Leili Adibfar and Siamack Hajimohammad speak in MESA session on “Modernity Framed: The Politics of Art Through the Lens of Economy and Class Struggle in Iran Between Revolutions”
Introduction
PANEL DESCRIPTION
This panel explores Iranian art within the "revolutionary century" (1905-1979), the transformative period spanning the Constitutional Revolution to the Islamic Revolution. It investigates how broader socio-political contestations—specifically those arising from Iran's transition from an agrarian society to a globally integrated petro-state—manifested within the realm of artistic production. The long course of the Constitutional Revolution fundamentally reshaped Iranian society through the transformation of statecraft and the legal system, and by creating novel class divisions. The establishment of new institutions, alongside the expansion of early industries during the tumultuous years of post-revolutionary civil war, World War I, and the interwar period, fueled these tensions toward modernity. The industrial exploitation of oil since the beginning of Pahlavi rule in Iran catapulted class struggles and the competition among various visions of modernity in Iran to a new level. Finally, the 1979 Revolution put an end to this chapter and began a new one. This panel foregrounds the role of visual arts and their producers as significant elements in negotiating the different stages of these tensions throughout the period between the two revolutions. Visual arts—encompassing painting, photography, political cartoons, and filmbecame crucial arenas where their producers, often in dialogue with or in opposition to state power and various social groups, actively shaped the perceptions of modernization, class struggle, and revolutionary ideologies.