Masoumeh Mozaffari’s path of paintings and the variations in her artistic style during three decades reflect changes in the social, economic, and political conditions of contemporary Iran. Her paintings address more than anything the perspective and social attitude of a part of the middle class who have been influential in political developments in Iran during the last three decades, whether through political acts or through contemplating on the status quo. This is a period when the urban middle class came back to politics following a decade of isolation in the 1980s, notably by the presidential election on May 2, 1997.
The so-called Reform period brought about levels of freedom of expression in the press and the arts, albeit in moderation; following decreased state control and reduced censorship, cultural institutions were given a degree of independence, and book publications (especially translations) soared.1 The reformist putsch, however, was blocked by limitations in its political program, its fierce opponents, and the volatility of the international scene in the early 2000s.
While official art, especially during the 1980s, drew doves of utopian ideology over a field strewn with martyrs of revolution and war,2 critical art, marginalized and pushed out of public discourse, found other venues to show its wounds and concerns over the painful events of the decade. These artists turned to European new realism but also revived guidelines set by modernist art to which pre-revolutionary institutions (mainly nonofficial) had adhered.
One of the main laboratories of critical art was the theoretical course of Ruin Pakbaz at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Tehran. A significant part of Mozaffari’s education took place in this laboratory as well as the workshops of artists like Mehdi Hosseini, Yagub Ammamehpich, and Nosratollah Moslemian.3 Her works express the anxieties of critical, engaged art during the period of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88): an art that publicly experienced loss and discontinuity while privately being labeled as elitist, superfluous, and individualistic. Within the framework of the state-forced urban unifications of the 1980s, which marginalized bodies both in terms of the ideology prevalent during the war and in terms of an absence of public participation in politics, the nonofficial art tended to exclude the realistic rendering of the human body. It engendered an entrenched artistic practice that seldom represented the human body as the meeting point of inside/outside order. On the contrary, by avoiding realism in portraying the body, critical art opened a space to speak of lack, suffering, and failure. In a large number of these works, both the space of painting and the human body are fragmented, dissonant, and marred by physical and spatial indeterminacy.4 Mozaffari’s paintings during this period are filled with uneasy images of haunted, distraught, fleeting, and confused spaces drawn in a series of peeling colors and broken lines. She continued with this form of expression until the mid-1990s, when the war had ended and the economic wheels of the country were geared toward reconstruction, setting privatization as its main goal. The face of the city changed to open the way for economic participation by the middle class. With it, political forces started to question the status quo.
The refurbishment of public spaces (like parks and cultural centers) in cities and the expansion of higher academic institutions (like the Azad University system, with its chain of private universities around the country) provided a degree of economic prosperity for citizens in urban areas and facilitated public exchange. Lifestyle changes revolved around the culture of consumption and gave private life a new meaning. The new social organization brought about different spatial and temporal experiences: leisure time, entertainment, and shopping that put in motion a process of production and forged the space for the formation of social relations based on individual tastes and preferences. Advertisement agencies and insurance companies flourished, as did concern for psychological and medical needs. Economic activity that benefited the individual was given legitimacy, as was the individual’s body. Individuality and independence, the drive toward success and status on a domestic level, washed the bitter and collective experiences of the previous decade. These changes, in turn, led to a new form of violence and crisis in the form of economic fissures in society.5
On the other hand, the economic downturn caused by sanctions and the widening economic gap resulting from privatizations, gave way to a political alliance between various social forces in favor of reform. The outcome of this coalition manifested itself in the presidential elections of 1997, the relatively open political space of the first term of the reformist administration, and the demands of the middle class for a change in the political and cultural organization of society driven by freedom of expression for citizens.6
The arts, too, were going through a major transformation in forms of expression and the use of material. Beginning in the early 1990s, cultural centers cropped up around the city and artistic events (like biennials and public exhibitions) influenced artistic productions.7 The first attempt on the part of artists was to establish a personal style of expression. If the idea of artistic practice had previously been to arrive at a language that reflected a collective experience and stylistic differences were only secondary to this attempt, now competitive spaces made stylistic differences in themselves as important as the form of expression per se.
