Shadi Ghadir-
ians work with Cindy Sherman to be eye opening;
8
and Martin Gayford, the chief art
critic for Bloomberg News based in London nds touches of Sherman and Duchamp in
Ghadirians series entitled Everyday Life.
9
Another apposite example of the same kind of treatment of the art of the non-West
appears in Anna Somers Cockss article Are We Colonializing Middle Eastern Art?,
which was published in The Art Newspaper in August 2009. Cockss essay, troubled by
hegemonic narratives of Western art, is worth discussing at length because it perfectly
illustrates how legitimate concerns about domination and reorientation of Middle
Eastern art by the West can subtly advocate the exclusion of non-Western contemporary
Figure 1. Vahid Sharian, Untitled, 20072008 [From the series Queen of the Jungle,
Digital print on metallic paper, 23 34 cm], courtesy of the artist.
7
In a review published in the New York Times in June 2009, Randy Kennedy quotes Sam Bardouil, the
curator of Chelsea Art Museums show Iran Inside Out, as he calls Vahid Sharian the Jeff Koons of
Iran. See Randy Kennedy, In Chelsea, Art Intersects With Reality of Iranian Conict, The
New York Times, 26 June 2009.
8
Yasmine Mohseni, Looking East, LACMA Catalog (date unknown), http://www.yasminemohseni.
com/articleFiles/LACMA.pdf (accessed 27 June 2010).
9
Martin Gayford, Saatchi Shows Veiled Women Made of Foil, Iran Sex-Worker Dolls, Bloomberg
News, 29 January 2009, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=muse&sid=
awSG3eIMpgsE (accessed 27 June 2010).
Interpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art 551
artists from the centrality of contemporary art debates and ultimately feed into the nar-
ratives they aspire to dismantle. Cocks, the general editorial director of The Art Newspa-
per, warns us that the fragile plant of Middle Eastern art can be trained in one direction
or another by Western art institutes, like the Chinese avant-garde of the last few years,
since it is still the western art institutions and western money, both pro bono and com-
mercial, that give validation to contemporary art anywhere in the world.
10
Criticizing
Figure 2. Shadi Ghadirian, Untitled, 19982001 [From the series Qajar Photography,
Digital print Photograph, Gelatin-silver bromide print, 23.97 16.19 cm.], courtesy
of the artist.
10
Anna Somers Cocks, Are We Colonializing Middle Eastern Art? No One Needs Western-style Fine
Art with Some Orientalist Flourishes, The Art Newspaper, 204 (July/August 2009), http://www.
theartnewspaper.com/articles/Are-we-colonialising-Middle-Eastern-art?/18604 (accessed 28 June 2010).
552 Torshizi
the policies made by some London museums such as the Tate Modern and the British
Museum towards the contemporary art of the Middle East, Cocks writes:
The conceptual work, lm and photography are being sought by the Tate, while
calligraphic work, the art that has the most deep-rooted following in the Middle
East, will go into the British Museum. This sounds very reasonable, except that
the market follows the lead of the Tate, not the British Museum, because of the
key role the Tate has in the international art system. The decisive power of
money will come down behind the Tates choices, inevitably affecting what
artists choose to produce. If this happens we will be artistically the poorer, which
is why it is good to hear of a museum initiative that seems to be sensitive to the
need to nurture an art that does not just mimic our own.
11
The danger Cocks has astutely delineated here is the eradication of different dialects of
the visual arts due to Western institutions minimal tolerance for artworks that are not
easily decodable, where the meaning is not readily on the surface of the work and that
require arduous efforts of translation. However, she goes too far on this note to suggest
that artists of the Middle East should be put back into their deep-rooted traditions.
Although she is absolutely right that the last thing we need is western-style ne art
with some orientalist ourishes, she fails to complicate the notion of western-style
art (read any form of contemporary global practice, such as video, performance,
installation, and so forth) and how these modes of art production are monopolized
by western artists. There is little space in her writing to rethink the institutional
demand for art from the non-West to be visually loyal to its geography of origin
and not to mimic the West, what is our own. In other words, although Cockss
legitimate concern about the hegemony of one language in contemporary art manifests
her keen observation of the current predicaments in the global art market, her pre-
scription for artists from the non-West ends in a more dangerous spot that excludes
non-Western artists from any dialog except about their locality, ethnicity, and
historical background.
In an entirely different geography, but in response to the same propensity of
Western discourses of art criticism and art history to marginalize the non-West,
the Argentinean artist Sebastian Lpez has argued that while the European artist
is allowed to investigate other cultures and enrich their own works and perspective,
it is expected that the artist from another culture only works in the background
and the artistic traditions connected to his or her place of origin.
12
He further
summarizes this situation by stating that if a foreign artist does not conform to
this separation, he is considered inauthentic, Westernized, and an imitator copyist
of what we do. The universal is ours, the local is yours.
13
11
Cocks, Are We Colonializing Middle Eastern Art?
12
Sebastian Lpezs statement is quoted in Canclini, Remaking Passports, 187.
13
Canclini, Remaking Passports.
Interpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art 553
Lopezs statement articulates the intricacy and insidiousness of the networks of
power, domination, and marginalization that are still at the heart of contemporary
art. While the contemporary moment pretends to celebrate multiculturalism and cos-
mopolitanism and continuously asserts its tolerance for difference within a global art
market, marginalization functions through less visible and complex networks. This is
to say that the politics of marginalization have gradually produced more intricate and
less visible means of rendering the non-West secondary to the West than the blatant
modes of marginalization previously at play. These politics have resulted in an unequal
economy of meaning production that does not try to exclude artists of the non-West,
but instead limits the interpretation of their works to a predetermined vocabulary that
echoes their ethnic background and thus accelerates their marginalization. This situ-
ation, I will argue, is the outcome of the politics of inter-cultural or, more accurately,
inter-discursive translation. Put differently, it is through the inter-discursive trans-
lation of the visual, departing from one context or discourse and arriving at
another, that processes of marginalization take place.
