¹ Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York, 1978)Google Scholar.

² Mitchell, Timothy, “Orientalism and Exhibitionary Order,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (London and New York, 1998), 495–518Google Scholar. First published in 1989 in Comparative Studies in Society and History 9 (CSSH) 31 (Cambridge).

³ Canclini, Néstor García, “Remaking Passports: Visual Thought in the Debate on Multiculturalism,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (London and New York, 1998), 180–89Google Scholar.

⁴ I find 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 initiatives 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., Said's Orientalism and Mitchell's “Orientalism and Exhibitionary 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 literature 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 Abbaspour, Mitra Monir, “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, Riverside, 2001)Google Scholar.

⁷ In a review published in the New York Times in June 2009, Randy Kennedy quotes Sam Bardouil, the curator of Chelsea Art Museum's show Iran Inside Out, as he calls Vahid Sharifian “the Jeff Koons of Iran.” See Randy Kennedy, “In Chelsea, Art Intersects With Reality of Iranian Conflict,” 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).

¹¹ Cocks, “Are We Colonializing Middle Eastern Art?”

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).

¹² Sebastian López's statement is quoted in Canclini, “Remaking Passports,” 187.

¹³ Canclini, “Remaking Passports.”

¹⁴ Derrida, Jacques, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, translated by Mensah, Patrick (Stanford, CA, 1996), 40Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 40–41.

¹⁶ Roffe, Jonathan, “Translation,” in Understanding Derrida, ed. Raynolds, Jack and Roffe, Jonathan (London and New York, 2004), 105Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Derrida, Jacques, Limited Inc, edited by Graff, Gerald, translated by Mehlman, Jeffery and Weber, Samuel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 133Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Liu, Lydia, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 13Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Liu, The Clash of Empires, 32–34.

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 Dabashi's critique of Scott McDonald's interview with Shirin Neshat in “Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography,” in Shirin Neshat: la Última Palabra, ed. Hamid Dabashi, Shirin Neshat and Octavio Zaya (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2005), 61.

²¹ To name only a few examples look at 6 Video Arts (2004–5) by Mania Akbari, photograph series The Loss of Our Identity by Sadegh Tirafkan, or Shahram Entekhabi's 72 Virgins (2009). All three artists have uncritically celebrated orientalized and sexualized renditions of Iranian women and have solidified them in their own works. Or see the sudden change in Fereidoon Omidi's oeuvre from abstract painting to works that are overcrowded with Persian calligraphy, after the success of Iranian calligraphy-painters, such as Mohammad Ehsai, at Christie's in Dubai in February 2006.

²² Dabashi, “Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography,” 59.

²⁵ Dabashi, “Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography,” 59 and 61 (English translation is printed only on odd pages).

²³ Dabashi, “Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography,” 31–85.

²⁴ Given Neshat's 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.”

²⁶ Iranian Students News Agency, “ISNA—06-09-2009—88/3/19—1353513.” ISNA—Iranian Students' News Agency, http://isna.ir/ISNA/NewsView.aspx?ID=News-1353513.

²⁷ Dabashi, “Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography,” 59.

²⁸ Iran: Inside Out. Documentary Video, digital format (New York, 2009), http://chelseaartmuseum.org/exhibits/2009/iraninsideout/index.html (emphases added).

²⁹ To name just a couple of prominent artists who endure the same reductive readings, the Colombian-born sculptor Doris Salcedo and Chéri Samba, from Congo, have both been rarely interpreted beyond the confinements caused by their “different” ethnic background.

³⁰ Barbad Golshiri, “For They Know What They Do Know,” e-flux Journal, no. 8 (2009), http://www.e- flux.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 hegemony and submit to it in the name of subversion” (Golshiri, “For They Know What They Do Know”).

³¹ Golshiri, “For They Know What They Do Know.”

³² Hamid Keshmirshekan, “The Question of Identity vis-à-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 Deleuze, Gilles, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Joughin, Martin (New York, 1995), 180Google Scholar.

³⁴ Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 45Google Scholar.

³⁵ Kristeva, Julia, Melanie Klein, trans. Guberman, Ross (New York, 2001), 154–55Google Scholar.

³⁶ Cixous, Hélène, “The Primitive Meal,” in French Feminists on Religion: A Reader, ed. Joy, Morny, O'Grady, Kathleen and Poxon, Judith L. (New York and London, 2002), 222–23Google Scholar.

³⁷ Cixous, “The Primitive Meal”.

³⁸ Cixous, “The Primitive Meal,” Editors' Introduction.

³⁹ Ghazaleh Hedayat's 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 figural abstraction that I have discussed in this paper.

⁴⁰ Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York and London, 1993), 26Google Scholar.

⁴¹ For a prominent example of the criticism Phelan faced, see Schneider, Rebecca, “Archives: Performance Remains,” Performance Research, 6, no. 2 (2000), 100–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² For example look at Robert Storr's 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, “Let's look at abstraction, and let's 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 don't look political! And as we know it's all about looking natural, it's all about being the normative aspect of whatever segment of culture we're dealing with, of life. That's where someone like Frankenthaler is the most politically successful 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): 24–32.

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 conversations are as follows: Ghazaleh Hedayat in three interviews with Foad Torshizi (Tehran, 29 June 2009; Tehran, 18 July 2009; Minneapolis-Tehran, 16 June 2010).

⁴⁴ Abu-Lughod, Lila, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist, 17, no. 1 (February 1990): 54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.