Translating Tradition - Of Protocols and Readings of the “Past” in Contemporary Iranian Art
About
Traditions persist through the years, but their meanings change over time. How do we read visual traditions in the present, and what happens when those readings are reduced to flat narratives that engage only with the surface rather than actively translating tradition?
Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer's writings, Dr. Foad Torshizi, Associate Professor of Art of the Islamic World at RISD, proposes that tradition is not a relic of the past but a dynamic force that situates the past in a living dialogue, continuously shaping and reshaping cultural meaning.
With a focus on contemporary Iranian art, this talk explores the protocols of Persian painting and how contemporary artists navigate, transform, and at times commodify its rich inherited forms. Through works by Shirin Neshat, Ala Ebtekar, Shiva Ahmadi, Shahpour Pouyan, and Javad Modarresi, it examines how these artists engage with tradition as a site of both continuity and rupture. By addressing their readings of Persian painting alongside the reception of their works in Iran and Western metropolitan centers, this talk critiques reductive interpretations and reveals the intricate processes of translating “the past” into contemporary artistic contexts.
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Foad Torshizi is an associate professor of Art of the Islamic World at RISD. He holds degrees in Comparative Literature and Society and Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (PhD and MPhil, Columbia University), Art History (MA, University of Minnesota) and Photography (MFA, Honar University of Tehran). Prior to joining the RISD faculty in 2017, he taught graduate students at Tehran University, advanced undergraduates and graduate students at the Università degli Studi di Milano in Italy as well as undergraduate students at Columbia University’s Core Curriculum.
Torshizi’s research interests are in the areas of global contemporary art, contemporary Iranian and Middle Eastern art, postcolonial theory, ethics of readership, theories of globalization and cosmopolitanism, comparative literature and politics of translation and interpretation. His research has been published in academic journals in both the US and Iran. Most recently, he published an article in Grey Room (MIT Press) titled “Loquacious Objects: Contemporary Iranian Art, Autotranslation, and the Readings of Benevolence.” Additionally, he has co-edited (with Joshua I. Cohen and Vazira Zamindar) a special issue of ARTMargins (MIT Press, June 2023) titled “Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn.”
Torshizi is currently completing a manuscript tentatively titled Unreadings: Contemporary Iranian Art and Art History’s Monolingualism. The manuscript examines the ways in which Western disciplinary forms, and more specifically art history and criticism, return home to circumscribe aesthetic diversity in Iran, demanding that the aesthetic economies of Iranian art align with Euro-American understandings of meaning, value, aspiration and desire.