Persia Reframed: Iranian Visions of Modern and Contemporary Art

(Hardback)

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The modern and contemporary art of Iran has often been understood, and positioned by commercial institutions, as decorative or ethnic hence the focus on calligraphy and veiled women. At a scholarly level it has been characterized as a comment on the socio-political context of the country. Viewing Iranian art as neither a commodity, nor an illustration of theory, Fereshteh Daftari approaches the modern art of Iran as a democratic space where pluralism a range of different styles and ideas can thrive. This art historical exploration offers new insights into Iranian art, from the late nineteenth century Qajar period, via the Saqqakhaneh movement of the 1960s and into the contemporary world. In the process the author comments on the concept of modernism in a non-Western environment and the shifting meanings of abstraction. She takes both a specific and a panoramic view of Iranian art to expose new themes such as the subversive appropriation of traditional art, whilst also tackling more perennial issues such as gender. With experience as an international curator, Daftari reviews the representations of Iranian artists outside the country and discusses the varied angles from which she has introduced the art to a Western audience. She explains how in the process she has steered clear of contentious rubrics, valorized contemporary media, and probed the complex relation between the individual and the political.

Reviews

There is no more appropriate time to read a book as erudite and illuminating as Fereshteh Daftaris Persia Reframed This is a work of global importance that initiates conversations and comparisons across countries that share aesthetic projects and cultural preoccupations that are clouded, too often, by the banal politics of blindness and rage. -- Homi K. Bhabha, Professor of Humanities, Harvard University
Fereshteh Daftaris elegantly illustrated Persia Reframed brings a fresh perspective to the development and complexity of modern and contemporary art in Iran over the last seventy years. -- Massumeh Farhad, Chief Curator, Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institute
'A pioneering independent curator in her field, with long experience at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Fereshteh Daftari at last offers a scholarly and critically insightful account of the numerous currents and cross currents of modern and contemporary art in Iran before and after the Islamic Revolution. -- Robert Storr, Professor, Yale University School of Art

Author Bio

Curator and scholar Fereshteh Daftari received her PhD in Art History from Columbia University (1988). During her tenure at the Museum of Modern Art (1988 - 2009), she curated a number of exhibitions including Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking (2006), the first treatment of diasporic artists from the Islamic world by a major institution. Her curatorial work in the field of Iranian modernism includes Between Word and Image at New York Universitys Grey Art Gallery in 2002, and Iran Modern at the Asia Society Museum in New York in 2013. Additionally, with several exhibitions, she focused on contemporary art: Action Now, the first exhibition of contemporary Iranian performance art held at the Cit Internationale des Arts, in Paris (2012); Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish Artists at the University of British Columbias Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver (2013); and Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, the Museum of fine Arts in Houston (2017) and soon at Asia Society, New York (2020).