Watch "Possibilites for Iranian Art" a lecture by Majid Akhgar

This event is a part of a lecture series on Iranian Modern and Contemporary Art, which will be held during the academic year 2020-2021

"Two years ago, while working on a special issue of an art quarterly in Tehran on the question of immigration as a somehow existential-historical decision, I wrote an article that its basic question was the prospect for the future one may imagine for oneself and one’s own country, as one decides to stay in Iran or leave it; as though this decision is consequent upon what s/he sees as possible/probable for the future of his/her country.

In other words, based on the idea of historical specificity and contingency of each historical life-world, I proposed a historical variant of the famous Kantian question: in what we may hope, what we may hope for, as a nation at a historical threshold? Is it possible for us to open an unbeaten route for ourselves, making a new history (or making history, new), or do we have to repeat, with a sense of historical belatedness, what others have done sooner and better than us?

As I’ll try to do in this lecture, we may pose this question for ourselves as an artist, and ask of what have been the historically existing options and routes Iranian artists have chosen during the history of modern art in Iran; and, of what one may imagine as possible for the future."

~ Majid Akhgar