Barbara Miller Lane Lecture
February 17, 2022
4pm EST
Old Library, Bryn Mawr College
Pamela Karimi, Associate Professor, UMass Dartmouth
Alternative Iran: Contemporary Art and Critical Spatial Practice
Register in advance for this meeting:
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Bryn Mawr , United States
101 N. Merion Ave, Old Library 224
The Department of the Growth and Structure of Cities at Bryn Mawr College invites Pamela Karimi (U Mass Dartmouth) to deliver the 2022 Barbara Miller Lane Lecture on February 17, 2022 at 4pm EST.
Named after the founder of the department, the lecture series was established by colleagues, students, alums and friends to honor the work of Barbara Miller Lane. The goal has been to bring to the College, scholars of the history of architecture and the built environment who have made significant contributions to the field, enlarging its scope and developing critical methods of its study. Over the years, we have invited a range of speakers including most recently, Sarah Lopez (UT Austin) as well as alumna Paula Lupkin, Ito Osayimwese and Despina Stratigakos.
Professor Pamela Karimi has written extensively on architecture, art, society and identity in Iran and the wider Middle East, and her publications include, Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran (2013), Images of the Child and Childhood in Modern Muslim Contexts (2012), The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the Middle East: From Napoleon to ISIS (2016). She has also made contributions to the history of American industrial cities, including the exhibit, Black Spaces Matter: Exploring the Aesthetics and Architectonics of an Abolitionist Neighborhood, and the publication, Reinventing the American Post-Industrial City (2015).
Her Barbara Miller Lane Lecture will be based on her forthcoming book, Alternative Iran: Contemporary Art and Critical Spatial Practice to be published by Stanford University Press. Drawing on the spatial and temporal turns that have animated Iranian art scenes since the late 1980s, this presentationilluminates the economic, social, intellectual, and visceral forces that have driven Iran’s creative class toward increasingly original forms of site-oriented and durational artmaking. Focused on artistic processes and experiential situations, these remarkable projects artfully offset ideological demands and regulatory regimes, even when they are fully sanctioned by the state. While exceptionally influential on the ground, the art forms are often ephemeral, and not meant for permanent display in galleries or museums. Flouting the pressures of the art market, they play out instead in ad hoc locations, pop-up venues, dilapidated structures, buildings under construction, leftover urban spaces, private homes, non-commercial galleries, and showrooms with “trusted” audiences. Outside Iran these grassroot artistic activities are frequently perceived as zirzamini (literally, of theunderground). Art experts inside Iran, however, admit that even if there is an “underground” quality to any initiative outside the direct purview of the government, nothing can be completely subterranean or covert. Rather than “underground,” then, this lecture capitalizes on the term “alternative” to present an enthralling inquiry into the places where artistic activities intersect with site, space, and architecture, or what is commonly referred to as critical spatial practice. The lecture further discloses the seemingly anomalous instances when the state and other powerful agents have appropriated the same spatial techniques of loose covertness to bring aspects of the alternative into the limelight, either to better regulate the creative community or to challenge the system from within. Though fairly recent, such a paradigm shift has created a multitude of grey zones and push-and-pull games between the art community and the authorities, culminating in instances of tentative coalition as opposed to uncompromising resistance.Hence, while primarily attending to nonconforming curatorial projects, independent guerrilla installations, escapist practices, and tacitly subversive performances, Karimi also features case studies from a house divided against itself. Based on personal interviews with over a hundred artists, gallerists, theater experts, musicians, and designers as well as a careful examination of archived materials and locally published reviews across four decades, this presentation throws into sharp relief the extraordinary art scenes that up to now have received little attention.
The lecture will be delivered in person at Old Library 224, and streamed live. The link is below:
