Thesis, 2021 2~ A Play for Public Vida Kasaei Keywords: Reality, fiction, public domain, storytelling
4~ Reality and truth always have the seal of human cognition on their forehead and find their expression in the form of human language. This cognition is not too troublesome and does not pose a problem in its understanding of subjects, but when confronted with the passage of time, the matter changes and puts our relationship with time ahead. With this interpretation, reality is based on a trembling understanding and, with the rise of modern financialized metropolises—in which society is changing so rapidly— our understanding is on a rollercoaster ride. The major focus of this study is the ambiguity of truth, that has been changing in both the physical and virtual public domains of economized cities, and its relationship to literature and visual language.
Our current truths are mainly shaped by advertisement engines exploiting all kinds of art in the public domain through mainstreaming counterculture to pursue their economic aims. By studying the history of the creation of public opinion and the public domain from the perspective of a storyteller, these themes are explored and turned inside-out through an exotic safari of thoughts, encountering a wide range of philosophers, artists, filmmakers, photographers, and journalists. Although the role of stories in our lives has become problematic due to external advertisement narratives, the world of storytelling, art and literature can present a worldview that closely corresponds to our experience of reality; nevertheless, we know that their basis is fictive. Reality has never been perceivable without fictional stories that stem from truths. Therefore, the work of art in our current age of information should reflect, criticize, disrupt, but also consciously allowing fiction as a form of possibility to transform imagination. 6~ i. Abstract ~xx 1. Prologue ~xx 2. Introduction: Crisis of Truth ~xx 3. Creation of Metropolis ~xx 3.1.Public and Private Space ~xx 3.2.Flow of Truth ~xx 4. Information City: Storytelling versus Information ~xx 5. Visual Storytelling ~xx 5.1 Artistic Oeuvre of Newsha Tavakolian ~xx 6. A Reflective Round-Up References ~xx 1 (see Wikipedia contributors “Women’s Rights in Iran”)
2 (see Wikipedia contributors “Iranian Reformists”)
8~
3 (see Wikipedia contributors “Iranian Green Movement”) As a Millennial—who, according to the Pew Research Centre (Heimlich), are counterculture junkies and the largest consumer generation (Okomo)—growing up in a liberal middle-class family within the oppressed culture of post-revolution Iran governed by highly sensitive Islamic rules, shaping a countercultural identity for myself was not an inconceivable pathway. After the revolution in February 1979, the country came under an Islamic structure and the public domains were re-shaped based on Islamic ideologies and standards. The most oppressive of these rules have been the restrictions for women. For instance, all women in Iran (local or tourist) are obligated to wear a hijab (an Islamic term for an item of clothing for covering women‘s hair and body protrusions in public spaces). Also, women are not allowed to sing solo in public 1. These are rules which had a direct influence on me as a young girl growing up in a patriarchal culture. In the late 1990s, as a result of globalization, change was inevitable. In 1997,2 after twenty years of a country lead by hard-liners, people voted for a reformist president. At this time, I was stepping into my second decade of life. The reformist wave brought a more liberal spirit into most houses and to people who sought change. However, the movement, except for giving a tiny bit more freedom to people, did not bring any fundamental changes. In May 2009, when I was in my early twenties and studying interior design, there were uprisings of millions of people in different cities against the results of the presidential election (which is known to the world as the Green movement).3 In this era, I was at the highest point of rebelliousness against all the social and political norms which were forced upon my life. The events in 2009 caused gripping changes for Iranian youth. As a result, many people in my generation were in jail, imprisoned in their homes, or had left the country due to the political circumstances. I was one of the people who had to leave the country after a while. Arriving in the Netherlands opened a new chapter in my life. Although I had been to Europe before, I had never lived in any Western country before 2011. At that time, Europe and Western countries were healing from the financial crisis of 2008. Neoliberalism was gaining the 4 All Ashoori quotations are translated into English from Persian/Farsi by myself. 10~
