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Alternative Iran offers a unique contribution to the field of contemporary art, investigating how Iranian artists engage with space and site amid the pressures of the art market and the state's regulatory regimes. Since the 1980s, political, economic, and intellectual forces have driven Iran's creative class toward increasingly original forms of artmaking not meant for official venues. Instead, these art forms appear in private homes with "trusted" audiences, derelict buildings, leftover urban zones, and remote natural sites. While many of these venues operate independently, others are fully sanctioned by the state. Drawing on interviews with over a hundred artists, gallerists, theater exper...
Women, Art, Freedom offers an insightful look at the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran, sparked by the tragic murder of Jina Mahsa Amini at the hands of the “morality police” for violating hijab rules. Beyond its feminist undertones and the remarkable courage of the young protesters, what sets this uprising apart from previous ones is the abundant and diverse art it has inspired. This book, rather than merely analyzing the artworks that garnered attention on social media platforms, brings to light lesser-known grassroots artistic movements that played a crucial role within their immediate local communities. Engaging with primarily Iran-based artists, it uncovers their role in shaping guerrilla interventions and street occupations and in articulating distinct forms of peaceful civil disobedience. By drawing on a broad spectrum of historical and theoretical sources, this book further reveals the origins and inspirations of Iran’s protest art. Focusing mainly on the interconnections between the public sphere, women’s bodies, and feminist viewpoints, Women, Art, Freedom underscores the vital role of artists in championing global justice and equality.
Examining Iran’s recent history through the double lens of domesticity and consumer culture, Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran demonstrates that a significant component of the modernization process in Iran advanced beyond political and public spheres. On the cusp of Iran’s entry into modernity, the rules and tenets that had traditionally defined the Iranian home began to vanish and the influx of new household goods gradually led to the substantial physical expansion of the domestic milieu. Subsequently, architects, designers, and commercial advertisers shifted their attention from commercial and public architecture to the new home and its contents. Domesticity and consumer culture...
This book explores the transformation of home culture and domestic architecture in twentieth century Iran. While highlighting the role of architects and urban planners since the turn of the century, the book also studies the interplay between foreign influences, gender roles, consumer culture, and women's education as they intersect with taste, fashion, and interior design.
Homogenization, Gender and Everyday Life in Pre- and Trans-modern Iran: An Archaeological Reading is actually an effort to investigate the interaction of power structure and gender in the context of everyday life in Iran in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The book pursues two main goals: situating gender in Iranian archaeology and calling for more consideration to daily life in archaeological gender researches. Drawing on a wide range of material culture, textual evidence, statistics and oral accounts, all chapters render the destruction of the everyday life of ordinary people. Events like parties and ceremonies, marriage and kinship, sexual practices, dress codes and even eating and drin...
What is the relationship between development as a globalizing project and the production of cultural specificities in developmental contexts? Utilising an architectural lens, this book illustrates how development instigates interest in the past and in the process, creates heritage. It show multiple uses of the past and their contestation in highly fluid social contexts.
Publisher description
Revolution and tradition are two sides of the same coin in Talinn Grigor's book on Iranian architecture. It starts in 1925 after Reza Pahlavi seized control of the country, but it arcs back to Ancient and Medieval Persia. Not that the government was rejecting modernity. IT instead promoted a reconstruction of the past that would aid efforts to make modern Iran an independent nation with an irrefutable claim to existence and power. Prodigious archival research informs Grigor's account of the excavations and discoveries Iranian authorities used to construct monuments to national heroes like Omar Khayyam, an important mathematician and astronomer of the 11th century as well as the author of the...
Critically deploying the idea of uneven and combined development this book provides a novel non-Eurocentric account of Iran’s experience of modernity and revolution. Recasting Iranian Modernity presents the argument that Eurocentrism can be decisively overcome through a social theory that has international relations at its ontological core. This will enable a conception of history in which there is an intrinsic international dimension to social change that prevents historical repetition. This hitherto under-theorized international dimension is, the book argues, manifest in combined patterns of development, which incorporate both foreign and native forms. It is the tension-prone and unstabl...
Baron Rosen’s Babi/Baha’i archives presents private letters and diplomatic correspondence from the nineteenth century, preserved among the prominent Russian scholar Baron Victor Rosen’s materials in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg branch. The materials cast light on the first studies of the Babi and Baha’i Faiths, new religious phenomena which, in Baron Rosen’s time, were emerging in Persia. Iran has always been a strategic concern of Russia’s geopolitical interests and the traditional importance which has been given to Persia has manifested itself in hundreds of documents and writings collected by the pre-revolutionary Russian diplomats and scholar...