9 - Reclaiming Cultural Space: The Artist's Performativity versus the State's Expectations in Contemporary Iran

Summary

This essay deals with discourses of identity politics, their association with the State's cultural strategy, and the artist's aesthetic rebellion versus its expectations, while examining visual culture in postrevolutionary Iran. I will explore the ways in which the artists' focal beliefs about social relations and cultural essentialism find expression in their artwork. This study will examine strategies employed by iranian artists and art activists concerned with rethinking notions of embodiment and performativity in tension with the political contexts of the country. I attempt to explore what is emerging and how different subject positions are being transformed or produced in the course of unfolding new dialectics of global culture in contemporary Iran. I should also attempt in this essay to identify what has happened in the course of contemporary Iranian cultural politics during the postrevolutionary period (after 1979), which has made the current power relations between the State's formulation and the artists to reclaim their cultural spaces.

Perhaps most of the sociological theories have agreed on the inert perception of the individual agent against structure and the subject against power. Social subjects, they maintain, internalize the demands of the dominant ideology. However, cultural studies theories, such as those presented by Michel Foucault, Michel De Certeau and John Fiske, put aside the notion of the passive subject, considering it to have an active role in countering the dominant ideology. This group emphasizes the notion of resistance against the ideological representation of power. This essay agrees with this latter idea.