5 Interview with Newsha Tavakolian conducted by me on 3rd December 2020. power to reshape cities and the flow of the economy on a global scale. Since, in Iran, the public domain is ruled by its government’s conservative ideologies, I was curious to discover how the public domain was formed in a Western country, such as the Netherlands, and how it influences public opinion. As liberal as it seems, it is nevertheless tainted with political and economic systems pursuing their own objectives. This is where, in dealing with modern thought, I am caught in ambiguity and bottlenecks. There was no way out of the bottlenecks without understanding how the public domain has been established. Literature and art, which can be traced back to the establishment of the first civilizations, are the sources by which I could (to a certain degree) grasp how the public domain of today is shaping our reality and the truths we believe in. Poetry mainly in the East, and philosophy in the West, were and are the main sources through which to do human studies. As an Iranian/ Dutch person, considering my Persian poetry and storytelling roots, I am intuitively interested in poetic language and experience. The Iranian thinker and author Dariush Ashoori (1938), in his book Poetry and Thought (1994), believes in the function of poetry for changing attitudes towards the world and that the function of poetry, in this sense, is to review the world and change it, to create and innovate (Ashoori 37).4 In Persian culture, poetry was and is a way of existing, a way of relating to and conceiving the world: a political action. But since globalization, poetry has become more of a symbolic act, and visual language has become the poetic language of the country to overcome censorship (Tavakolian 2020).5 At the same time, having lived for the past ten years in the Netherlands, I have learned to approach reality through philosophy and rationalizing. For instance, if we follow the views of Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), contemporary political reality confronts us with the lack of an unambiguous orientation that direct our actions. In his publication Liquid Times (2007), living in a century of uncertainty, he names five developments that contribute to that (post-) modern uncertainty. First, is the transition from solid to liquid modernity: social structures change faster than anyone can anticipate. Second, is the separation of power and politics: politics outsources its tasks to the market and thus reduces citizens to consumers. Third, is the abolition of the solidarity principle and its expansion in the fourth element: post history in which the action is focused on the present. And finally, there is hyper-individualistic reflexivity: all responsibility lies with the individual, who must be able to oversee all possibilities within the contemporary capriciousness 12~
„[t]hat may not bring collective liberation, but it does bring relief: so the plan is, and we pretend there is a plan, we can execute it, but, if we abandon the plan, then only tyranny and chaos will reign” (De Cauter 140). and must be flexible (Bauman 15-19). He summarizes the development towards these five orientations with three metaphorical archetypes: the forester (Christian Middle Ages), the gardener (rational modernity), and the hunter (liquid modernity) (Bauman 132). If we combine five orientations and the metaphor of the hunter described by Bauman, we can argue that we have become hunters of neo-liberal information. Since the gigantic mechanism of neoliberalism has been forming our realities, the thread of truth is not in the hand of stories coming from human experience but is in the hands of economic forces pursuing their own stories. Therefore, I can agree with the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s (1892-1940) argument in his essay The Storyteller (1936) about the death of storytelling and experience both in the West and East. However, what I argue is that, in the metropolises of the twenty-first century, the way we communicate is determined by the technology and by the markets, or economic considerations and by algorithmic selection. Therefore, the public domain is influenced by sentiments rather than conversational reasoning—affecting emotions, such as feelings of hope and fear. Thus, literature (poetry and philosophy) and the public domain (i.e., the state, stock market, and, since the past decade, social media) offer us specific opportunities to get to grips with who we are in the world. But the public domain also has the tendency to master our cognition and existence, and this is when we can speak of a lack of freedom. Yet, artists—such as Newsha Tavakolian (1981), Iranian photographer and a Magnum photos member, whose work is going to be discussed further in this paper—as visual freedom fighters, teach us that it is still possible to walk on a tightrope above the city and look down with a critical gaze to translate what is happening. This reflection is not cheerful but there is no escape from it. Lieven de Cauter (1959)—a Belgian philosopher, writer, and poet—in his book Metamodernity for Beginners (‘Metamoderniteit voor Beginners’) offers us a helping hand, telling us to consciously allow for fiction as a condition of possibility. We must simply pretend:
This master thesis is therefore stained with ambivalence and plays against the neo-liberal public truths; not as the absolute answer— because then this attempt has failed—but to explore alternatives to 14~ criticism. In other words, it looks for new possibilities for critique on the decay of stories and the rise of information in our lives. 6 Referring to Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid time theory.
