No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Troubling Naturalism: Shirana Shahbazi's The Curve
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Abstract
This article performs a reading of Shirana Shahbazi's photo-based mural The Curve (2007), an artwork that interrogates the production of knowledge based on various ideas of truth in representation. The Curve meditates on knowledge production in relation to three sites: contemporary documentary photography, the history of northern European still-life painting, and the murals of religious leaders and martyrs that adorn Tehran. The effect of these multiple citations is the creation of an artwork that cannot be comfortably contextualized either in Western art history or in contemporary Iranian visual culture. The Curve thereby anticipates and attempts to block its own assimilation into art historical and critical discourses that reduce the work of Iranian artists to static reflections of a particular geographical and political reality. The artwork thus demands a consideration of the ways in which context, as a term in contemporary global art history, is ideologically constructed within a certain network of power relationships.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2012
Footnotes
The author thanks Cathy Asher, in whose seminar work on this essay began. This research was supported by a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
References
1 Mitter, Partha, “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” The Art Bulletin, 90, no. 4 (December 2008): 532CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Bhabha, Homi, “Draw the Curtain,” in Iranian Photography Now, ed. Issa, Rose (Ostfildern, 2008), 16Google Scholar.
3 Sholis, Brian, “Shirana Shahbazi at the Swiss Institute,” Artforum (online) (September 27, 2007)Google Scholar.
4 Subotnick in Bush, Kate and Jetzer, Gianni, eds., Shirana Shahbazi: Meanwhile (New York and London, 2007), 61Google Scholar.
5 Lange, Christy, “I Am an Image,” Frieze, no. 113 (March 2008): 122Google Scholar.
6 As quoted in Azimi, Negar et al., Shirana Shahbazi: Accept the Expected (Geneva and Cologne, 2005), 97Google Scholar.
7 Tirdad Zolghadr in Azimi et al., Shirana Shahbazi, 18.
8 Katya García-Antón in Azimi et al., Shirana Shahbazi, 93.
9 Tim Teeman, “The Epic in the Everyday,” Times Online, 4 February 2006.
10 Grootenboer, Hanneke, The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting (Chicago, 2005), 10Google Scholar.
11 Grootenboer, The Rhetoric of Perspective, 13.
12 Grootenboer, The Rhetoric of Perspective, 17.
13 García-Antón in Azimi, Shirana Shahbazi, 93.
14 Mottahedeh, Negar, “‘Life Is Color!’ Toward a Transnational Feminist Analysis of Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Gabbeh,” Signs, 30, no. 1 (2004): 1404CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Mottahedeh, “‘Life Is Color!’,” 1413–14.
16 I am thinking here specifically of the nineteenth-century French realist novel, and various forms of realist filmmaking, ranging from Italian neorealism of the 1940s and 1950s to the contemporary realism of filmmakers such as Bruno Dumont and the Dardenne brothers.
17 As quoted in Teeman, “The Epic in the Everyday.”
18 This concept Mottahedeh takes from Rey Chow. See Mottahedeh, “‘Life is Color!’,” 1405.
19 Lydia Liu, in The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA, 2006), develops the concept of the super-sign, which is not a word but a heterogeneous cultural signifying chain (34). In the super-sign, the lack of commensurability between languages being translated into each other becomes disguised. The effect is to conceal the way that apparently neutral terms are in fact the result of power-laden histories of colonial encounter. Liu traces the development of the super-sign yi/barbarian in Chinese–British imperial and trade relations. She demonstrates how the British objection to this term as used to designate foreigners, an objection which was cemented through continual practices of selective translation and expressed as a desire for “equality” in imperial relations, was in fact motivated by an imperialistic desire to dominate China, a desire of which the Chinese were fully aware. In relation to art by Middle Eastern or diasporic Middle Eastern artists, the veil is a super-sign in that it is a collection of disagreements, misinterpretations and compromises made across a terrain of unequal power relations that have their roots in colonialism. In many contemporary art practices, the veil as super-sign functions to support the realism-effect which Mottahedeh criticizes, through being interpreted by audiences as a totalizing sign of the reality of life in Iran and other Muslim countries.
20 Mottahedeh, “‘Life is Color!’,” 1421.
21 Grootenboer (The Rhetoric of Perspective, 30–31) makes this argument about the muted colors of breakfast still lifes in the first half of the seventeenth century.
22 Smyth, Cherry, “Shirana Shahbazi”, Art Monthly, 3, no. 6 (2006): 294–95Google Scholar.
23 As quoted in Azimi, Shirana Shahbazi, 97.
24 Issa, Rose, Pakbaz, Ruyin and Shayegan, Daryush present reproductions of these images in Iranian Contemporary Art (London, 2001), 23–25Google Scholar.
26 Shahbazi in Issa, Iranian Photography Now, 192.
25 Issa, Iranian Photography Now, 13. Note that the term “ethnic marketing” was coined by Tirdad Zolghadr for the title of a 2004 exhibition at Kunsthalle Geneva.
27 Abbott, Brett, Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography Since the Sixties (Los Angeles, 2010), 9Google Scholar.