This paper investigates the relationship between contemporary visual art production and nation-building in the Arab Gulf. In the last ten years, artists have begun responding to recent heritagization efforts which focus on a pre-Oil Bedouin past. This is the case in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where state-funded festivals combine heritage with art and provide funding for the arts industry. Such a focus on the past stands in contradiction with Dubai’s identity as a futuristic, and multi-cultural port-city, and artists address these issues in their work. Are artists aiding nation-building efforts seeking to elevate the history of nationals and exclude those of its large migrant community? Or are artists resisting these attempts, and if so, how? These questions are addressed and answered through ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the UAE in 2015 and 2016. During that time, an internship at Art Dubai, the Arab Gulf’s biggest art fair, has helped to connect to a large base of practicing artists in the UAE. Theoretically rooted in the study of art worlds and postcolonial theory, this paper builds on what Homi Bhabha (2004) has called the ‘double narrative movement’, a core ambivalence of nation-building in which a necessity exists to reach out to the past to seemingly create a national shared memory, while simultaneously having to remain in the present to enact identity. This conundrum has been complicated as states increasingly employ the future for national imaginations as well. This is visible in Dubai where ambitious building-projects compete with pioneering developments in the arts, sciences, and engineering. These recent developments however have been neglected in current scholarship, leading to a fragmentary understanding of recent turns in the politics of nation-building. As Appadurai (1981) reminds us, the past is never abundant, but is instead tailored into a scarce resource, desirable through its fabricated evanescence. I hypothesize that the future is too, as a result of the reinforcement of narrow pasts resulting from specific nation-building agendas. As such, as Appadurai (2013) shows in his newer work, the future is aspired, anticipated, and imagined through the past and present. In analyzing the consequences of adding the future into the nation-building equation, I like to suggest that the future needs to play into Bhabha’s (2004) discussion of the ‘double narrative movement’, if it shall remain ‘good to think with’.

Iranian religiosity whether practiced in real life or (re)presented in theatricalized life is intertwined with emotionality. Since 1979 Revolution and particularly after Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), state authorities require that the Shi’i sacred virtues (martyrdom, spirituality and contented self) need to be experienced as invested in the theatrical experience, and its embodiment, and space. Hence, a unique dramaturgy and scenic language, known as value-based (arzeshi) theatrical modality, emerged. In addition to religious values, this modality relies on Iranians’ performance traditions (Ta’ziyeh and Naq?li), and their myths and embodied emotional patterns. The surrealistic theatricalization of religious stories and figures offers strong affective engagement with audiences, and as a result, provide spaces for collective grievance and catharsis. To the new generation of artists, however, the Shi’i religiosity and its emotional narratives and representations can barely provide a legitimate, suitable answer to their existential doubts and rationalized viewpoints. They are aware that emotion and religion are constructed, institutionalised and politicized, thus try to probe into the forces behind this institutionalisation and politicization. Their counter-value-based theatre offers an alternative narrative of Iranianness and different modes of embodied religiosity and emotionality through confrontational techniques of realism, fantasy, grotesque, or parody. By focusing on the realities of the corporeal and emotional aftermath of social and intercultural crises (war and domestic violence), this new interventionist modality makes visible the systems of control, plays around with established values, and offers alternative visions. This paper investigates the triangulated correspondence between the religious values, emotional practices, and dramaturgical traditions that have been created and contested in Iranian theatre. It also traces the shift in the aesthetics, themes, scenic language, and various modes of emotionality and corporeality in these two theatrical modalities during the last three decades. By bridging recent scholarship in a number of fields, including body studies, religious studies, emotion studies, and semiotics and contextualizing them in the Iranian religio-political circumstances, this research aims at providing a localized critical and analytical methodology that recognizes the autonomy of Iranian indigenous epistemic and artistic experiences. It, therefore, proceeds through a survey of theatre reviewing in Iranian journals, blogosphere, and archives, interviewing with artists, and formal and textual analysis of three case studies. One of the methodological advantages of this localized method is to develop a model of analysis applicable to studying the theatre of the Middle East that has remained heavily under-researched.

The Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) left a deep wound in the public memories of both nations. On the Iranian side, the official narrative of the war, dubbed as “The Eight Years of Sacred Defense,” constantly imposes itself on the country’s history and memory. The large body of literature, cinema, and other cultural products in the past three decades, funded and supported by state-owned institutions, have effectively shaped the predominant discourse of war memory in the country. However, with the passage of time, this propagandist discourse is gradually losing its grip on the public memorialization of the war. New waves of artistic responses to the war, by the younger generation of artists, who had not been directly exposed to the war itself, are aiming to revive the “Sacred Defense” discourse for their contemporary audience. This essay looks into one example of this revivalist approach, "Standing in the Dust" (Istadeh dar ghobar) by Mohammad Hossein Mahdavian (2015). The film, highly celebrated and vigorously promoted in the country, uses a mockumentary approach to narrate the life of Ahmad Motevaselian, one of the most controversial Iranian military leaders. This essay will particularly examine the visual technics and narrative schemes employed by the filmmaker to ambitiously rethink the genre of Sacred Defense and find its new audience among the post-war generation of Iranians.