ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores the complications of this notion within the Iranian context and articulate the ways in which Sazmanab Project Space in particular practises art-making that connects itself to global discussions while still being decidedly local. In the realm of the visual arts, much of the work of cultural institutions – many of which were created with the support of the previous queen, Farah Diba, who had been actively involved in promoting the arts – was completely undone. Over the course of her years on the throne she amassed a huge collection of modern art that was donated to the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in 1977. Contemporary art encapsulates the prospect of contemporaneity through the mobility of ideas and exchange in which artists may imagine themselves as part of a post-ethnic utopia in which ethnicity becomes a matter of individual articulation and not an identification marker to be discovered in artwork.