This paper is an attempt to examine this situation further and look into the pos-
sibilities of resisting it. In order to do so, I will look at the Iranian contemporary
artist, Ghazaleh Hedayat, who has foregrounded this issue in her oeuvre and has
striven to ght it on different fronts by way of both creating her artworkthus
not endorsing silenceand preempting abusive readings of it. I will argue that the
gradual evolution in her work from gural representation to non-gural abstraction
has deliberately aimed to show the very limits of inter-discursive translation in order
to destabilize the politics of domination and marginalization that are inexorably
intertwined with it. Hedayats strategy, to which I will refer as non-gural abstrac-
tion, despite its risks and failures, I propose, has been an effective way to resist the
encompassing characteristics of Euro-American-centrism in discourses of contempor-
ary art and therefore should be regarded as a signicant mode of resistance to the
more cunning and complicated methods of marginalization. After situating
Hedayats work in the historical context pertinent to her work, I will try to offer
a reading of her video entitled Eves Apple (2006), which does not conform to the
predetermined vocabulary often used in writing about artists of the Middle East.
However, I will remain fully aware that my very own act of interpretation falls
under the same rubric, namely inter-discursive translation. My point here is not to
refuse translation, but to maintain a self-reexive position that foregrounds the
limits of translation and endorses them as creative potentials for further interpret-
ations. In the second half of this paper, through a closer study of her work, I will
attempt to expose the methodical transformation from gural representation to
abstraction in Hedayats oeuvre in order to examine it as a strategy of resistance
against dominant narratives of marginalization. It is important to look more
closely at this strategy of resistance, I maintain, as it offers a fresh understanding
of the congurations of highly animate relations of power and hegemony in a
global art world and the emerging modes of resistance.
I am interested in the way that Hedayats non-conformity to a readily accessible
visual regime signifying Iranian-ness complicates not only common reductive read-
554 Torshizi
ings of Iranian artwork and artists, but also the wider assumption that the West acts as
an authoritative translator of global visual language. Hedayats use of abstraction is a
method of resistance to the translation that occurs when easily recognizable signiers
stand in for the Orient in a Western-dominated art market. By moving towards
abstraction, and away from easily decodable visual signiers of Iran, she both aims
to resist a localized narrative for her work and also calls for reection on the inherently
untenable relationship between art objects and an artists identity.
When I look at Hedayats work as a critically intervening force within the politics
of translation, I am referring to the way in which translation has been articulated and
dened by scholars such as Jacques Derrida and Lydia Liu. The image of the West as
the authoritative translator of art is coterminous with what Derrida identies as the
hegemony of the homogeneous.
14
In Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis
of Origin, Derrida asserts that the context in which meaning is produced is a political
terrain. Context is always non-natural. It enforces homo-hegemony and this means that
it always privileges one language over the others. Historically speaking, the dominance
of colonial sovereignties brought about the weakening, or in some cases even the utter
obliteration, of many languages and consequently the ultimate advantage of one
language, i.e. the language of the colonizer, over the others. Thus we have arrived at
the hegemony of the homogenous. This can be veried everywhere, everywhere
this homo-hegemony remains at work in the culture, effacing the folds and attening
the text.
15
Moreover, this privileging comes hand-in-hand with the exclusion of what
disturbs and destabilizes this hegemonic homogeneity.
16
This attening of the text,
about which Derrida warns us, is produced and perpetuated through the hegemony
of the language of art history and criticism that has itself often been limited to a voca-
bulary that corroborates the politics of Western-centrism. This is not to say that
English, or any other dominant European language, does not offer the possibility of
accurate and loyal translations/interpretations of non-Western visual artworks, but
that the context of interpretation, which, as Derrida puts it, is always a non-natural
imposed homo-homogeneity, in the contemporary art world conforms with
Western-centrism and thus anchors the processes of meaning production in the
muddy waters of cultural domination and marginalization of the non-West.
17
Through a more political and historically grounded analysis, Lydia Liu traces cul-
tural dominance and its relation to inter-cultural translation in the interaction
between China and Britain. In her 2004 book The Clash of Empires: The Invention
of China in Modern World Making Liu describes the structure of power relations in
the context of inter-discursive translation through her theorization of the notion of
the super-sign. Liu denes the super-sign as a linguistic monstrosity that thrives on
14
Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, translated by Patrick
Mensah (Stanford, CA, 1996), 40.
15
Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 4041.
16
Jonathan Roffe, Translation, in Understanding Derrida, ed. Jack Raynolds and Jonathan Roffe
(London and New York, 2004), 105.
17
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, edited by Gerald Graff, translated by Jeffery Mehlman and Samuel
Weber (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 133.
Interpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art 555
the excess of its presumed meanings by virtue of being exposed to, or thrown together
with, foreign etymologies and foreign languages.
18
She refers to a historical incident
where the Chinese word yi (foreigners) was translated as barbarian by British
people in China during the Sino-British encounter, the use of which in legal docu-
ments was ofcially banned in the Treaty of Tianjin at the insistence of the British
for its derogatory implications. Liu argues that the translation as barbarian for the
word yi , which was meant to refer to foreigners in China, the prohibition of its
use and its subsequent vanishing from the Chinese language was a result of the
encounter between the two divergent contexts (English and Chinese) in which one
dominated the other, expropriated this word and put an end to its life or at least
made it invisible for a long time.