16~ With the rise of globalization and neoliberal economies since the early 1990s (after the end of the Cold War), what is common among the people in modern economized cities is uncertainty.6 As a result, uncertainty has led humanity into the limbo realm of facts which are fictions. The International Monetary Fund identifies four basic aspects posed by globalization: trade and teams’ actions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people, and the dissemination of knowledge (IMF Staff). Thus, today’s cities are places for the global economy, non-national firms, and stock markets. Cities have become places to create fictive realities to drive people to take certain actions. In the current post-truth era (a term which was selected as the word of the year by Oxford in 2016 (Wynants 10)), the public domain is influenced by sentiments rather than conversational reasoning. In such situations, the question to ask is whether or not we still have access to the truth. If yes, then how and in what form does it take place? The public domain of today is built upon the economic and political pillars which influence public opinion. The origin of public opinion in the West can be traced back to the advent of the first cities in the Middle ages, with the practice of literature (Bax et al. 21). At around the same time, similar activity was taking place in the public squares of the Middle East—particularly in Persian culture. The medium through which this was done was mainly that of poetry, and these poems would often be about the tyranny of the sovereigns (Aryanpur 20). All the while, Walter Benjamin in his essay The Storyteller, has warned Western society about the ‘death of the storyteller’, which is caused by the rise of the information era. In this study, by combing theoretical (literature) and practice-based research (film), we will explore how a work of art is not opposed to or juxtaposed with reality but evokes fictive realities. This reality gives space to embodiment: to give a body, face, or voice to what remains visible or hidden in public space, through imagination (Bax et al. 20). While we are aware that the basis of it is fictive, it is nevertheless a presentation of a world view that closely corresponds to our true experience of reality. “The modern struggle of the 21st century is not the public sphere, but rather about a common place that transcends the division between private and public, between market and state.” (Sander Bax, Pascal Gielen, Bram Ieven 25)
18~ The German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas (1929), in his classic essay The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), has discussed the public sphere as civil society. Habermas begins his discussion from history—in particular, the Greek city-state. A similar investigation has also been done by Michael Foucault (1926-1984) in his study on the Greek notion of Parrhesia—meaning the courage to tell the truth relating to others and the self—which, according to Euripides’ plays could only be practised by Athenians in public (Foucault „The Courage of the Truth“ 33-56). But Habermas traces further and finds the fundamental foundations influencing the establishment of the public sphere and its emergence in the development of a new economic and political system during the fourteenth and fifteenth century. He considers that the second rise of the public sphere came about in modern times along with the development of media within civil society. According to Habermas, with the rise of capitalism came the urgency of a ‘sphere of commodity exchange and social labour’ (Habermas 27). This sphere of commodity exchange was, in Habermas’ own words, ‘privatized, but publicly relevant’ (ibid). In other words, it is a public sphere that is not regulated by the state. There are two possible interpretations of such a situation. A negative approach encounters the main elements of neoliberalism, like that of Michael Foucault in his argument on the relationship between sovereignty and economic liberalism during the seventeenth century (Foucault, “Society Must be Defended“ 13). A more optimistic approach, which is argued by Habermas, creates an alternative place for politics (Habermas 29). But his optimism did not last longer than a decade and, in the early 1970s, he began to warn his readers about the rise of technological communication media and the control exercised by various political and commercial parties which were posing a threat to the independence of the public sphere. “The use value of a message is less important than its exchange value, its contribution to a larger pool, flow, or circulation of content. A contribution need not be understood; it need only to be repeated, reproduced, forwarded”. (Jodi Dean 108)
20~
“[i]f we want to learn something new, then we have to interrupt the city, because globalization has ensured that places become interchangeable; therefore, the classical question of who I am is shifted to where I am” (Esser). 7 From an interview conducted by myself with Bram Esser on 5th October 2020 With the expansion of urban living toward the end of the seventeenth century and the creation of metropolises during the nineteenth century, what was necessary (both in the East and West) was that the economy would circulate. Consequently, the public sphere of today is based on economic and political flow. In such societies, to have this flow, it is enormously valuable to repeat and reproduce truths accordingly, to influence public opinion. Thus, the truth becomes fluid and dependent on the time and place in which it has been given to an individual. The Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1927- 2017) has introduced the concept of Liquid Modernity (1999). This is later modernity marked by global capitalist economies with their increasing privatization of services, and by the flow of the information revolution. As a consequence of this flow, what happens somewhere on the other side of the world affects us, and vice versa: our daily reality has an impact on unknown places in the world. Globalization had already been around for some time but it was still experiencing a certain ‘natural’ slowdown. However, today, globalization operates at the speed of light. As a result, the truth—which is formed in the metropolises—has become fragmented and constantly changes. Therefore, the role of the city and the public domain must be fundamentally changed. Bram Esser (1976)—a Dutch philosopher known as an explorer of the everyday life, who is also fascinated by the phenomenon of globalization—claims that
7. To find an answer to the question, instead of looking at a GPS on his phone to see where he is, he goes to different places, explores new areas, and talks to people in the “[t]hrough hearing their stories and history, they can tell me where I am” (Esser).
