Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam: “Modern Trends in Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Art and the Question of Alternative Modernism”

Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam (Tehran/Berlin) held a lecture on “Modern Trends in Pre-revolutionary Iranian Art and the Question of Alternative Modernism” during the Annual Conference “Global Modernisms: Contiguities, Infrastructures and Aesthetics”, 5 – 7 November 2015, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. The Conference was organized by the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Max Weber Stiftung in cooperation with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and convened by Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices.

Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam: “Modern Trends in Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Art” from ForumundMaxWeber on Vimeo.

During recent years and by the application of post-colonial theories to art history practices, many scholars have sought to formulate different versions of modernism across the globe. Challenging the uniqueness and originality of Western modernism, the debate about the multiplicity of modernist art offers a prism for assessing the arts of non-Western cultures with regards to both their aesthetic and socio-political values. There is, however, a risk of ignoring the spatio-temporal particularity of notions such as ‘progress,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘secularity,’ and ‘academicism’ embedded in Western modernity, and accordingly modernism, in favour of the universalism of modernist art. This lecture focuses on ‘Iranian modernism’ in the timeline between the 1950s and 1970s and the ways in which it has been characterised as both indigenous and universal to reinforce the idea of alternative modernism during recent years. From the avant-gardist movement of Fighting Rooster to the state-supported Saqqa-Khaneh School, Iranian artists adopted and transformed modernist aesthetics to combine the traditional with the modern and contemporary.

Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam. Photo: Luise Illigen/Art Histories

In his lecture, he intends to examine the ways in which modernism was perceived among Iranian artists, intellectuals and cultural administrators during the reign of the second Pahlavi monarch, which was coincided with the intensification of the Cold War. To evaluate the artistic practices of this crucial period in contemporary history of Iran, Moussavi-Aghdam discusses the asymmetrical encounter of Iranian artists with Euro-American modernism through utilising the notion of contemporaneity with regards to the idea of multiple modernisms and global art history today.

Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam is a researcher in the field of modern art history, philosophy of art and science, queer theory and contemporary Iranian art. He received his doctorate degree in Art History and Visual Studies at Manchester University in 2009. He has been teaching at Tehran Art University since 2011. One of his main concerns in both research and teaching is to articulate the new methods of art history and the ways they could be applicable in Iranian context today.

The following interviews and contributions have emerged from the conference:

• Arjun Appadurai: “Indian Popular Cinema in the Making of a Decolonized Modernity”
• Saleem Al-Bahloly in conversation with Nada Shabout: “Freedom in the non-structure”
• Atreyee Gupta in conversation with Ming Tiampo: “It is difficult to change the DNA of a museum”
• Helene Bongers: Tagungsbericht “Global Modernisms: Infrastructures, Contiguities and Aesthetic Practices”
• Saima Akhtar: Conference Review “Global Modernisms: Contiguities, Infrastructures and Aesthetic Practices”
• Hannah Baader and Atreyee Gupta: Welcome and Introduction to “Global Modernism”
• Harsha Ram: “The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, Regional, National, Local”
• Merel van Tilburg: “From ‘Aesthetic Colonialism’ to a Syncretic Aesthetic: Negotiating Universalism, Francité and Negritude in Senegalese and French Modernist Tapestries”