Staging Identity: Performance and Irony in Contemporary Arab and Iranian Photography

The photograph has a long tradition of fashioning identity and shaping one’s self-presentation to the world. In this exhibition, we focus on Arab and Iranian artists who use photography’s performative and ironic aspects for identity creation. Each artist uses these devices in order to stage a particular experience. The historical legacy of culture, society and politics play a role in these artists’ work - both those who live in the Middle East and those in the Diaspora. However, in this exhibition, we are not examining the general effects of these legacies on the artist’s work. Instead, we aim to explore how the theatricality of the photographs affects the viewer and creates a space where the artifice is laid bare. What results are innovative and daring statements about authenticity and about the tensions between individual selves and their cultural context.

Visual clichés of the Middle East have long been present in artistic discourse and it is not the intention to position this exhibition to reinscribe Orientalist fantasies onto this work. We are not asking these artists to carry the burden of representation for Iranian and Arab culture. The struggle to assert their individualism allows for the production of works that give us insights into their intimate world. By focusing on the staging of identity, the intention of this exhibition is to present a more nuanced and layered understanding of the forces bearing on their lives in the Middle East.

In all of these works, it is the staged, ironic and performative aspects that are shared. What is interesting about these aspects of the works is how the constructed realities become a safe way to critique regimes and discourses without making overt political statements. These imagined constructions become a neutral place to confront stereotypes, to hold off on truth, and to imagine other realities. By not attempting a documentary approach, these works fall into a narrow window that can be interpreted as artistic. The theatrical stage creates an affective construction for the imagination and is an effective under the radar approach to deal with a social critique of the state.