22~ neighbourhood:
It is indeed a relevant approach: one has to enter the city to hear stories—even stronger, has to experience them—because reality also largely consists of stories. Places only gain meaning in fiction; thus, fiction needs to be attached. A landscape consists half in a physical environment and half in your imagination. It is imagination that brings the landscape to life, for it is more influenced by memories about the past and stories people tell. But globalization has put fiction into crisis as well. “With the advent of the first cities in the Middle ages, West European culture gave rise to the idea that the square or market square was the place where public opinion was formed, and literature was practiced.” (Bax et al. 21)
24~
“The songs and compositions they used, particularly after the Constitutional Revolution, replaced the „free language“ of the press, which was compatible to the nature of the nation, and as soon as they were released to the public, they became popular among the people, and these songs/poems awakened their sense of self-awareness and motivated the masses to mobilize and fight for their rights.” (Aryanpour 29)8 Though this quotation by Bax et al. focuses on how public opinion was formed in market squares in Middle-age Western Europe, it is also true that, at around the same time, similar activity was taking place in the public squares of the Middle East: particularly in Persian culture. The medium through which this was done was mainly that of poetry and storytelling. After several centuries, the culture of poetry in Persia enhanced and became a significant tool for forming public opinions. For instance, in the late 19th century, minstrels, clowns and magicians were creating a kind of comic public show in market squares, which entertained while also forming various political voices. The groups of performers responsible for this roamed the cities, staging scenes and performing small theatrical pieces. In these pieces, they would often openly mock and criticize authority in public domains. As Yahya Aryanpour (1907- 1985) mentioned in his book From Saba to Nima (1971): “the term information refers to a specific type of social organization in which the production, processing and transmission of information, due to the new technological conditions that have arisen in this historical period, are the main sources of productivity and power” (Castells 57). 8 All Aryanpour quotations are translated into English from Persian/Farsi, by myself.
26~
“[e]very glance at a newspaper demonstrates that it has reached a new low, that our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible” (Benjamin 83). Returning to 2020, in our neo-liberal, capitalist world, everywhere is privatized or nationalized; therefore, there is almost no public sphere in the city to share experience. Instead, the city, as the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells (1942) claims, has become an Information City (Castells 1989). We are living in a post-truth era in which facts, the truth, and reality are increasingly destabilized, while fiction is given a status upgrade. An example of this can be found in the presidential election of America in 2016, in which objective facts proved to be less important than emotion-driven public opinion (Wynants 10). With the technological developments and rise of social media in society, spreading any kind of information is now easier than at any other time in the history. Castells says:
8. The advertising and mass media industries find many applications in this context because, in addition to reducing the time between production and consumption of goods and aiding the distribution of goods in the global capitalist system, they provide a suitable platform for ruling consumer life for people. Almost a century ago, while the German-Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was working on his masterpiece essay The Storyteller (1936), the writer, of course, did not have a laptop but he nevertheless assumed himself to be a citizen in the communication era. The essay meditates on the role of storytelling in society, the dangers it is facing, its decay, and how our relationship with truth— both general and specific—is shaped by stories. Benjamin argues that because of rise of information— through the ubiquity of the “why” in the form of news—we no longer care for the experience of others. Benjamin directed his complaint towards the commodification of experience in the newspapers, but, most of all, strongly complained about the news industry:
This applies to such (online) entertainment today. As Castells claims,
“[t]he paradigm shift in the present age can be considered as a transition from technology based cheap energy inputs to technology based on cheap information inputs” (Castells 92).
“was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience” (Benjamin 83).
28~ „no incident is narrated unless descriptions are specified in advance“ (id. 89).
“the value of information does not go beyond that particular moment when it happened. The news must completely surrender to that moment and explain himself in every way without wasting time“ (id. 90). Consequently, experience loses its value and information has become the truth of the twenty-first century. According to Benjamin, pervasive wars and inflation are the direct causes of the devaluation of experience:
As a result of the truly awful things they had seen in the early 20th century, people no longer wished to talk about what, a hundred years before, might have made a ballad or, a thousand years before, an epic poem. In fact, experience—the perception of the world through living rather than experimentation—loses its authority. The story also loses its source of inspiration. But on another level, the “dispersion of information” has a deceptive effect on experience and has led to a crisis in storytelling and the novel. In the newspapers,
While the value of storytelling, which is deeply rooted in oral culture, leaves many events unsaid, thereby giving the reader the opportunity or interpretation,
Since perceiving truth is very much dependent on the time and place in which it has been given, the meaning and role of fiction is therefore facing a crisis by the engines of advertisement and information. In the decrease of stories from our lives, fiction has found its place in information and become a tool for various advertisement companies and political organizations to pursue their goals. Fiction is a domain of the writer and the artist, not of the journalist or the politician. It does not mean that fiction has nothing to do with the truth. On the contrary, we know that a story arranges facts into a narrative— “the effect of the storyteller‘s work on the story remains as the effect of the potter‘s hand on the potter‘s clay“ (id. 90-92).
30~
“If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Borden is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places — the activities that are intimately associated with boredom — are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listener disappears.” (id. 90)
9 Full title: On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life often, exaggerating and rationalizing them. Precisely because fiction does not claim to be truth, it is honest and leaves interpretation up to its audience. But just because stories are stemming from the imagination realm, this does not mean that they are inherently untrue. Perhaps stories actually reveal a deeper truth about the world in which we live than statistical facts. As Benjamin says:
Artistic storytelling is a connection that does not present itself as an objective reality, but as a social process. Since we bombard ourselves with unauthorized information, lacking the emotional context that only skilful storytelling can convey, the role of storyteller in helping us to cultivate wisdom in the age of information is an increasingly challenging and important one. This wealth of available information has also created an environment causing neglect towards our surrendering. We can almost never be sure about any thoughts, since everything is changing at the speed of light. In order to seem aware, we form our so-called ideas by relying on detailed information and superficial perceptions. The most dangerous by-product of the trend of information and the greatest threat to storytelling is something that Benjamin recognized: our sensitivity to boredom.