19
Lius provocative example serves as a model to
look at contemporary inter-cultural encounters in which translation is more covertly
at play in the transportation of the visual, which supposedly communicates with an
international language not in need of translation. Lius model sheds light on the
more obscure elements involved in the act of inter-cultural translation that are
never disentangled from politics.
Perhaps the most familiar super-sign that comes to mind in the context of contem-
porary Iranian art is the worn-out gure of the veil. Within the limits of this paper I
will not be able to trace the history of the veil as a proliferating visual element and its
continuous presence in the contemporary visual culture and art of Iran, but I will
utilize Lius model in order to delve into some recent examples of the reception of
Iranian art in the West and back in Iran. It is worth mentioning that the visual appear-
ance of the veil has been, and still is, the most easily accessible icon in the contempor-
ary visual representationor perhaps I should say misrepresentationof the gure of
Iranian women. At times it is hard to nd any account written on Iranian women
artists of which the central, or at least one of the central, arguments is not formed
around the issue of the veil.
20
Some recent examples of these accounts are necessary in order to emphasize how
prevalent they are in the current discourses of art criticism. It is small wonder that
the veil appears at the center of all of the interpretations that I will bring here as
examples to illustrate my point. But the proliferation of the localization of the
Iranian artists is not to be solely blamed on the West. Aligned with the politics of mar-
ginalization and localization of contemporary Iranian artists are the cultural policies of
the incumbent Iranian government in promoting nationalism in art, which has grew
exponentially since the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2005.
18
Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge,
MA, 2004), 13.
19
Liu, The Clash of Empires, 3234.
20
For example see the interview with the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat by Artemis Papanika that has
been given the title of Shirin Neshat: A Voice for Women in Veil in Oneculture daily website of art
and culture (April 2009). http://www.onculture.eu/story.aspx?s_id=729&z_id=31 (accessed 29 June
2010). Also see Hamid Dabashis critique of Scott McDonalds interview with Shirin Neshat in Trans-
cending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography, in Shirin Neshat: la ltima Palabra, ed. Hamid
Dabashi, Shirin Neshat and Octavio Zaya (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2005), 61.
556 Torshizi
Thus, it is not only Western art venues that expect Iranian artists to somehow include
the veil in their artworks, but also it is an internal policy to allow only those artists
from Iran to represent the country in international venues who strictly follow a
national regime of signiers, including the veil. Although these cultural policies
inside Iran seem to have accelerated more recently, we should not forget that the
marginalization and localization of Iranian contemporary artists have not been
limited to the past few years.
In fact, many Iranian artists, with the exception of those who celebrate this predica-
ment and exploit it to their benet,
21
have long wrestled with the global politics of rep-
resentation and display, during the time in which their works have played a major role
on the stage of the so-called world art. From participating in signicant international
biennales to numerous shows of imported artworks either fromIran or fromthe Middle
East, Iranian visual artists have practiced an extraordinary presence in comparison
to their peers from the region. The most recent examples of these international
exhibitions include the Venice Art Biennales in 2005 and 2009; the Saatchi gallerys
Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East show in 2009 in London; and the Chelsea
Art Museums Iran Inside Out in New York City from June to September 2009. The
latter, in particular, exploited its fortuitous coincidence with the Green movement in
Iran as the opening of the show came shortly after Irans turmoil in June 2009,
which occupied the headlines of almost every major news agency in the world.
While these are a few examples that I will discuss here, it is not far-fetched to argue
that in almost every contemporary show that has exhibited artworks from Iran in the
past two decades, Iranian artists have played the role of a constitutive absence that con-
structs the margins of Western art discourses and maintains their centrality. What I
mean by this constitutive absence is not to say that they are literally excluded from
global art exhibition, but it is precisely in their presence as secondary to the West
that they dene the margins of what is considered serious, critical, advanced, and
complex art. The examples here are to illustrate the propensity of many contemporary
art venues to stake out an imaginative geography in which the artists struggle with
backward and primitive societies and consequently to reduce the works of many
Iranian artists into tokens of their ethnic alterity and the falsely manufactured pastness
attached to the name of their country.
22
The few examples here demonstrate different
strategies of the exclusion of Iranian artists from critical debates in contemporary art,
depriving them of the possibility to engage in narratives that are liberated from their
ethnicity. This is all done under the shadow of their ethnic and racial difference,
forcing them to serve as manifestations of the rest of the world in the infamous
equation of the West and the rest.
21
To name only a few examples look at 6 Video Arts (20045) by Mania Akbari, photograph series The
Loss of Our Identity by Sadegh Tirafkan, or Shahram Entekhabis 72 Virgins (2009). All three artists have
uncritically celebrated orientalized and sexualized renditions of Iranian women and have solidied them
in their own works. Or see the sudden change in Fereidoon Omidis oeuvre from abstract painting to
works that are overcrowded with Persian calligraphy, after the success of Iranian calligraphy-painters,
such as Mohammad Ehsai, at Christies in Dubai in February 2006.
22
Dabashi, Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography, 59.
Interpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art 557
In his essay on Shirin Neshat, Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative
Geography published in 2005, Hamid Dabashi acerbically points to some examples
of reductive interpretations of Neshats work such as reviews written by Scott McDonald
or Francesco Bonami.
23
Dabashi elaborates further on these politics by using the term
arrested vocabulary, by which he refers to a predetermined vocabulary that attens
Neshats work into a comment on the plight of women in violent Islamic countries
and fails to account for its semiotic complexity.
