This chapter aims to constitute a step towards (re)tracing the history of modern and contemporary art of Iran. It raises the question of whether art productions outside the Euro-American domain, the so-called Global North, can be described within existing parameters of art historical conceptualisation and classification. Here the major issue is the problem of terminology and tem-porality. How have art histories been interpreted in non-Western regions such as Iran, the so-called Global South, which up until recently were interpreted as the periphery and the Other? How would this question be reflected in the current debates about the idea of a ‘Global Art History’? I examine the question of whether the history of modern and contemporary art of Iran can be defined within or in contradiction to the existing parameters and frameworks of Euro-American and Islamic art historical context.

Theoretical Paradigms

Euro-American historiographical accounts of non-Western modern and contemporary art rarely consider the discursive contexts of artistic production, their cultural implications, dissemination, or their incorporation into local historical narratives. In fact, the classical Eurocentric models of art history writing largely follow a worldview derived from the idea of a linear history, and do not attempt to establish or adapt art historical models in various temporalities and contexts. This has created unbalanced historiographical maps and art historical sources that enforce categories and references mainly affiliated with types of art that are all too often assigned to peripheral spaces. In the meantime, art historical scholarship in Iran1 and on Iran in the West, and more generally the Middle East and North African (MENA) region, has made great strides in addressing these questions during recent years. Over the last few decades varieties of publications on modern and predominantly contemporary Iranian art and its diasporas have appeared in different formats, including journal articles, book chapters, monographs, catalogues raisonnés, exhibition and catalogue essays and private collections. The subject has partly grown in the context of what came to be called by art historians, critics and curators the ‘regional’ and ‘ethnic’ turn in contemporary art. An increasing number of Western museums, art institutes, scholars and curators have paid more attention to art of other regions outside the mainstream narratives of contemporary art, including Latin America, South East Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.