Psychoanalyst Adam Philips (1954) in his essays on the Unexamined Life (1994)9 calls boredom capacity a growth success for the child, and said it is essential to creative life (Popova). The brevity of the story is the most important factor that causes it to be remembered. Listening to the retelling of a story is a part of its nature, which requires the emptiness of wings and lethargy that is achieved less and less every day. Thus, in our financialized, capitalist world, in which oral storytelling has lost its place, storytellers have become journalists, editors, filmmakers, or curators who help people to understand not only 32~ what is important in the world but also how to apply them to our own experience. The great storytellers of today are transforming information into knowledge and experience, mostly in the framework of fiction. Through symbolism, metaphor, and communication, the storyteller helps us interpret information, integrate it within our existing knowledge, and turn it into wisdom. Though they are creating information as well, a great story of expanding understanding also invites the audience to reflect. The work of art, on the other hand, evokes fictional truths. American philosopher of art Kendall Walton (1939), in his work Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990), argues that “fact can be fiction and fiction fact” (Walton 73). According to Walton, the representational arts can be considered props that stimulate specific imaginations, in the way that kids’ toys serve as props in the fantasy world of children (Walton 34). The ambiguity of stories which emphasize personal experience— unlike information, which tries to explain everything—led to stories using any manner of fantastic ideas or miracles because they are not defined by the pursuit of a “why” or a scientific idea of “truth”. Therefore, we ought not to let stories disappear from our lives without a fight, for, stories (as Benjamin hinted at) allow us to escape the systems that dominate our lives: most notably, capitalism itself. Unlike information, they also bring us closer to other people. Telling stories is a perpetual act of rebellion: claiming freedom and the value of our experience against a world that tries to tell us we are nothing unless we contribute to information. 34~
“In neo-realism cinema, the real is no longer represented or reproduced but aimed at.” (Deleuze 132) We know everything by language, but language can only be known by language. The only thing that language has resemblances with is light: light illuminates itself. It is so enlightening that it reveals everything but remains hidden. It is light that enables our eyes to see everything that is visible. But, visual or Cinematic language embraces language, light, time, music, and location to enable us to sense different realities and the urge to change. In other words, cinematic is a human force that recognizes the need for change in the world and informs people. Such a feature of cinema was not important until after the Second World War. Gilles Deleuze (1925- 1995) in his study in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, reflects on the liveliness and grandeur of the modern cinema (Bensmaia “if we take the history of thought, we see that time has always put the notion of truth into crisis” (Deleuze 130).
36~
“neo-realism produced a formal or material additional reality” (ibid.). 57). After the Second World War, the units of situation and action can no longer be maintained in the disjointed post-war world. The new situation gives rise to a pure optical and sound situation from which the ‘direct time-image’ emerges. This new visual language has signs which are called ‘chronosigns’. These signs bring the notion of truth into question and, from there, modern cinema gives a new approach to a number of important problems of modern thought: the undecidability of truth and falsity, the relationship between inside and outside, the nature of ‘the people’, and the relationship between brain and body. Deleuze draws several consequences from this reversal in the cinema which resulted in the break-up of the classical cinema that was defined in relation to the external world and self-aware subjects. He argues:
Following Deleuze’s theory, two regimes of the image can be contrasted: an organic regime and a crystalline regime. The former is a description which assumes the independence of its subject that can be called organic. The latter is the contrary: a crystalline description stands for its object, replaces it, both creates and erases it, and constantly gives way to other descriptions which contradict, displace, or modify the preceding ones. The crystalline image resulted in the neo-realism cinema movement in Italy. In this genre of filmmaking, reality contains ambiguity and the spectator is positioned in-between what has been perceived as real and fiction. Deleuze puts it together as follows:
This reality was a source of inspiration for the French New Wave in the 1950s and Iranian New Wave in the 1960s-2010s. But the new wave deliberately broke with the form of the true to be replaced by powers of life—cinematographic powers considered to be profound. Inspired by the new wave of visual storytelling, Iranian filmmakers, such as Forough Farokhzad, Abbas Kiasrostami, and Sohrab Shahid Sales, succeeded in making internationally-known films. What these films have in common is their socio-political engagement, rejection of traditional filmmaking, exploration of new approaches towards narrative, visual language, and editing, and use of existential themes. All of these characteristics are still relevant in the visual language of Iranian storytellers. To observe how, in our current globalized world, 38~ visual storytellers are dealing with similar themes, we are now going to reflect on the artistic oeuvre of a contemporary Iranian visual storyteller. “I am not an artist; I am more of a storyteller” (Tavakolian 2020)
40~
10 (see also Wikipedia contributors “Iran Student Protests”)
11 Audio interview with Tavakolian conducted by me on 3rd December 2020. (“…I was longing to shift my practice, but the events in 2009 speeded up the process” (Tavakolian 2020)).