24
Dabashi asserts:
There is an imaginative geography at work in the heart of that geopolitics of recep-
tion that is impossible to miss and unwise to ignore. It is impossible to read any-
thing on Shirin Neshat these days written by someone having already imagined
himself or herself inside a hermetically sealed sort of Andy Warhols Campbell
Soup Can code-named the West without reaching for a red pen and marking
the number of times that phrases such as repressed Iranian/Muslim woman
appear and mar any serious conversation with her work.
25
Dabashis analysis of the geopolitics of the reception of Neshats work most effectively
describes the situation of contemporary arts current discourses. Since 2005, when his
critique of readings of Neshat was published, a single glance at exhibition catalogues
and art reviews sufces to nd numerous examples that fall under the same rubric of
reductive interpretation.
One other instance of these reductive readings, with an entirely different agenda,
namely promoting conformity to local visual vocabularies, is evident in the ofcial
fty-third Venice Biennales bulletin, Exhibart. During the course of this biennale
in 2009, Exhibart exalted Irans pavilion for being able to remain loyal to its cultural
heritage. Iranian art, after many years, writes Exhibarts reporter, has shown orig-
inality at the Venice Biennale. It has shown what really is original and is not trying
to satisfy a Western taste.
26
What the Venice Biennales Exhibart considered orig-
inal Iranian art was a selection of artworks by Iraj Eskandari, Mahmoud Avishi,
and Sedaghat Jabbari that clearly manifest a national identity through systematic
regimentations of Persian and Islamic visual signiers. The works of these artists,
23
Dabashi, Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography, 3185.
24
Given Neshats immigration to the United States in her teenage years and the formation of her art
career in the US, one might quite reasonably dispute that she should not be simply categorized as an
Iranian artist. However, for better or for worse, not only has she been continuously regarded to as an
Iranian artist and included in art shows presenting artists from Iran, but also she has been portrayed
as the voice of the Iranian women, an attribution that in fact Neshat has always resented. Therefore,
it is pertinent to argue that even her association with the voice of the Iranian women is part of a bigger
politics of representation and display that resists accepting Neshat as simply an artist rather than an
Iranian artist.
25
Dabashi, Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography, 59 and 61 (English trans-
lation is printed only on odd pages).
26
Iranian Students News Agency, ISNA06-09-200988/3/191353513. ISNAIranian
Students News Agency, http://isna.ir/ISNA/NewsView.aspx?ID=News-1353513.
558 Torshizi
especially of Iraj Eskandari, with his painting series of deformed Achaemenid gures
with different color variations, and Sedaghat Jabbari with a large number of Persian
calligraphy-paintings, exhibit a connement to a regime of local visual elements,
which, contrary to Exhibarts claim, seek to satisfy Western taste besides their
patrons demands. What in fact was celebrated by Exhibart was the Iranian artists
self-denial to partake in a critical dialog that does not only concern their ethnic back-
ground but also engages in broader narrativesnarratives such as gender, biopolitics,
post-humanity, and so forth that are addressed by Western artists quite frequently.
What we witness in Exhibart is the coaxing of the artists from the non-West to
remain local and employ a visual regime that can be easily translated using what
Dabashi has rightly termed as arrested verbal vocabulary.
27
Figure 3. Shirin Neshat, Untitled, 1997 [From the series Women of Allah], courtesy of
Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.
27
Dabashi, Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography, 59.
Interpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art 559
A more recent example of this kind of rhetorical gesture is strikingly evident in the
Chelsea Art Museums show, Iran Inside Out, which included more than fty Iranian
artists from inside Iran and diasporic artists from the outside. Sam Bardouil, the
curator of the show, juxtaposes two disparate artworks: a portrait of a young boy lying
on a wooden box, which is a pen on canvas drawing by Ahmad Morshedloo and a
photo-installation by ShahramEntekhabi, in which he lled the wall on top of the paint-
ing withprostitutes advertising cards that are censored witha black marker making them
appear as if they are wearing the chador. There, the curator makes a bizarre connection
between the two works, implying that the prostitutes in Entekhabis work are in the
dreams of the young sleeping boy in Morshedloos extraordinarily executed painting.
In an egregious, crude remark, Bardouil suggests that the sexual fantasies of Iranian
male teenagers are conscated by Irans theocratic government and argues that this jux-
taposition is a critique of thatas if, as a curator, he has the right to create an absurd
collage with the works of artists who are participating in his show in order to manufac-
ture a newwork that better satises his audience, which back in June 2009 was yearning
to know more about Iranian politics than its art. Ironically, young Iranian mens sexual
fantasies, as Bardouil suggests, are directed toward Western prostitutes.
In a documentary video about the show, posted on Chelsea Art Museums website,
he says:
Right next to me here, we have an amazing painting of a huge scale by an artist who
lives in the inside. His name is Ahmad Morshedloo. And it is of a man lying in his
bed, more like a teenager and thats why I wanted it to be on the ground level to give
the idea that he is really lying on his bed. Right on top of it, theres this amazing
installation by this artist who lives in Berlin. His name is Shahram Entekhabi,
who since 2002 has been collecting real prostitute cards and covering them with
the chador, saying that the complete revealing of the woman or complete covering
of the woman is the same thing, because you are looking at the woman as a sex
object. Now by juxtaposing the two works at such close proximity I wanted to
kind of make a joke and say that probably inside the country, even a mans fantasies
have been conscated and they have been covered [laughing]. So that was just a little
curatorial interjection on my behalf.
