“Other Modernities in Iran” - Artistic practices beyond secularity

The common narrative in Iranian art historiography has been predominately modeled after Western modes of knowledge production. It created linear narratives of stylistic development and artistic progress. Such a formalist canon, however, largely detaches Iranian modernist production from its socio-political context of origin and reduces the art works to mere aesthetic experiments with Western modernity.

A theoretical framework rooted in postcolonial critique helps deconstruct imperial notions of modernity and has the potential to decolonize Iranian modernist art history.

The institutionalized discourse of modernist art appropriated and materialized artistic expression as visual evidence of the state’s successful westernization and secularization. However, the concept of secularism is closely tied to Western modernity and denotes an assumed neutral separation between religion and politics. This poses the question of secularity’s applicability to non-Western societies. In most cases, colonialism and imperialism formed the relationship between secular and religious realms in non-Western countries. This is also the case for Iran, where modernist Iranian art exemplifies the limits of Eurocentric concepts of secularity and modernity. Looking at artistic practices shows that Iran’s modernist art was far more than mere experiments with modern forms. The artists’ incorporation of Islamic iconography question general assumptions about modernism's inherent characteristics, such as its secularity and status as a radical break with the past. This demonstrates that Iranian modernist art was not simply a local implementation of universal modernist practices but a highly diverse field of cultural production that reflected upon questions of modernity and modernization as practiced in Iran.