“After ten years of working as a professional photojournalist, I was aware that the language of photography was changing. The essence of being a photojournalist is to be at the spot and record Newsha Tavakolian (1981) is considered one of the best self-taught contemporary photographers in Iran. In the last two decades, Tavakolian has been able to expand her professional activities in the field of photography, curation and video installations with themes rooted in social concerns of her homeland—Iran—and around the world. Tavakolian’s signature characteristics can be distinguished in the way she incorporates colour, dimmed lighting, and gloomy atmospheres in her images. Her subjects stem from both imagination and reality, the boundary between fiction and reality is blurred, and her works always correspond with the social structure, its struggle and contradictions. Furthermore, her works provoke a suspension in time: the conquest of the past is unresolved and there is an uncertain future. Born and raised in Tehran, Newsha Tavakolian began working as a professional photographer in the Iranian press at the age of sixteen, right after dropping out of high school and completing a six-month photography course. In the late 1990s, with the dawn of the reformist movement in the political system of the country, Tavakolian started her career in a women’s magazine and later worked for six other reformist newspapers (Tavakolian 2020). Her first professional activity is considered to be her coverage of the July 1999 students’ uprising.10 These photos were used in several Iranian newspapers. Tavakolian was thrown into the world of contemporary art fortuitously 11
In 2009, her press card was temporarily confiscated as a consequence of her covering the controversial presidential election result, which forced her to work beyond her job as a photojournalist. The event caused the dawn of her artistic journey, which she described as follows: events in the moment; I no longer had the longing to only capture the moment and document events. Therefore, I decided to turn my gaze from outside to myself and to see what is happening inside me. It was not easy to throw myself suddenly in the world of, so to say, ‘art photography’. Through practice, I was able to translate my inner self into the circumstances of other people, whose stories I may be able to tell. Though, I never call myself an art artist, I am more of a Storyteller.” (Tavakolian)
12 (see also Wikipedia contributors “Women’s Rights in Iran”) “[i]n my artistic practice, I always start from an inner struggle, for example, I always wanted to become a singer, but I could not, therefore I decided to portray other female singers who are not allowed to perform for the public” (Tavakolian). 42~
“I owe my artistic vision to my practice as a photojournalist, through which I was able to get acquainted with different parts of the society. Photography has been expanding my knowledge in sociology. I can say that my camera made me kind of a sociologist” (Tavakolian). In her first artistic project titledListen (2010-2011), the border between the fictitious and the real is blurred. In this project, she focused on women singers in Iran, who are banned from performing solo or producing their own albums due to Islamic regulations that have been in effect since the 1979 revolution.12 She explained:
In her exhibition at a private gallery in Tehran, she made a dream CD cover for each of the women—however, the CD cases were empty (Magnum Photos “Listen”). figure 01 Being a photojournalist for more than a decade had a direct effect on her vision as an artist. She stated:
Her second artistic project, titled Look (2011), stems from her knowledge about Iranian society. This project is a portrait of Iran’s middle-class youth. The melancholy colour theme that dominates the image adds to the unmotivated feeling of her subjects. The subjects of Tavakolian are not frozen by her or by a photographic process— they are a generation of young people from a land whose history is replete with suspensions. Every window in this metropolis is a story of a purgatory, a boundary between the past and the future. figure 02 Staying and going, and any other such confrontation in the present, has let to endless passivity—a hopelessness that has dried tears, 44~
“In Iran, we have used the language of poetry and metaphor for many years to overcome censorship and express our inner selves, and it seems that in today’s world, particularly in Iran, visual image and metaphor have become an alternative to poetry and a way of overcoming censorship. Even if we distance ourselves from specialized photography even in the eyes of its subject. figure 03It does not matter if these are photographs that have been documented or staged… what matters is who her subjects are. They breathe, and each of them, behind the windows facing this city, is obscured by the prevailing filth and external suspensions (Magnum Photos “Look”). One of the characteristics of Tavakolian’s identity is her refusal to conform to the expectations of others. Her works are full of courage and independence, regardless of any nationality. In 2014, she won the Carmignac Gestion photojournalism award (L’Œil de la Photographie). The award initially caused public controversy between her and the award officials when they asked her to change the title of her work from “Blank Pages of an Iranian Photo Album” to “The Lost Generation”. Since she was unwilling to make this change, she therefore returned the 50.000-euro award to the foundation. However, this was all quickly rectified, as the foundation soon surrendered and decided to give the artist complete freedom, after all. The Blank Pages of an Iranian Photo Album (2015) project consists of a photo book, a collection of several personal accordion albums stacked together, and a video installation, in various exhibitions around the world. At the beginning of each of these albums, a story of each person is given to us. Along with the text, we also see an image of their