28
Perhaps it was in the wake of the serendipity of the show with Irans upheaval in
Summer 2009 that Bardouil found his curatorial interjection, namely, the manipu-
lation of two disparate artworks by faking a relationship between them, to be not
only legitimate but also a benevolent effort that gives voice to silenced Iranians. Ironi-
cally, it was during this time that the world was watching, on the news, thousands of
young Iranian women and men protesting side-by-side on the streets of Tehran. One
might argue that Bardouils supercial approach is an exceptional instance and does
not represent curatorial tendencies more generally. I agree. But through a few examples
28
Iran: Inside Out. Documentary Video, digital format (New York, 2009), http://chelseaartmuseum.
org/exhibits/2009/iraninsideout/index.html (emphases added).
560 Torshizi
I have offered so far, I have tried to outline different strategies that are deployed by what
is perhaps the majority of Western art curators and critics in order not to exclude
Iranian artists but to present them in a highly distorted manner, which ultimately
ends in their exclusion from the contemporariness of contemporary art. The same
goes for the majority of other non-Western artists around the globe. A brief look at
contemporary art is enough to realize that even the most celebrated artists of the
non-West have been continuously read only in relation to their ethnic background.
29
Yet Western curators and critics are not alone in employing this arrested verbal
vocabulary to discuss and interpret contemporary Iranian art. The dominance of
this vocabulary has simultaneously played a signicant role in the reshaping of local
discourses of art. A recent example of this is clearly visible in Barbad Golshiris
For They Know What They Do Know in e-ux journal. While in a verbose
account of contemporary Iranian art Golshiri criticizes orientalist renditions of the
art of Iran, he falls into the same trap of positioning himself outside the politics
that he denigrates and accusing some Iranian artists of becoming agents of homogen-
izing forces and supporting the aestheticization of stereotypes.
30
What Golshiri is
suggesting here, by these relatively vague terms, is that many of the Iranian artists, by
means of aestheticizing the homogenized stereotypes of the Orient, have satised the
global art markets ravenousness and in fact functioned as accomplices to Western
discourses of marginalization by solidifying and conrming their attened renditions
of the Other. Here, it seems to me that Golshiri is wrong on both of his assertions. For
his idea that the artists help with the homogenization of the region is based on a
premise that cultural domination necessarily seeks homogenization and the ultimate
obliteration of difference. This premise fails to account for complex strategies of
the machines of social identity that create innumerable differences and represent
them as expressions of ethnic alterity. To argue that the so-called Orient is a hetero-
geneous entity is to insist on an almost indisputable and widely accepted fact and thus
is to miss the battleground. Western discourses of contemporary art, I maintain, cele-
brate the multiplicity of this phantasmagoric geography. What is at stake and in need
of resistance, however, is that whatever comprises this heterogeneous entity is dened
as what-is-not-the-West and thus has always occupied the position of the secondary,
the marginalized, in the dichotomy of the West and the non-West. The Wests
endorsement of the internal differences of a geographical region, which has endured
marginalization in its totality, should by no means be assumed equal to the eradication
of hierarchy. The highly differentiated and diverse region of the Middle East remains
29
To name just a couple of prominent artists who endure the same reductive readings, the Colombian-
born sculptor Doris Salcedo and Chri Samba, from Congo, have both been rarely interpreted beyond the
connements caused by their different ethnic background.
30
Barbad Golshiri, For They Know What They Do Know, e-ux Journal, no. 8 (2009), http://www.
e- ux.com/journal/view/80. Some of the artists Golshiri lambasts in this essay include Shirin Aliabadi,
Shirin Neshat, Shadi Ghadirian, Shojaa Azari and Farhad Moshiri. He writes: Shadi Ghadirian, Farhad
Moshiri, Ghazel, and Shirin Ali-Abadi perpetuate the dominant image [of Iranian woman in the veil] in a
very direct way; no pentimenti or curvatures are there to be seen. They take advantage of doxa and hege-
mony and submit to it in the name of subversion (Golshiri, For They Know What They Do Know).
Interpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art 561
secondary to the center of the world and serves as a sideshow for the Wests curious
citizens. Second, by suggesting that the Iranian artists support and feed into the
procedures of aestheticization of stereotypes, Golshiri has failed to hold responsible
those who have fabricated these stereotypes and instead has given the full agency of
the aestheticization of homogenized stereotypes to the artists.
Criticizing Saatchis Unveiled newsletter for conating Arabs and Iranians, Golshiri
is right to some degree to point out that the dominant producers of social identity and
ethnic alterity, or, in his words, those who are the holders of such discourses, tend to
abandon dissimilar qualities and manufacture essentialist and homogenizing readings
of the so-called region. But what is intriguing is his own failure to liberate himself
from the very same literature he lambasts. Associating Shirin Neshat with what was
disturbingly termed in Iran as chador art or accusing Shirin Ali-Abadi of supporting
the constructed mass by attributing to it an ethnic, geographic, cultural, or political
reality to homogenize diversity and difference,
31
are examples of the reshaping of
Iranian local discourse of contemporary art in conformity with Western art discourses
arrested vocabulary, par excellence. In fact, the anxiety in the language of many Iranian
critics, such as Golshiri or Hamid Keshmirshekan, about exoticism suggests that there
is an inherent presence of the West in their modes of thinking as the ultimate spec-
tator.
32
However, I do not mean to imply that thinking about exoticism should be
completely abandoned, as I acknowledge its substantial effects on the contemporary
art of Iran and other non-Western geographies. What I want to argue, instead, is
that laying bare the preoccupation of Iranian critics with terms such as exoticism or
chador art, which have proliferated in the past two decades, demonstrates that
although the specter of the West is not clearly manifest in the local discourses of
contemporary Iranian art, it is undisputedly present.
