An Examination of Diasporic Iranian Contemporary Women Artists

Abstract

The nature of geographical loss taken as an event or a condition holds an inherent—if not also a muted—quality of melancholic and nostalgic sensation towards origins, often related to conceptions of home and identity. The existential experiences of exile and the feelings of being outcast from a society and/or culture echo certain perceptions of displacement and of not belonging, as an ultimate form of rejection by a host society on both literal and metaphorical terms. As such, the “mumbles” and “incoherently” rendered voices of unwelcomed and underprivileged communities have much lower frequencies than those of dominant, white, host cultures of the West. Despite the drowned-out nature of these ethnic voices, contemporary artists from diverse immigrant groups elegantly weave their untold stories using sophisticated visual vocabularies to beautifully overlap such polyphonic expressions with contemporary socio-political narratives—ones that often pulse in Western institutional settings. This thesis seeks to enrich and cultivate a deeper understanding of certain exilic and diasporic conditions of concern—namely for Iranian diasporas. As an Iranian-born Australian immigrant myself, the multi-layered expression of diasporic states and their subsequent fluid circumstances underpin this PhD project to explicit effect. This is achieved through a close examination of the artistic practices and cultural productions of contemporary women artists, including Tala Madani, Nairy Baghramian, Malekeh Nayiny, Ghazal Radpay and myself, who each immigrated to the West after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. By retracing dynamic networks of cross-cultural exchanges from numerous thinkers and intellectuals that oscillate between mappings of collective memories, vulnerabilities of lived realities and multiplicities of shared commonalities, this constellation attempts to unravel aspects of certain Iranian, female, diasporic and contemporary artistic practices.