childhood. In this project, her aim is to reveal the untold stories of society under sanctions. Therefore, she focuses on the family albums which give an almost complete picture of what life in an ideal and special cultural context demands from us. Photos in the photo album mostly refer to the lack of happy moments in the main course of life, and for this very reason they represent something that has been tried so hard to overcome; it means daily life, despair, loss and anything that wants to show that undesirable part of life. With this approach, Tavakolian depicts the everyday life and moments of nine subjects, in the structure of the album world that has no thematic value for photography. It can be said that, from the photographer’s point of view, the blank pages of an Iranian photo album should be filled with images of moments and feelings of human life that have never been seen before but are considered the reality of their life. figure 04 books and look more closely at the world around us and observe a little more delicately what is happening around us, we will realize this very well.” (Tavakolian)
13 Premenstrual syndrome
“[w]hile the nature of my work is that while it often starts out in the personal realms, I always want to connect it to the world we are living in. As I got to understand the feeling of PMS more, I also found it to be a metaphor for the complex times we live 46~ in globally. I found that mother earth is on PMS” (Magnum Photos “For the Sake”).
“I like to test myself, to challenge, to have doubts, fears, apprehensions in my projects, so that every time I can learn from my trial and error and add to my knowledge” (Tavakolian).
“[i]n this project, I completely followed my gut, and did not limit myself, I wanted to experiment” (Magnum Photos “For the Sake”). For the Sake of Calmness (2020) is a twenty-minute video- installation—the latest project by Tavakolian—in which she combines theory and practice with her own persona experience. For the Sake of Calmness primarily went on show on October 4th 2020 in Tehran’s Argo Factory, then in January 2021 was on show at New York’s Thomas Erben gallery, and in February was officially selected for Ammodo Tiger Short competition in International Rotterdam film festival 2021. In this project, she combines theory and practice and has established a relationship between landscape, history and imagination. The film is highly coded yet perceivable by every person, from any background. Inspired by PMS13, Tavakolian creates a world in which the problem of modern thought has been given a voice and image:
The fact that an artist, from a personal experience (that of premenstrual syndrome) which is shared by half the world‘s population (i.e., women) can find in it a metaphor for the complex and confusing situation of the world today, shows the deep and extensive experience of the author. And, of course, with a brief look at the rich artistic oeuvre of Newsha Tavakolian, this should not come as a surprise. What is remarkable is her curiosity to explore the unexplored and step into unknown places:
For the Sake of Calmness is the most personal project of Tavakolian. She explained: “I enjoy from the world of imagination, but it always has to be connected to reality and should not be exaggerated” (Tavakolian).
48~ The chosen cinematic form and medium required collaboration with other disciplines; therefore, she worked with a cinematographer, a play writer and a sound designer. By collaborating with other disciplines, Tavakolian has created a world of moving image in which the distinction between frozen and moving images is blurred:
The images are both still and moving, this technique gives the viewer enough time to ponder and interpret images—the contrary to the fast cuts and high speed of cinema-industry films. Beginning with the thought-provoking first scene, with a gloomy shadow cast over the building, is a signifier of Tavakolian’s composition. figure 05 Through a monologue by the artist, we hear three times a similar repetitive monologue about the pre-sale of the building units, which subtly pinpoints the current cancerous capitalist system. Each time, the narrator talks from a different unit and claims to be the one who knows everything and tells the truth, all the while, we are not sure who is telling the truth. What Tavakolian tries to emphasize here is that, as individuals, throughout our lives, we have tried to communicate from different perspectives and places but we have not succeeded in it. In this scene, while looking at the building and listening to the monologue, the camera subtly zooms in, and one’s mind finds the moment to ponder upon the feelings and dive into inner struggles and experiences which we have gained from public life. Throughout the film, the relations between inside and outside—both in terms of private and public space, and in terms of individuals inner conflicts—corresponds with the intense presence of confusion in 21st-century societies. Who we are will always remain concealed in the heart of reality, and this is expressed throughout the film with an indescribable thoughtfulness. Maybe it is due to choosing both male and female subjects that this film is not merely about the premenstrual period of women; instead, it carefully refers to people‘s confused state of being, regardless of sex or gender. One of the strongest scenes of the film is the scene from the top of a building in the city, in which the spectator is brutally confronted with the ugly political games of the progressive left-wing and conservative right-wing governments. Here is an emphasis on the misguidance of humans with which we have been struggling throughout our lives. figure 06 With military phrases such as „to the left, left” or “to the right, right“ or, elsewhere, „just forward“, Tavakolian 50~ tries to emphasize the political and social struggle that started in the 20th century, and which the 21st-century inhabitants of the world are still engaged in. German sociologist George Simmel (1858-1918) in his