
What People Do with Images
Aesthetics, Politics and the Production of Iranian Visual Culture in Transnational Circuits
Mazyar Lotfalian(Author)
Sean Kingston Publishing
Published on 30. June 2022
Book
Hardback
192 pages
978-1-912385-42-3 (ISBN)
Description
Rejecting broad-brush definitions of post-revolutionary art, What People Do with Images provides a nuanced account of artistic practice in Iran and its diaspora during the first part of the twenty-first century. Careful attention is paid to the effects of shifts in internal Iranian politics; the influence of US elections, travel bans and sanctions; and global media sensationalism and Islamophobia. Drawing widely on critical theory from both cultural studies and anthropology, Mazyar Lotfalian details an ecosystem for artistic production, covering a range of media, from performance to installations and video art to films.
Museum curators, it is suggested, have mistakenly struggled to fit these works into their traditional-modern-contemporary schema, and political commentators have mistakenly struggled to position them as resistance, opposition or counterculture to Islam or the Islamic Republic. Instead, the author argues that creative artworks neutralize such dichotomies, working around them, and playing a sophisticated game of testing and slowly shifting the boundaries of what is acceptable. They do so in part by neutralizing the boundaries of what is inside and outside the nation-state, travelling across the transnational circuits in which the domestic and diasporic arenas reshape each other. While this book offers the valuable opportunity to gain an understanding of the Iranian art scene, it also has a wider significance in asking more generally how identity politics is mediated by creative acts and images within transnational socio-political spheres.
Museum curators, it is suggested, have mistakenly struggled to fit these works into their traditional-modern-contemporary schema, and political commentators have mistakenly struggled to position them as resistance, opposition or counterculture to Islam or the Islamic Republic. Instead, the author argues that creative artworks neutralize such dichotomies, working around them, and playing a sophisticated game of testing and slowly shifting the boundaries of what is acceptable. They do so in part by neutralizing the boundaries of what is inside and outside the nation-state, travelling across the transnational circuits in which the domestic and diasporic arenas reshape each other. While this book offers the valuable opportunity to gain an understanding of the Iranian art scene, it also has a wider significance in asking more generally how identity politics is mediated by creative acts and images within transnational socio-political spheres.
Reviews / Votes
What People Do With Images is an exciting contribution to the growing anthropological engagement with contemporary art, especially work concerned with transformations in the circulation of culture. Drawing on Ranciere and Mitchell, Lotfalian articulates an original framework for engaging his detailed discussion of the changing world(s) of Iranian art and visual culture, their mediation with (and of) the affairs of the world, arguing for art as 'a meta-political space' of 'dissensus'. His approach to 'the work of art' - in the case of a rapidly growing and changing Iranian visual culture, reframed by digital media is all the more significant and moving given his insights as an anthropologist/participant. Lotfalian brings profound knowledge and sympathy to his engaging account of what contemporary Iranian artists 'do with images', revealing their implication in the national and transnational worlds in which they circulate.Professor Fred R. Myers New York UniversityMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxon
United Kingdom
Target group
Adult education
College/higher education
Illustrations
20 premium colour figures
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
599 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-912385-42-3 (9781912385423)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Dr Mazyar Lotfalian is an anthropologist who has taught at several different universities, including Yale, Pittsburgh and Emerson College. He has also worked as Assistant Director of Persian Studies at the University of California, Irvine and held an inaugural post-doctoral fellowship at the Centre for Religion and Media, New York University.
Content
Chapter 1 Introduction: Worlding with images; Chapter 2 The aesthetics of space: Diaspora vs. Iran, who speaks for whom?; Chapter 3 Curating Islam/Iran; Chapter 4 Autoethnography as documentary in Iranian films and videos; Chapter 5 Aesthetics and politics of contemporary Shi'ite images: A passion play in the transnational circuits; Chapter 6 Aestheticized politics, visual culture and emergent forms of digital practice; Chapter 7 Locating the Iranian underground; Chapter 8 Conclusion; Appendix; Biographies; References; Index.