Saatchis show, Exhibarts review, or Bardouils remarks, as some primary examples,
indicate the violence that occurs during the inter-cultural translation of contemporary
art from marginalized countries to culturally dominant empires of art and culture.
While the visual arts are sometimes characterized as not needing translation, as
somehow a kind of universal language, a much more intricate network of inter-
discursive translation with a subtle movement and a concealed architecture of
power relations is at play in the presentation of the visual across borders. Within
this context, Ghazaleh Hedayats oeuvre is signicant not only in that it reveals this
hidden architecture, but also in that she seeks new forms of resisting it. There is
no need to fear or hope, as Deleuze has once said, but only to look for new
weapons.
33
Hedayats Eves Apple foregrounds the necessity and urgency of looking
31
Golshiri, For They Know What They Do Know.
32
Hamid Keshmirshekan, The Question of Identity vis--vis Exoticism in Contemporary Iranian
Art, lecture delivered at the Khalili Research Center, Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford University,
during the Barakat Trust Conference: Contemporary Iranian Art: Modernity and the Iranian Artist,
curated by Hamid Keshmirshekan, Kellogg College, Oxford University, 11 July 2005; Golshiri, For
They Know What They Do Know.
33
Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on Control Societies, in Negotiations 19721990, trans. Martin Joughin
(New York, 1995), 180.
562 Torshizi
for new weapons, for new strategies of resistance, and for new ways to negotiate power
during the age of highly animate social machines that create and recreate the identi-
ties and differences that are understood as the local, now marginalized in more subtle
and nuanced ways than they were before.
34
After her video Untitled (2005), in which we see a close-up of Hedayat staring into
the camera, wearing a loose scarf, which is a common and familiar visual element in
todays everyday life in Iran, numerous critiques, similar in nature to what Golshiri
writes about Iranian artists, gushed out of the scene of contemporary art in Iran.
Her appearance with a scarf was at the center of these critiques. Although there is
no written account on Hedayats work, at least to the best of my knowledge, being
involved with the contemporary art scene in Tehran allowed me to hear clearly the
inux of criticism owing in the oral discourses of the art scene, both among artists
and critics. Most of these critiques arose from the super-sign of the veil. Those
Iranian critics who lambasted her work did not recognize Hedayats appearance in
the veil as the only way she could have shown her work in public, nor could they
imagine that Iranian women really do wear the scarf in their everyday lives. The
Figure 4. Shirin Aliabadi, Miss Hybrid III, 2007 [Inkjet print on plexiglass,
150 114 cm.], courtesy of the artist.
34
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 45.
Interpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art 563
veil, the scarf, was turned merely into a signier of what we used to call self-exoticiza-
tion in Iran. For as soon as it appeared in any artistic representation of a female gure,
it masked the content of the artwork and made impossible any critical dialog between
the artwork and its spectators.
It was as a result of this situation that Hedayat decided to move away from a rep-
resentational visibility; a strategy that I will discuss later in this paper. This deliberate
move gave rise to her next video, Eves Apple (2006), which until today remains one of
the least seen and one of the most remarkable video works in the contemporary art of
Iran, given its semantic and visual complexity and its potential for resisting dominant
narratives of marginalization of non-Western artists. Eves Apple is a seven-minute-
long video that is repeated continuously during the time of its exhibition. It is an
extreme close-up of a female larynx, a protuberance in the human throat, that every
once in a while moves slightly up and down, and thus the looping of the video
makes it almost impossible to discern where it starts and ends. The experience of
encountering the video is somewhat disorienting in that the visual qualities of its
low-contrast pale skin color prevent any immediate recognition of what is being
shown on the screen. This visually abstract footage of a female throat, which is
shown in a small monitor with a comparable scale to the average human being, is
installed behind a wall in the gallery at the height of approximately ve feet. The
video has no sound. The title of the work, Eves Apple (Seeb e Havv in Persian),
is reminiscent of the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden as a
result of their rebellious act of eating the fruit of the forbidden tree.
Eves Apple complicates the problematic association of sin with femininity within
the Christian tradition and biblical translations of the story of Adam and Eve. Its
title suggests that the protuberance in our throats is a constant reminder of our
Figure 5. Ghazaleh Hedayat, Untitled, 2005 [Still from video], courtesy of the artist.
564 Torshizi
primordial sin. But at the same time, by changing the famous name of Adams apple
given to the human larynx, it alludes to the historical associations of Eve with sin,
inscribed in our minds. Hedayat playfully criticizes the phallocentric biases of
history and language. This is one of the instances where she posits her critique to
the politics of translation that have rendered an imaginative story a source of associ-
ation of women with deception and disgrace. Emphasizing an arbitrary translation of
the Latin word malum as apple by including it in the title of her work, she draws our
attention to the very limits of translation. The Latin word malum (evil) is similar to
the word malum (an apple); a similarity that has inuenced the apples becoming
interpreted as the biblical forbidden fruit. This arbitrariness as the characteristic
of translation leads us to what Derrida brought to our attention; that translation
enforces homo-hegemony and ultimately always favors one context over the other.
This allusion in the work of Hedayat effectively extends her criticism of the arbitrari-
ness in Western reiterations of Adam and Eves story that resulted in favor of mascu-
linity and held Eve accountable for contracting malum or evil.
