Barbara Miller Lane Lecture with Pamela Karimi

Join us for a presentation by Architect and Architectural Historian Pamela Karimi on "Alternative Iran: Contemporary Art and Critical Spatial Practice."

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Drawing on the spatial and temporal turns that have animated Iranian art scenes since the late 1980s, this presentation illuminates the economic, social, intellectual, and visceral forces that have driven Iran’s creative class toward increasingly original forms of site-oriented and durational artmaking. Focused on artistic processes and experiential situations, these remarkable projects artfully offset ideological demands and regulatory regimes, even when they are fully sanctioned by the state. While exceptionally influential on the ground, the art forms are often ephemeral, and not meant for permanent display in galleries or museums. Flouting the pressures of the art market, they play out instead in ad hoc locations, pop-up venues, dilapidated structures, buildings under construction, leftover urban spaces, private homes, non-commercial galleries, and showrooms with “trusted” audiences. Outside Iran these grassroot artistic activities are frequently perceived as zirzamini (literally, of the underground). Art experts inside Iran, however, admit that even if there is an “underground” quality to any initiative outside the direct purview of the government, nothing can be completely subterranean or covert. Rather than “underground,” then, this lecture capitalizes on the term “alternative” to present an enthralling inquiry into the places where artistic activities intersect with site, space, and architecture, or what is commonly referred to as critical spatial practice. The lecture further discloses the seemingly anomalous instances when the state and other powerful agents have appropriated the same spatial techniques of loose covertness to bring aspects of the alternative into the limelight, either to better regulate the creative community or to challenge the system from within. Though fairly recent, such a paradigm shift has created a multitude of grey zones and push-and-pull games between the art community and the authorities, culminating in instances of tentative coalition as opposed to uncompromising resistance. Hence, while primarily attending to nonconforming curatorial projects, independent guerrilla installations, escapist practices, and tacitly subversive performances, Karimi also features case studies from a house divided against itself. Based on personal interviews with over a hundred artists, gallerists, theater experts, musicians, and designers as well as a careful examination of archived materials and locally published reviews across four decades, this presentation throws into sharp relief the extraordinary art scenes that up to now have received little attention.

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