Interview by Dr. Elaine Coburn
Since 2009, Professor Moridi, your scholarship has highlighted art production in Iran and the Middle East, including painting, cinema, poetry and literature. From your earliest writing, you and your co-authors have been especially concerned with the role of women and the ways that, as you describe, women resist expected ideas about how they will be depicted.[1] At the same time, you have written that women artists and their contributions to the fine arts, in particular, have largely been neglected in scholarly literature.[2] Can you describe women’s role in the arts in Iran and how they have been active as artists?
Women have been ignored in the history of modern Iranian art for years, while women were active in the modern art movement in the 1940s to 1960. Historically, the field of art production was masculine; however, the subject of many men’s artwork were women. Also, representation of women in the works of Iranian modernist artists were traditional. Jalil Ziapour, a pioneer and avant-garde artist in the first wave of modernist artists of the 1940s, painted traditional images of Iranian ethnic women in Cubist style. The artwork of the second wave of modern Iranian artists in the 1960s, saw women still being depicted traditionally.
After the revolution of 1978, modern Iranian women were more marginalized and their representation in the media became more traditional and religious than in the past. In the male sphere, during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the heroes were all men and the paintings depicted men, but after the war and from the 1990s, this process was revised. Artists gradually depicted a different identity of women, and instead of traditional, imaginary, symbolic, and iconic images, artists depicted the reality of being a woman.
Gradually, more women appeared and, in this decade, the number of women artists increased significantly. Art universities and art institutes proliferated, and women art graduates became more active as artists, gallerists, and art journalists. For women, studying art was not only about creating works of art but was also like searching for a new identity.
The visual language of this new generation was self-portrait. Self-portrait became the visual paradigm of women’s art. Women showed their true selves with self-portraits. Women’s image of themselves was different from men’s image of women.
In the 2010s, with the development of the Internet, it became possible for women artist to be visible. Actually, the emergence of the Internet and virtual space gave marginalized and excluded discourses the opportunity to become visible. Women artists were able to show their work in virtual space regardless of the restrictions of government censorship and male visual culture. This was a revolution in the representation of women in the visual culture of Iran.
“For women, studying art was not only about creating works of art but was also like searching for a new identity.”
Mohammad Reza Moridi
He has studied the relationship between art and society in the Middle East region, and as a visiting researcher at the Orient-Institute Beirut (OIB), he has researched “discourse of contemporary Islamic art” and the position of Women artists of the Middle East in this discourse.
In an article titled “Neo-Orientalism in the Contemporary Art of Middle Eastern Women”, he discussed how Women artists of the Muslim and Middle Eastern societies faced the image stereotypes of “being a woman”, “being Muslim” and “Middle Eastern”.
As a (virtual) visiting scholar at CFR, he wants to discuss the experience of women artists in Iran and pursue the question: How do women’s artistic experiences (especially in contemporary Iranian painting) act as a field of resistance against masculine subjectivity? He will explain how women artists challenge the public politics of gender in Iran with their artworks.
Read more about Mohammad Reza Moridi
Your scholarship has examined women as objects of the male artists’ gaze, women as artists, and women as publics, whose gender and social location influence their understanding and interpretation of artworks.[3] If women are clearly important to the art world in Iran and the Middle East more broadly, the word “feminism” appears less frequently in your writing. Could you explain the relationship of women artists to feminisms? What visual strategies do women use to express their ideas?
Feminist awareness has increased in Iran. Now, not only women artists create artworks with feminist themes, but men painters also depict different narratives and images of women. But, the rethinking of women’s identity is absent in the political and formal discourse of power. Political institutions consider feminist attitudes as westernization and consider it a threat to the foundation of culture. Although feminist art has been ignored by government festivals and formal art events, it has been developed in the galleries and in the field of Iranian art.
Women artists with feminist awareness attempt to resist the subjectification of women, and use new visual strategies to create a gap in the reproduction of masculine dominated culture. These visual strategies act not only as artworks in the art world, but also as political action in the public space.
Women have turned the body into the main subject for political and social rebellion. Their rebellion is against obedient bodies (under the rule of religion), disciplined bodies (under the rule of politics) and sexual bodies (under the rule of male gender). Women try to free their bodies. Now the body of Iranian women artists has become rebellious.
The semiotic analysis of artworks shows that instead of stereotypical, naturalistic, lyrical, mythological, and decorative representation of women, women are looking for new narratives of women’s identity. The image of women in the artworks of women artists, such as Shohreh Mehran, Mitra Samadi, Elahe Heidari, and Aria Eghbal, represents a suspended, torn, restless, and inflammatory world; the image of the lonely, isolated, and limited world, in the work of Shirin Ghandchi; women on the verge of protest, in the work of Simin Keramati; and women trapped in household chores, in the works of Zeynab Movahed.
