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Negotiating Identities: Embodied Experience as Resistance to the Orientalist Gaze in the Artworks of Three Contemporary Women Artists from Iran
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- Author / Creator
- Noori Shirazi, Somayeh
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This dissertation offers three case studies of contemporary women artists from Iran: Ghazaleh Hedayat (b. 1979), Simin Keramati (b. 1970), and Katayoun Karami (b. 1967), to challenge stereotypical readings of Iranian contemporary art that are based on homogenized notions of Iranian identity. I examine self-reflective photographs and videos made by these artists to consider how they question assumptions about politicized and cultural identities in their artworks. In doing so, I contextualize the art of these three artists within an art historical genealogy in which the artists from the Global South challenge the identity politics prevalent in the mainstream international art world. I focus on the visual qualities of the artworks to show how these artists interrogate and complicate the notion of “Iranian-ness” and how they re-define and conceptualize this notion based on their lived experiences as women in Iran.
After conducting semi-structured interviews with the artists and choosing six works in total (two for each artist), I position the selected work within feminist and postcolonial critical frameworks to analyze how these artists perform embodiment in relation to their personal lived experiences. I investigate how they introduce themselves as embodied subjects to problematize the lens through which the artworks of artists from Iran are typically viewed. After defining the term “Orientalist gaze”, I argue this mode of looking is still discernable in the globalized art world. In this dissertation, I explore what strategies are employed by these artists to undermine this gaze. By developing these strategies, the selected artists represent their critical responses to an imposed ethnic group identification, refusing to allow their bodies to become objectified and racialized by the Orientalist gaze. I argue that the artists strive to generate affective responses in their audiences and provide them with the experience of embodied viewership. This form of viewing puts the artist and the viewer in a looking relation in which both of them occupy the role of being an embodied subject. -
- Graduation date
- Fall 2023
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.