As a result, some of the artists who had been active in the previous decade took their semi-abstract works to pure abstraction (an approach that clearly favored the signature of the artist over experiential content). Others developed their abstract-figurative style and tried to enrich its depth and concepts. Among the artists who had started their practices as students in the 1980s, a tendency toward modernist portraiture developed.8 Belonging to this group of painters, Mozaffari intensified her distressed expression within a different framework. She turned the surface of her paintings into an arena of interlocking spaces: stairs, windows, doors, and walls were all means of opening up closed inner spaces toward each other. The relatively homogenous visual textures of the previous works gave way to variegate textures intensified by the use of collage (of photographs or sketches). Her works in this period are at once compositions of mainly greyish hue, cubist-like broken spaces, vibrating and distinct dark and light surfaces, expressive drawings, and hints of narrative and abstract elements. In these works, portrait photography, urban photographs, and at times famous art history photos reveal a desire for documentation with a certain resistance to forgetting images and faces as well as showing the increasing tension between private and public spaces. Space in these paintings is still too abstract to portray the life of a particular social class or group. The relative overpowering of the abstract treatment of elements and subjects keep these images at a general state of expression.
At the start of the 2000s, however, the artistic configuration of Mozaffari’s works transformed through a series of breaks in the composition, beginning in her exhibition at the Artists Forum in Tehran in 2004. In these works, she almost got rid of the collage technique and represented the break in space through an abstract combining of surfaces that each only show a part of the total visual field. One of the pivotal images of this period is a sixteen-panel polyptych whose sections form a large table with figures sitting around it. Elements like stacks of paper, a pen, cup, fruit bowl, and ashtray, in addition to the expressive poses of the unfinished figures, clearly point to the lifestyle of the urban middle class with their cultural preferences.
This form of expression — based on the representation of breaks in the work of our artist — is somewhat akin to and contemporaneous with the break in the political process and the failure of parliamentary negotiations in the late 1990s, which stripped the middle class of any hope for civil rights that usually accompanies the privatization of capital. Reformist forces had lost their unity and were once again sidelined. Theirs was a silence informed by the government’s withdrawal from negotiations as well as its incapacity to give free rein to public involvement in political action, and was a clear indication of the ineffectual vision of liberal politics in keeping the unity between various economic social classes and their reliance on the official elite to engineer social activities.9
By the middle of the 2000s, Iran faced harsher sanctions. The country’s relationship with the international community further deteriorated, resulting in economic hardship for the middle class and small manufacturers. The hardline administration’s command over a swath of the economy gave those closer to the state access to capital for some time; a new economic middle class formed that had no cultural or ideological affinity to the old one and didn’t share its political visions, though it had made inroads into politics and economics. As a result, both the political situation and the relatively consistent outlook that the old middle class had of itself were in the process of dissolution. The disintegrated liberal political forces had lost most of their influence in political institutions, but in the late 2000s, they became active again and vied for political (and not necessarily economic) justice.
This political movement allowed a new alliance to form between diverse social groups beyond economic and social crises; however, it ceased to achieve its objectives. In addition to the state’s unleashing of violence, lack of an organizational vista and wholesome ideology failed to provide content for formalizing the protests. Nevertheless, this movement ultimately led to the coming to power of a moderate administration in 2013 that continues to pursue neo-liberal economic policy despite its nod in the direction of civil freedoms. Streets that had briefly become available for “individuals” to connect are no longer the ground for political subjects but the playground of commercial forces that waylay the privacy of individuals. Now it seems that the idea of politics is lost altogether.
From the middle of the 2000s, Mozaffari’s images reexamine society to discover a lost meaning at the same time that they fail to present a total picture.10 In these works, figures are trapped inside their midsize hermitage, perspectives are exaggerated, surfaces are tremulous, and objects are in the process of disintegrating. From then on, Mozaffari’s project has been to intensify the composition of these cuts in the space within the frame; the more, however, she progresses in this direction, the more she distances herself from abstract surfaces toward a more realistic representation of breaks in space. In other words, the inconsistency and tension in space and the ensuing struggle stumbles on realism to represent itself — this is a form of commitment to witnessing and representing that is detected by the senses, even if with a little touch.
Her paintings from this period on become clearly corporeal. In works that she presented in 2009, photographic angles and a combination of internal and external spaces are brought into the frame via large windows that offer the viewer a vista of the city at night and, in this way, make it possible for her to address the breaks in space.
Here, the perturbations on the subjects’ faces are as effective in relaying anxiety as are the sharp angles of lines and the flicking of darkness and light. A white cloth is as representative of a disguise as it is an element to activate space and change form. In these works, personal belongings and objects surrounding the subject — keychain, notebook, CD — are more prevalent and point to the fear of inquisition and persecution. The appearance of a newspaper on a cluttered table is emblematic of the political difficulties of this period marked by interrogations and incarcerations.
