Ryan Roach

Curatorial Activism: The Critical Potential of Assemblage, Organization, and Presentation

Contemporary Iran exists in a paradoxical state filled with government censorship and negotiated acts of civil disobedience. These acts usually occupy a third underground space between public spaces and privately owned interiors focusing on anonymity and impermanence. This give and take has become even more apparent after the unjust killing of 16-year-old Mahsa Amini by Iran’s morality police. Amini was killed for not complying with the government’s arbitrary yet ruthless subjugation of female bodily presentation in public. Since the murder, Iranian youth have bravely taken to the streets, protesting the failure of the Iranian revolution to grant its citizens autonomy. 

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Art has been at the forefront of the current Woman, Life, Freedom movement and every preceding social movement in the country since the late twentieth century. Art created during these movements “has a radical and rebellious zeal … [these are] brave works with layered meanings” (Karimi, “The Many Shades of Iran’s Protest Art” 2). According to Karimi, curators in Iran, along with the artists they partner, use critical spatial practices to disrupt the state-sanctioned control of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG). Art goes underground via critical spatial practices, away from official spaces to make commentaries about “taboo” topics often ignored or punished by the government (“Many Shades” 5). Artists and curators employ subversive strategies to narrowly skirt government censorship, imprisonment, or even death. Given these potential consequences, curators have taken on the mantle of curatorial activism in a prefigurative context to imagine a future world rooted in choice, building on present action to create a new reality. Maura Reilly defines curatorial activism as “the practice of organizing art exhibitions with the principle aim of ensuring that certain constituencies of artists are no longer ghettoized or excluded from the master narratives of art. It is a practice that commits itself to counter-hegemonic initiatives that give voice to those who have been historically silenced or omitted altogether” (1). In Iran, curatorial activism uses critical spatial practices to disrupt naturalized norms. Curators question the “master narrative of art” that centers on the government’s will. These “counter-hegemonic initiatives” investigate the misuse of religion to silence those who criticize or are abused by the ruling regime. Given the regime’s theocratic suppression of dissent, curatorial activism is a transgressive strategy used by art agents to synthesize underground art and spaces, negotiating and subverting the power structures that uphold hegemonic dominance. 

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Alternative art in Iran is a complex field comprising the underground - work whose practitioners do not seek and often do not receive the express permission of the MCIG. In its resistance to the status quo, it represents vast experiential dimensions. Representing different political, economic, and gendered experiences, it subverts the government’s effort to create a singular, homogenized population. At the art’s inception, it questions the government’s inability to address the needs of its citizens, especially those who do not fit within the standardized norm. Contemporary Iranian protest art, like Shirin Neshat’s Women of Allah series (1993-1997) or the various works of anonymous graffiti around Tehran, remains in ebb and flow as art agents continually negotiate with the MCIG, questioning who controls public space and the detrimental effects of seeking to commodify the right to access space. 

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The presentation of Iranian alternative art invades the everyday, making seemingly natural Islamic values promoted by the Iranian state strange. Because alternative art questions social standards like the policing of the female body, the proliferation of economic disparity, and the devaluing of the voice of youth, art agents are subject to state-sanctioned retaliatory violence. Yet, the status of censorship is quite muddy. Because the regulations are generalized decisions become situational. Along with the arbitrariness of censorship, government systems seem overwhelmed by the expansiveness of underground networks as artists from different genres and mediums respond to one another. 

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For example, Houman Mortazavi’s Untitled, from the artist’s Zirtakhti collection (2010) is a watercolor painting of a seemingly innocuous flower composed of various shades of red. Yet, upon further examination, the work seems to open up right before the viewer’s eyes, revealing itself to be simultaneously a flower in bloom and a representation of the vulva. There is no longer a clear-cut division between the two. The Zirtakhti, or “under the bed,” collection must be kept underground, hidden from public life to avoid state-sanctioned consequences. Yet it is visible enough to convey its message to its targeted audience. The sexual provocation of Mortazavi’s Untitled classifies it as defiant art precisely because it seeks to acknowledge a lived experience that has historically been oppressed throughout the regime’s reign. As the work enters the sphere of feminism and recognizes the right for women to exist, the viewer begins to experience feelings of disquiet, injustice, and utter rage. Mortazavi’s Untitled is not just some innocent flower but, rather, a loaded symbol representing the subjugation of women as the Islamic Republic of Iran has brutally policed their bodies. Anger begins to take on a political dimension in resisting this gendered control, allowing all genders and gendered expressions the autonomy to exist freely. The constant shift from flower to reproductive organ is just one example of how negotiation is used in the creation of underground art and its presentation in space. The work is not overtly sexual, yet there are recognizable signs for the audience to grasp and for the MCIG to target.

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Underground curatorial agents will frequently alter space in unconventional locations such as homes, parking lots, or neighborhood parks. Curators imbue these temporarily transformed areas with nonviolent acts of civil disobedience. Rather than focusing on lived space, curators often operate on physical space, the more dematerialized forces that govern citizens' spatial relations to themselves and each other. Physical or abstract space is created by powerful stakeholders, usually state agencies or private urban planners (Karimi, Alternative Iran 24). Throughout Alternative Iran, Karimi explores how “‘abstract space’ is challenged not just by artists but by architects and curators who seek to undo ‘abstraction’ and ‘alienation’ through design solutions, proposing alternative modes of living, granting agency to the users of the space, and intervening within the existing spaces of the Islamic Republic (Alternative Iran 24). Curators wrestle control of physical space back from these stakeholders through critical spatial practices.

