Thesis

Master of Fine Arts, major in TRANS 2021

I explored the social impact of photographs on romantic and marital relationships. My primary objective was to recount history through the eyes of ordinary individuals, an approach referred to as “history from below,” commonly known as “Alltagsgeschichte” in Germany and “microhistory” in Italy and France. The aims and significance of such research are multifaceted. Foremost, these studies aim to showcase how ordinary individuals had the capacity for agency, rather than being mere recipients of the effects of massive, vague, impersonal forces. In other words, they were not passive objects of “history,” but active agents who played a vital role in shaping their own lives. The research was conducted creatively with fiction in lieu of a quantitative academic style. Investigations travelled through the red-light district (Shahr-e No) to illuminate the evolution in modern Iranian sexual attitudes and how modernisation adapted sexual and romantic relationships there.

Photography’s influence on Iranian couples, romance and sexual relationships of this era encapsulates the project. During the Pahlavi reign, Iranian society instantly became obsessed with visuals. In Iran, photography had quickly become popular in spreading out Visual Pleasure as defined by British film theorist Laura Mulvey. Regarding historical contexts, a rigorous investigation was conducted on how photography allowed people, regardless of gender and class, freedom to express their desire for love. Despite their traditional and stringent religion, people were open to having their special marriages and relationships captured. The thesis’ findings discovered that exchanging photos frequently was crucial to falling in love. 

This is part of master’s thesis at HEAD.

A glance

From an early age, I knew I was good at telling stories. I would have liked to be a novelist if I had not decided a visual artist, although this is not my reason for conducting academic research through the lens of fiction.

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It was not an easy decision to write a novel as a method of academic research. However, the narrative was inside me, it spilled out as soon as I started writing. I found myself surrounded by stories. I was a beginner at creative writing, and still am. Nevertheless, I believe I could not have conveyed the depth of meaning and information that I did in the novel, if I had written a thesis that was purely academic. It was a highly ambitious choice, and a very challenging process to develop a novel in such a short period, especially for a novice like myself. 

Hyper-reality

I was born two years after the Islamic revolution in 1979. It was unique in many respects, including the breakthrough in propaganda. It was centered on narrative. In this way, I can consider myself a child of narration. The Revolution, as the new government called themselves, built up a new system of cause and effect, creating their own narrative in order to justify their actions. Narratives made and defined the post-revolutionary world. Various tools were needed to create them. The Government used every avenue of communication available for this purpose: television, cinema, photography, fiction/story, newspapers, music, anthem/Song, poem, painting, graphics, theater and the Shia Mythology system sat on top of all these.

The revolution intended to rewrite Iranian history to suit itself. All aspects of our lives had to be reconstructed for a single reason: lack of “Meaning”. The Meaning had been lost. They made a new system to either re“signify” or re”view” every single phenomenon all over again before publishing. All these led to a substantial “exhilaration” emerging. Whatever I heard and saw overflowed with that, at school, on T.V. and in the well known Friday Prayers which were always a vague, unnerving experience that I disliked as a child. 

This exhilaration diminished everything to a bipolar world which was either black or white. That was used in order to provoke a feeling which I call sublimity, encountering a strength beyond that of mankind’s power. Sublimity connected phenomena so that we felt sheltered, protected by this simplified manner of judging our surroundings. The mechanism of signifying phenomena created an invisible chain which would present all of life’s events as related. This established an infrangible solidarity between the Iranian people.

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