The empty space of an apartment (as if its owners are about to move) and large surfaces, with a row of empty chairs and empty coat hooks (traces of absent individuals), are indicative of constricted and high-strung inner spaces. This is while outer spaces, like buildings seen through the windows, point to the division of inside and outside more than anything else — an expression of the unmet dream of taking back the streets of the city.
Mozaffari’s works are conscious of anxieties and confusions surrounding tangible reality on the one hand, and on the other, they are a means of contemplation for the artist on the apprehensions of a particular social class during a transitory period when it has lost its former agency. The uncertainty in her works is informed by the qualms of this class and its political standing. Advertently or not, in her paintings, Mozaffari reflects meaningfully on the social evolution of the middle class, on her own physical body, and on her trepidations in understanding her own essence and political agency. However, she is not simply someone who silently records what she sees. By making her compositions volatile and dissonant, by painting on the edge of crisis and maintaining tension within its space, she is finding a way to overcome the uncertainty that attempts to give off the illusion that all is well, that dissonant spaces are but unified and that tension is only natural. Mozaffari’s paintings are an emotional response to a social process of homogenization, if not a downright revenge waged against it.
1 Ervand Abrahamian offers these statistics: “The number of newspapers increased from 5 to 26 and their circulation from 1,200,000 to 3,200,000. The number of magazines increased from 778 to 1375. The number of books from 14,500 to 233,000.” Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Tehran: [Ney Publishers, 2011), 332.
2 It is necessary to take into account the practical aspects of the use of this language in the 1980s and 1990s. While in the 1980s, art was directly influenced by capricious conditions and its function was to encourage the spirit of resistance, in the 1990s it was an ideological force that compensated for the deterioration of utopian ideals in favor of new political and economic realities. In the visual arts, this eloquent language based on nonvisual elements continued to strive for another decade without the ground that the realities of revolution and war in the previous decade had provided. In the 2000s, a major change in this language took place. This language was in sync with the commercial policies of a new government that paradoxically presented them as moral choices in urban areas and through state-run television.
3 Mozaffari has spoken often of this period of her studies. See, for example, Masoumeh Mozaffari, “A Look at an Educational Project,” in conversation with Nurani and Pourbahrami, Herfeh Honarmand Quarterly 27 (Winter 2009): 131–37.
4 Here, one must keep in mind, as mentioned previously, that the content of these works is governed by the visual and physical properties of color and form, as only the consistency of visual and formal elements could reveal and transmit the politically inexpressible and suppressed experiences of these artists.
5 Abbas Kasemi offers a brilliant analysis of the “transition from a revolutionary society to one of consumption” in this period, which he calls a “new alignment of the body,” and the reduction of social and political crises to medical and psychological issues. See Abbas Kazemi, Everyday Life in a Post-Revolutionary Society (Tehran: Farhang Javid, 2016), 143–52.
6 The coalition was never without tension. The Dormitory Incidence (1999) led to a spate of prosecutions and the closure of newspapers, many of the reformist parliamentary representatives were disallowed from the race for the 7th Parliament (2003), and finally, the political crisis of that decade was entirely the outcome of the existing tension between the middle and ruling class.
7 Three painting biennials since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 took place between 1991 and 1995. See Mohammadreza Moridi, Art as Collective Practice (Tehran: Howzeh Honari Khorasan Razavi, 2014), 119–20.
8 For a closer look at artistic styles of the 1980s, the following article is of great value: Fa’eqeh Boqrati, “Paintings of 1959 to 1999,” in In Search of New Time, vol. 2 (Tehran: Herfeh Honarmand, 2016).
9 For a clear account of the formation and downfall of hopes in this period, see Mohammad Ali Kadivar, “Coalitions and misconceptions in the reform movement of Iran: 1997–2005,” Goftogu Quarterly 67.
10 Perhaps we can attribute the number of translations from the areas of philosophy and psychology with political content to this attempt to reinvent a liberating narrative from existing facts.
This text was first published in a longer version in Farsi and English in the monograph Masoumeh Mozaffari (Tehran: Lajevardi Foundation, 2023).
Ali Golestaneh, “In the Presence of the Others: Masoumeh Mozaffari’s Three Decades of Painting and Persistence,” in mohit.art NOTES #10 (April/May 2024); published on www.mohit.art, April 5, 2024.