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Critical spatial practices implement a prefigurative desire for social equality into concrete actions. Invented by Jane Rendell, critical spatial practices intersect theoretical ideas and discursive practices.  Artists in Iran use actions such as “escaping, curating, choreographing, improvising, planning (temporally), reconfiguring (spatially), and negotiating (verbally)” (Karimi, Alternative Iran 36) to challenge how power both constructs and alters space. At its core, critical spatial practices integrate the hidden structures that govern access and use of space.

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Understanding the critical spatial practice of curation as a purposeful act intended to expose and resist underlying, inequitable power structures, one can explore “alternative modes of living, granting agency to the users of the space, and intervening within the existing spaces of the Islamic Republic” (Karimi, Alternative Iran 24). The following two case studies, Amin Ansari’s Greens’ Art project and Elham Puriya Mehr’s curation of Club 29, demonstrate how curating can make knowledge and space more accessible, resisting the process of normalization and acknowledging diverse experiences. 

Amin Ansari runs the Greens’ Art project which collects the digital material made in Iran during 2009-11. The project explores the role digital media played in the success of the Green Movement, a two-year-long response to incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's purported victory over Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. Suspicion that the results of the election were false sparked anti-government grassroots protests, in which people used social media to share information through different works of naïve art. Art-making became democratized, as the everyday person created artistic works to covertly communicate information or to share their thoughts on the movement, expanding the movement’s reach on social media platforms.

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The Greens’ Art project is a curatorial effort that collects and contextualizes. By bringing the digital creations of the Green Movement, people who use the project can better understand how ever-evolving digital communication networks affect artistic production. Digital media played a crucial role in the proliferation of the Green Movement due to the restrictions placed on national television and radio (Ansari 1). The output of artistic production concerning the movement during the 2009-2011 period “seems all the more remarkable when we compare it to the realities of the regulated mass media and the government’s ideological control of online information channels” (Ansari 1).

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Despite the regime’s strict control of national television and radio and fervent attempts at regulating cyber-information, the Greens’ Art project immortalizes the ephemeral aspect of underground protest art during this period. Even if the government succeeded in restricting Irians’ access to this art, curatorial efforts like Greens’ Art provide a space for this slice of Iranian history to exist, separate from governmental agencies seeking to sanitize the brutality of history. The Greens’ Art project’s goal is rooted in the future. By providing a space for future scholars to access material made during the Green Movement, it affirms the power of artistic production and demonstrates how advanced technologies can circumvent government suppression. 

Another curatorial project which has less to do with the potential of the digital space than with access to physical space is Elham Puriya Mehr’s Club 29. At the root of Club 29 is separating public spaces from public spheres. In the view of philosophers Farabi and Suhrawardi, public space should be communal, with one advantage being that it allows for more interaction between various members of society. However, in the context of Iran, the notion of the individual is eradicated because those who dissent are seen as resisting the common good and are violently punished for using their activism to question notions of power (Mehr 2).

Mehr argues against curating in public space, because it is now controlled to reinforce power dynamics like separate gendered spaces. Her solution to public inaccessibility is “that planning strategies have the potential to change the purpose of spaces … shifting the focus from recapturing public spaces into building temporary public spheres” (3). To resist the common networks of hegemony and monetary value, Mehr curated Club 29 as a series of performances that prioritized the role of the participants in the construction of art. It was a temporary combination of exhibition space with art production. Throughout the project, people used storytelling to build community. Framing the act of storytelling in public as a form of activism, Club 29 privileged the experiences of people, giving power back to the individual. At the heart of the public sphere is the act of storytelling. Hannah Arendt theorized that storytelling is the only viable form of political action because it invites every member of a society to participate in communicating their experiences (Mehr 3). It informs people about how others live. It forces public space from the grip of power into the hands of the everyday person.

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What stood out most in “Curatorial Activism in Iran” was Mehr’s staunch desire for temporality and apoliticism. Club 29 was able to resist governmental normalization and maintain its curatorial agency by remaining apolitical. Rather than being a cathartic experience where participants were meant to discuss the injustices they have suffered at the ruling regime, Club 29 was a place to share stories and exchange ideas. As Mehr notes, in some situations, “not acting is a stronger gesture than acting, and that not being political may be political” (4). 

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Club 29’s relation to the underground and alternative space is in its ephemerality. By existing in unexpected public spheres like the everyday, curatorial projects like Club 29 can adapt to Iran’s rapidly changing political climate. As curators appropriate space, they resist controlling space to make it strange as it works with other forms of activism. By integrating the controlling of space to reveal underlying power systems, Club 29 seeks to negate a hierarchical group structure to create a more creative and participatory community. Club 29 operated in a space of loose covertness, unconventional sites that are not entirely in the public eye, yet also not completely hidden. Art conducted in harder-to-reach places like the two-story abandoned space that housed Club 29 has an aura of spontaneity, adding to its ephemerality. The space’s loose covertness helped the project separate itself from the regime’s ideological control. Mehr invades the everyday of lived space to let people in and to give them a voice.  

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Curatorial activism in Iran is an active practice that wrestles control back from the hands of the few into the many by employing subversive strategies intended to make knowledge and space more accessible and ultimately autonomous. Strangeness is central to activist curatorial efforts concerned with resisting homogenizing normalcy. By placing the strange in everyday events, activists reinvigorate public consciousness. They illuminate the various ways power operates in societies of control to disenfranchise the marginalized.