“What does contemporaneity signify for Iranian artists, and how have they drawn inspiration from contemporary life?”
Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives, Second Edition (Saqi Books, 2025). Image courtesy Hamid Keshmirshekan and Jadaliyya.by Hamid Keshmirshekan, Jadaliyya
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Hamid Keshmirshekan (HK): Having worked for decades on the modern and contemporary art of Iran—and the wider Middle East and North Africa (MENA)—and its relationship to discursive movements and socio-political developments, I have come to see that Euro-American paradigms cannot be uncritically applied to the study of Iranian art as though these frameworks possess universal validity. These analyses often fail to account for the local discursive contexts of artistic production, their cultural implications, and their integration into local historical narratives. This has produced unbalanced historiographies and art-historical sources that consign non-Western art to the periphery. This book emerges from that problem and continues my broader scholarship on the “decolonization” of art history, with a particular focus on the so-called Global South and the MENA region in particular. Here, I aim to challenge the authority of a single, dominant art-historical discourse and to expose how different subjectivities are reproduced within particular narratives. My objective is to establish ways of defining art-historical and temporal perception in the context of Iran.
While I draw on certain “global” art-historical paradigms, including critical theory and methodological models, much of the book’s content is grounded in primary sources, many in Persian, as well as my own field observations and interviews with artists, curators, critics, and cultural activists. Teaching the theory and history of art of Iran and the MENA region in universities in both the United Kingdom and Iran has allowed me to test and refine these arguments in dialogue with students and colleagues across contemporary art history, theory, and Islamic art and material culture. My sustained engagement with Iran’s contemporary art scene over the past few decades has also given me access to insider perspectives, prevailing concerns within the artistic community, and the ways these are reflected in artistic strategies. Together, these experiences have shaped the critical lens through which this book examines its subject.
The first edition appeared in 2013, at a time when no comprehensive study of this scope existed, despite the rapid growth of research on modern and contemporary art of the MENA region. In many respects, it entered uncharted territory, aiming to fill a significant gap in scholarship. Since then, profound changes have occurred in both the Iranian art scene and the broader social and political context, making a second edition necessary. This edition takes stock of the major transformations of the past decade, both historically and intellectually. Twelve years on, I also used the opportunity to reflect on the book’s methodological, historical, and structural dimensions and to consider how the study of contemporary art and society might be further developed. The revisions vary across chapters: some have been substantially reworked, others updated with new material, and sections where the original content remained valid have been lightly revised. A new introduction sets out these reflections and brings the work up to date.