Yet there are at least two more complex sides to Hedayats critique of the binary
logic implemented in Western thought. Perhaps the slight bulge in the throat depicted
in Eves Apple and its less visible presence resonates with the contrast between genital
organs, and thus it alludes to the famous envy for what is absent. While it seems per-
tinent to read Hedayats work through the psychoanalytical notion of penis envy, I
suggest that the similarity between the shape of the protuberance in the depicted
throat and the gure of the breast are not accidental. What Eves Apple offers in posit-
ing this subtle gural similarity is an inkling of the primacy of motherhood, and there-
fore it puts forward a strong dismantling critique of the phallocentric assumptions
embedded in the works of Sigmund Freud, a founding father of modern Western
thought. As two of the most prominent scholars of feminist psychoanalysis,
Figure 6. Ghazaleh Hedayat, Eves Apple, 2006 [Still from video], courtesy of the
artist.
Interpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art 565
Melanie Klein and Julia Kristeva, have suggested in their critique of Freuds biological
essentialism, the maternal function should be regarded as a force that not only plays a
signicant role in the development of the mothers subjectivity but also allows her to
accept the Other, the child, neither as an ab-ject nor an object of desire, but the rst
Other.
35
Eves Apples invocation of the gure of the breast thus strives to foreground
the primacy of motherhood in order to tease yet another discourse of phallocentrism
that has continuously privileged masculinity and rendered femininity in association
with absence, lack and a desire for what is missing.
The notion of the acceptance of the Other emerges also in a different interpretation
of Eves Apple enabled by Hlne Cixouss reading of the fable of Adam and Eve. In
Reaching the Point of Wheat, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Maturing Woman, in
describing what she calls the primitive meal [cne] in the primitive scene [scne] of
Adam and Eve, Cixous argues that the signicance of the biblical story lies in the
tension between desire and prohibition. She asserts that the apple, as a paradigmatic
object of desire, becomes the site of the struggle between interdiction and desire for the
rst woman. What Cixous nds to be the most compelling in the triumph of desire
over prohibition in Eve, which ultimately results in her biting of the apple, the visible
promise that is full and possesses an inside, is that Eve is not afraid of eating it.
What Eve will discover, she writes, in her relationship to the concrete reality is
the inside of the apple, and this inside is good. The Fable [of the primordial sin]
tells us how the genesis of femininity goes by way of the mouth, through a certain
oral pleasure, and through the nonfear of the inside.
36
Cixous continues: astonishingly, our oldest book of dreams relates to us, in its
cryptic mode, that Eve in not afraid of the inside, neither of her own nor of the
others.
37
Cixouss reading enables us to interpret another dimension of the
complex work of Hedayat, in that it allows us to understand the absence of a
bolder protuberance as a higher capacity for the integration of the Other, the
outside. Thus, Eves Apple, in reminding us that Eve, as primordial feminine, exercised
her superior potential to open herself to the otherness of the apple, disturbs the mascu-
line economy that is characterized by a single-minded concern with increasing the
phallic power of the masculine subject, according to Cixous.
38
Hedayats complex and multifaceted video effectively eludes reductive interpret-
ations, in that she deliberately removes any familiar signier of her ethnic background
in order to partake in a broader dialog concerning femininity and phallocentrism. The
gradual evolution in her oeuvre is clearly visible in her departure from a video in which
she appeared in a self-portrait style staring into the camera without blinking to the
point that her face is wet with tears to her later arrival to another video, where her
gural representation becomes highly abstracted. Moreover, the continuation of this
35
Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein, trans. Ross Guberman (New York, 2001), 15455.
36
Hlne Cixous, The Primitive Meal, in French Feminists on Religion: A Reader, ed. Morny Joy,
Kathleen OGrady and Judith L. Poxon (New York and London, 2002), 22223.
37
Cixous, The Primitive Meal.
38
Cixous, The Primitive Meal, Editors Introduction.
566 Torshizi
abstraction in her subsequent work, where she avoids gural representation through
working with hair and skin, suggests a carefully planned strategy that gains more visi-
bility precisely through invisibility.
39
This is not to suggest that in order to have more
visible women we need to have more invisible ones, but to understand that the politics
of visibility should be disturbed by means of deployment of strategies that aim at the
limits of its very logic. Hedayat offers a valuable and potent example that strives to
target the limits of visibility and translation.
As performance theorist Peggy Phelan has shown us, in the context of the represen-
tation of female subjects, neither better representations (i.e., those that are more
visible) nor the refusal of representation (those that are invisible or non-existent)
by women can serve as solutions to the phallocentric ideologies of representation.
40
Thus she proposes the employment of the subversive strategy of the unmarked, the
invisible, the non-reproductive or the performative to dismantle the very logic on
which the ideology of the visible operates. Although Phelan has faced theoretical criti-
cism for suggesting that performance eludes re-presentation and remaining, it is useful
to extrapolate from her theory an articulation of resistance against representation that
thrives upon attacking the very logic of representation.
41
Resonating with this notion of undoing the logic of a discourse, we can elicit from
Ghazaleh Hedayats works, among those of numerous other artists,
42
a tactic of resist-
ance that targets the limits of the discourse that is originally supposed to delimit and
dene the work itself. Thus, Hedayats systematic attack on language and translation,
as it is manifest in Eves Apple, should be read as an effort to tease out the connements
of the inter-discursive translation in the contemporary global art market and conse-
quently as an attempt to disturb its secure modus operandi.
I do not mean to imply that what I am offering here is the only accurate possible
reading of Hedayats work. Also, it might appear to be an odd claim to argue that a
more nuanced reading of Hedayats work will arrive through an interpretation
informed by the work of some central Western thinkers in the discipline of psycho-
analysis. However, before providing a response too quickly to this legitimate concern,
39
Ghazaleh Hedayats show Strand and Skin was held at Tarrahan Azad Art Gallery in Tehran in
October and November 2008. All works presented at the show followed the same strategy of gural
abstraction that I have discussed in this paper.