Nikoo Tarkhani has depicted her body on a painting of flowers and birds in the collection, There is a charge for the eyeing of my scars (2012). Beautiful birds from the Iranian style of historical painting inflict wounds on the woman’s body. Sparrows and nightingales, as symbols of love and poetry, pluck Tarkhani’s body, unearthing her vessels and leaving her in a still agony. The artist’s body is passive and unable, a victim in the bed of tradition, which is gradually falling into pieces.
“Women have turned the body into the main subject for political and social rebellion. The grotesque body challenges all conventional and expected images of femininity by ridiculing ugliness and making fun of fears.”
Mohammad Reza Moridi
Women’s self-portraits are another visual evidence of the rethinking of women’s identity in Iran. The grotesque body of women in self-portraits, with open mouths and swollen sexual organs, body secretions and disfigured and fragmented forms is another image of women that the rules of art history and the ritual system of museums do not match. These self-portraits show the status of women in today’s society as a social act. Such as Soha Kabiri’s disfigured self-portrait, the fragmented face in Pegah Salimi’s self-portrait, the swollen head in Mahsa Karimi’s self-portrait and the deformed body in Pooneh Oshidari’s self-portrait. The grotesque body challenges all conventional and expected images of femininity by ridiculing ugliness and making fun of fears.
Your writings have considered women artists in Iran, but also in places like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which you argue are transcultural spaces: zones of contact among Persian and Arab artists that are creating complex, multicultural spaces of expression.[4] How have women artists played a role not only in Iran but across the Middle East, creating aesthetic history that is, you argue, a statement against dominant masculine cultures and government ideologies?
The artwork of women artists are both in conflict with the public discourse of gender and gender politics in the Middle East, which suppresses them, and in conflict with the history of art, which also marginalizes them. Therefore, the first step to discuss feminist art in the Middle East is to question the history of Middle East art. One should ask—like Linda Nochlin does in her 1971 book of the same title—”Why have there been no great women artists?” The institutional obstacles that prevent women from succeeding in the arts should be examined.
The history of women’s art in the arts of the Middle East is not only an aesthetic history, but also a history of the struggle of discourses of femininity with the discourses of the dominant traditional culture and ideological governments. As Linda Nochlin argues, feminist art history should be viewed as an intellectual clarification and as a political project (Harris, 2001: 99). In explaining her view of feminist art history, Nochlin says: ‘I do not conceive of a feminist art history as a way of simply adding a token list of women painters and sculptors to art history’ (Nochlin, 1998: xii).
Nochlin warns that feminists must not attempt simply to ‘rehabilitate’ or ‘rediscover’ examples of ‘insufficiently appreciated women artists’ that traditional –patriarchal – art history has chosen simply to ignore (1998:147). Rather, their main task is to expose the ideological side of the culture of domination. Therefore, the history of feminist art goes beyond the history of fine arts and narrates the cultural history of domination. If we look at feminist art in the Middle East from this point of view, we find that women’s art is like a struggle.
“We need a specific theoretical approach to discuss women’s art in the Middle East. An approach that is not only aesthetic but also political and social.”
Mohammad Reza Moridi
For women in the Middle East, art is a field of resistance against masculine subjectivity, and, in Foucault’s words, it is a war against the subjectivation of woman. Women painters attempt to deconstruct the visual form which men have constructed about women. They resist subjectivation, and use new visual strategies, and in so doing create gaps in the reproduction of masculine dominant culture.
The visual regime of the representation of women in masculine culture and in the religious and ideological governments of the Middle East provides frameworks and narratives that direct people’s gaze towards stereotypes of femininity. But women’s art as counter public spheres are considered oppositional communities that are in contrast with the homogenizing logic of ideological government and traditional cultures, in other words, women have created a competing discourse, a parallel discourse, or a counter-discourse that can show their needs, desires, and identity.
We need a specific theoretical approach to discuss women’s art in the Middle East. An approach that is not only aesthetic but also political and social. In my view, the history of Middle East women’s art is currently unwritten. This movement needs theorizing and historiography to be visible. At least for me, this research path is a priority.
Endnotes
[1]. Moridi, M. and Taghizadegan, k (2009). Women’s Painting and Feminine Painting, Journal of Women in development, Tehran University, vol.2, No.3. Access in: https://jwdp.ut.ac.ir/article_28290.html?lang=en
[2]. Alimadadi, M. and Moridi, Mohammad Reza (2017). The absent history of Iranian women painters, Sociological Journal of Art and Literature, V. 9, N. 17, Access in: https://jsal.ut.ac.ir/article_64573_en.html
[3]. Ravadrad, A. and Moridi, MR. and Taghizadegan, k (2010). Analysing Women’s Representation In Contemporary Iranian Painting, Journal of Women in development, Tehran University, vol.8, No.1. Access in: https://jwdp.ut.ac.ir/article_20446.html?lang=en
[4]. Moridi, M.R (2020). Art in contact zone: The trans-regional cultural policy making in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar and the formation of new artistic movements, Access in: https://qspace.qu.edu.qa/handle/10576/17037
References:
Harris, Jonathan. 2001. The New Art History: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.
Nochlin, Linda. 1998. Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays. London: Thames and Hudson.