In the early 1990s, a loose collective of Iranian artists installed their work in an empty single family villa that was scheduled to be demolished and replaced by an apartment building. The artists did not use the empty walls and spaces as a gallery; they used them as the medium for their art. Taking advantage of the emptied nooks and crannies of what had been private family space, the artists lavished their individual and collective attention on site-specific installations: wall paintings of dinner parties; carpets of fragmented household items; taxidermy birds in storage areas. The project is remembered and referred to, but there is almost no documentation of the actual art; it was all destroyed when the house was demolished. This was intentional. As much as the project was a striking challenge to the pristine white cube aesthetics of conventional gallery spaces, it was an eloquent testimonial to the evanescence of material being: of the art, of the house, of the city. Known as the Khaneh Kolangi (the house that is to be knocked down), the beauty of the collective project, made up of its individual installations, was its willful, upstart challenge to the supposed limitations on creative agency in the face of dominant cultural, political, and market forces. This paper focuses on the Khaneh Kolangi, and several related arts projects of the same period. All of these projects were collective efforts, and all made use of unconventional and/or rejected spaces to create something new by pointedly adapting the available structures of earlier sites and traditions of making. The limitations of Iranian post-revolutionary life pushed these artists to adapt alternative methods and visions, and to directly engage in a process of critique of the conditions of cultural production. The artists positioned their work within the conceptual framework of public art (projects freely available to a general audience and intended as an intervention into shared social life), but very differently, in medium and message, from the better known, better documented Iranian examples of state approved public art (outdoor building murals and sculptures). Based on interviews with artists who were involved in the projects, as well as other artists and cultural producers who connect the principles of their dissident contemporary work to the example of the Khaneh Kolangi, this paper explores how these alternative projects disrupted assumed relationships between authority and freedom in both aesthetic and political terms.

The study of Ali Shariati’s oeuvre reveals an understanding of the Iranian Revolution vis-à-vis the pervasive critique of industrial modernity, promoted in the second half of the twentieth century across the globe. Frustrated with the isolation and alienation of the modern man in a Godless world, a product of liberal democracy and its communist alternative, Shariati strove to produce a liberating and revolutionary reading of Islam to challenge modern conditions. His interpretation of Islam aimed at promoting Shi’ism as a socio-cultural theocratic solution that could stand strong against the failures of both Western liberalism and Eastern communism. Yet, his intellectual endeavor is not only rooted in his commitment to and proficiency in Islam but also provoked by his knowledge of and interest in the philosophical tradition that promoted liberalism and communism both. Therefore, a detailed assessment of Shariati’s body of work cannot be achieved without noticing his critical engagement with Western philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, and the influence of anti-Western intellectuals like Frantz Fanon, who himself bore the lineage of (leftist) Western thought in his advocacy for social justice and decolonization. This conflation both justifies and complicates Shariati’s aim and attempt to have a “modern” reading of Islam and can be read not as antimodernist but as alternative modernism. This inquiry examines Shariati’s oeuvre to understand the appropriation of leftist concepts that fomented his revolutionary reading of Islam, and in particular the place of aesthetic theory in his thought. To understand this blend of leftist ideas and Islamic thought as an alternative approach to modernity, I scrutinize Shariati's lectures on art against the backdrop of the global intellectual atmosphere that was influential on him, along with the analysis of a revolutionary visual discourse that was structured around his aesthetic theory. According to this observation, this paper examines the ways in which Shariati translated the global intellectual impact of the second half of the twentieth century into his “modern” configuration of Islam as a tool to challenge modernity itself, and asks how this rendering could possibly change our ideas about the historical role of critical (and aesthetic) theory in relation to alternative practices of modernism.

Having written and directed more than twenty films during a career that has spanned half a century, Dariush Mehrjui has iconic status, and is famous for presenting exceptionally strong characterizations of women in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema (Banoo, Sara, Pari, Leila, Bemani). But Mehrjui is less recognized for his depictions of men’s vulnerability; both in his pre-revolutionary works and in his post-revolutionary films (fourteen films with male protagonists). This paper analyzes the contradictory depictions of gender in Dariush Mehrjui’s films, with a particular focus on his representations of vulnerable male protagonists. In many of Mehrjui's pre-revolutionary films, men are portrayed as naïve, powerless, incompetent characters who are victims of a hostile social system. The male characters of his pre-revolutionary films fit common characterizations of progressive politics of the time (1960s- 1970s): they are rural peasants or working class urban poor, overwhelmed by alienation and injustice. In his post-revolutionary films, Mehrjui’s characters are more like the educated, urban middle-class audience members who would come to see his films. These are flawed human characters who are as much or more limited by their own psychology, as the legal or political barriers of their society. But while the women characters struggle and usually overcome their psychological (and social) barriers, Mehrjui’s men are more confounded by their own emotional contradictions and internal conflicts. In many of these post-revolutionary films, for a variety of reasons determined by the individual plot, women leave men, whether temporarily or forever. At that moment, Mehrjui’s male characters show their most vulnerable side: in almost all of his post-revolutionary films, there is a scene or two in which the men beg the women to come back and claim they cannot live without them. Despite and perhaps even because of the social limits on gender roles in Iranian post-revolutionary society, the women claim their freedom, and the men find themselves bereft. Mehrjui’s male protagonists struggle with their sense of abandonment, and their efforts to process the emotions of their symbolic castration within a patriarchal social structure are consistently incomplete. Close analysis of the films, including Postchi, Hamoun, Derakht-e Golabi, Santouri, demonstrates a repetitive pattern and an unconscious dynamic in the representation of Mehrjui’s men as vulnerable beings who beg women to stay in their lives comparing to the strong women characters and their representation in his films.