Foad Torshizi

"Loquacious Objects: Contemporary Iranian Art, Autotranslation, and the Readings of Benevolence" examines the ways in which curatorial and critical discourses in contemporary art, at both the so-called global and local levels, frequently undermine Iranian artists' aesthetic interventions by overly politicizing their works.

This essay proposes a simple argument about feminist practices in contemporary Iranian art: that the over-politicization of the Iranian feminist artists’ representational strategies by the liberal discourses of Western metropolitan art criticism has rendered these strategies susceptible to reification and assimilation into the narrative spaces of a market-driven art world. To this pervasive overpoliticization is added the inattention of con- temporary Iranian feminist artists to the ways in which representation itself can be implicated in sustaining gender inequality. From the feminist critiques presented in the works of artists such as Shirin Neshat, Newsha Tavakolian, and Parastou Forouhar, an awareness of representation’s complicity in the perpetuation of discriminatory gender politics is surreptitiously excluded. What I will argue in this essay is predicated on a close reading of a series of shifts in artistic strategies in works by the contemporary Iranian artist Ghazaleh Hedayat (b. 1979), which suggest a withdrawal from figurative representation and a gravitation toward what media theorist Laura U. Marks has termed haptic visuality. This move, along with a series of systematic attempts at foregrounding senses peripheral to sight, I propose, offers a new approach to feminism in contemporary Iranian art, relying primarily on an affective economy that enables a feminist subject as the interlocutor of art history while it simultaneously cultivates an alternative to the much-reified representational feminist art in Iran.

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 sevenminute piece of video-art by Ghazaleh Hedayat entitled Eve’s Apple (2006), the article examines this predicament and the possibilities for the artists to circumvent it. It argues that Hedayat’s 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.