40
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York and London, 1993), 26.
41
For a prominent example of the criticism Phelan faced, see Rebecca Schneider, Archives: Perform-
ance Remains, Performance Research, 6, no. 2 (2000), 100108.
42
For example look at Robert Storrs interview with the artist Felix Gonzales-Torres, where he argues
in favor of abstraction as an effective way in producing political art. He says to Storr, Lets look at
abstraction, and lets consider the most successful of those political artists, Helen Frankenthaler. Why
are they the most successful political artists, even more than Kosuth, much more than Hans Haacke,
much more than Nancy and Leon or Barbara Kruger? Because they dont look political! And as we
know its all about looking natural, its all about being the normative aspect of whatever segment of
culture were dealing with, of life. Thats where someone like Frankenthaler is the most politically success-
ful artist when it comes to the political agenda that those works entail, because she serves a very clear
agenda of the Right. Felix Gonzales-Torres, Etre un Espion, interview by Robert Storr, ArtPress
(January 1995): 2432.
Interpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art 567
I would like to make note of two important dimensions of this regimentation of
Western scholars. First I believe that one should not forget that Klein, Kristeva,
Cixous and Phelan are all theorizing from a marginal position in relation to the domi-
nant masculine discourses of psychoanalysis. And, second, this discursive marginal pos-
ition has fractally developed its very own center and margins. Thus, in that I see
Hedayats video to be a poignant critique of phallocentrism, I did not want to
place her work in the margins of the margins, as happens often with the artists of
the non-West when they make a political, social or philosophical commentary that
aims at discourses at the center of contemporary thought. I chose to read Eves
Apple employing theories of feminist psychoanalytical thinkers for I did not want
to participate in the marginalization of a critique that is potentially useful in opposing
phallocentrism. Moreover, Hedayats strategy of abstraction along with the content of
her work, both of which I have examined in this paper, is analogous with one of the
major premises of psychoanalysis, i.e. appearance does not necessarily lay bare what is
hidden inside. I also want to emphasize that my attention to psychoanalysis in inter-
preting her work is in part informed by the discussions I have had with the artist
before and during the writing of this paper.
43
Yet it is unwise to suggest that this strategy is an ultimate solution without its own
risks and disadvantages. As much as a non-gural abstraction expands the domains of
interpretation and resists reductive readings, it can also trigger some radical inferences
that can possibly place the work back into what it initially aims to resist. In autumn of
2008 at a screening of Ghazaleh Hedayats work during a speech in an academic venue
in Malm, I happened to witness a bizarre reading that obstinately wanted to under-
stand her work as a reference to silenced women of the Middle East, where their lar-
ynxes (sound box) are not able to give them voice in their traditional and patriarchal
society. Although potentially this was a forceful and imaginative interpretation, I was
really struck by how the viewer extrapolated all those remarks about women of the
Middle East from the biographical information about Ghazaleh Hedayat, and could
not even imagine that her work is about femininity rather than the plight of
women of some specic and imaginative geography called the Middle East.
Thus, at rst, it might appear that the question which should be asked is about the
political efcacy of non-gural abstraction in the context of resisting narratives of mar-
ginalization. In fact, my aim in this paper has been to demonstrate the effectiveness of
this strategy, at least in the context of the oeuvre of Ghazaleh Hedayat, and to argue
that its potentials for resisting reductive interpretations by far exceed its limitations.
However, there are at least two points that I nd in need of further clarication.
First, this strategy cannot be disentangled from the context of the work and prescribed
to the rest of the artists who ght the same battle against marginalization, in that any
form of prescriptive strategy will sooner or later turn into its opposite and will become
43
I have conducted three conversations with the artist, of which two took place in Tehran in summer
2009 and the other was a long-distance phone conversation in summer 2010. References to these con-
versations are as follows: Ghazaleh Hedayat in three interviews with Foad Torshizi (Tehran, 29 June
2009; Tehran, 18 July 2009; Minneapolis-Tehran, 16 June 2010).
568 Torshizi
a means of reinforcement of restraints on artists. And, second, one should question the
ways in which political efcacy of a strategy is assessed and ask whether its subversive-
ness has to be merely understood in terms of dismantling a dominant narrative or an
authoritative system of translation and interpretation or if it can be simply successful
in revealing the structures of power relations.
In an essay entitled The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power
throughBedouinWomen, Lila Abu-Lughodsuggests that what we canextrapolate from
various forms of resistance is a diagnostic of power relations. She asserts that instead of
taking these forms as signs of humanfreedom, we needtosee themas strategies that tell us
more about formations of power and how people are caught up in them.
44
Ghazaleh
Hedayats Eves Apple and her non-gural abstraction strategy offer productive potentials
to see that the artists of the non-West still need to resist their renditions as ethnic Others
and their imposed pastness through reductive readings of their works. It might be that
her biographical information, which, unfortunately, has given an instrumental role in
the interpretation of art in art-historical discourses, incites the desire in its viewer to
associate her work with the outside culture, but her video ultimately strives to elude
that kind of capture. Whether it is successful or not, it allows us to deduce the power
relations which it arduously struggles to resist. By aiming at the very limits of inter-dis-
cursive translationand its politics, Hedayat offers anacerbic critique that questions dom-
inance, hegemony, and marginalization: questions to which we might never nd
satisfactory answers, but that are still in need of iteration.
44
Lila Abu-Lughod, The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through
Bedouin Women, American Ethnologist, 17, no. 1 (February 1990): 54.
Interpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art 569
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