PhD | Unfinished Chapters: Exploring Poetic Reorientations of Iranian Modern and Contemporary art – Kasper Tromp

PhD | Unfinished Chapters: Exploring Poetic Reorientations of Iranian Modern and Contemporary art – Kasper Tromp
PhD Candidate: Kasper Tromp
Supervisors: Sonia de Laforcade, Matthew Mullane, Scott Nethersole
Institution: Radboud University, Nijmegen

Despite the relative absence of critical art-historical writing in Iranian academia, there exists a vibrant contemporary art scene in Iran in which artists, curators and critics produce a variety of ‘informal’ art discourses. A recurring subject in such writings is the human soul, understood as a subjective prism through which the world is perceived, interpreted and reconstituted in creative practices. While several authors have alluded to a return of spirituality in Iranian art since the 1960s (i.e. Saqqakhaneh, neo-traditionalism), most studies emphasize ‘outer’ formal relationships between modern and traditional art, rather than ‘inner’ subjective engagements of artists with spiritual thought. My PhD project examines how Iranian artists interact with ideas of Islamic mysticism and spirituality in their creative processes, and how these inspire alternative genealogies of the modern and contemporary, beyond Iranian state traditionalism and the tradition-modernity dichotomy. The source material that artists most frequently turn to is mystical poetry, ascribing to their interactions with poems a transformative force. As such, my project will conceptualize the agency of these texts which, for the artists, are ‘living’ presences in the contemporary world rather than passive objects of medieval heritage. Such direct performative interactions between artists and texts help explore the multiple disjunctive origins and non-linear progression of Iranian modernities, and challenge the prevalent idea that Islamic art did not historically progress into the modern and contemporary age.