study on culture in The Future of Our Culture says that we become alienated from an objective culture because we find ourselves trapped in a process of anonymity and so retreat into individual isolation. It is only the artist who can combine objective culture with their mental culture by achieving a kind of harmony between receiving objective culture and his or her creative production. Simmel not only uses the arts as an example of his analysis but also uses aesthetics as a way of studying social phenomena. Society as a whole can take the form of a work of art when we can give meaning to each of its components based on its share in the whole. Social organization itself is an aesthetic work, insofar as it cultivates an end for the functioning of components and their interrelationships. Simmel believes that the artist is the mirror of their society (Simmel 175). In a nutshell, Tavakololian, as a storyteller, is a mirror of her society, along with this exceptional opportunity through which she chooses the frame of her choice. Her latest work is a great example of how— through combining modern art disciplines such as image, music, text, light and space design— the author can play the role of a storyteller in her society and express an abstract subject which is coded, and yet readable for others. Tavakolian, as the storyteller, refers to life (and this life, ironically, includes not only her own experience but also a large part of the experiences of others). She is able to put recognizable personal stories in a social context, and in this way make people think about the world, the political systems, their own feelings and thoughts about the subject. Therefore, Tavakolian is a great example of a contemporary visual storyteller-fighter who, with her courage and rebellious actions, is seeking freedom and the value of experience in this age of information. 52~ Living in a world without culture and art is the opposite of what builds a society. In addition to being alive through its political, social, and economic events, humanity also performs actions and leaves obvious traces in the form of various signs or artworks (Lévi-Strauss 176). With the fear that art will be reduced to a purely material aspect, one cannot ignore the other aspects of it: explicitly, human understanding. There has always been a need to use different expressions or invent other languages. The desire for creativity, like breathing, cannot be 54~
14 For instance, Tavakolian: by her refusal to conform to the expectation of others and the example of the Carmignac Gestion photojournalism award. suppressed. When culture is independent, it is a source of creativity: an organic environment in which living matter, all kinds of connections, interests, crises, and different ways of life and thought can grow (Bourdieu 96). Unlike science, which seeks to find answers to all questions about man and his environment through research and inquiry, art raises questions without necessarily seeking answers. In other words, it claims nothing but tries to express what it feels. Its extraordinary dimensions go back to the astonishing variety of expressions. It opens up different realms of perception, pays attention to the world, extracts it or elevates it. Art—like thought— allows for a deep study of reality. For many, especially ordinary people, an encounter with an artistic field or cultural activity acts as a stimulus, a means of awareness, or an opportunity to exit their social situations. However, culture— like formal art—can be plagued by a liberal epidemic. Authoritarian governments have always replaced culture by praising their power with art based on principles and laws. Today, it is our democracies— whose economic interests have become their most important preoccupation—that set the standard for the aesthetics of our lives (Stiegler). Dominance methods, through the principle of standardization, occupy cultural channels to promote their indivisible and expandable ideological patterns. Like a viscous weave that surrounds us in all directions and pores of life, it plans ignorance and deliberately contaminates our living and sensory environment with ugliness. They no longer look for causes and effects, but impact. Their goal is to weaken public judgment, reduce the power of action, and destroy the possibilities that can transform society. Today, the current protests and discontent provide more tricks by understanding that art opens eyes and creation means resistance (or vice versa)14. Thus, we can stand together more vigorously in the means of propaganda, connecting the worlds of thought and art, science and culture, and information and storytelling. On the scale of the human, it is easy to see that the centre of human passion is the riddle: the most beautiful ideas emerge from doubt, the charm and importance of confusion. The state of the world deserves hope and courage to be able to jump out of these few lights, feelings that give the oppressed the power of joy and happiness. Stimulating the human soul, awakening consciences, enlightening lives, stylizing reality, recording the beautiful, loading the horizon, irrigating life, or inventing weapons... Wherever there is independence, culture and art should be included in the domain of world perception. 56~ Bibliography
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This production has been made possible with support from:
Ashna Sarkar, my supervisor and mentor, who shared her knowledge and patience with me in the process of researching for and writing this thesis;
Newsha Tavakolian and Bram Esser, who shared their insights into their practices during an in-depth conversation on the topic;
Rosie Taekema, who hunted down my English errors and gave coherency to my sentences;
Ghenwa Abu-Fayad and Anna Bierler, who gave their creative touch into the design and presentation of this piece;
The Sandberg Institute, Resolution department, who have given me the opportunity and space to examine myself and my interests;
And finally, Amir Komelizade, the greatest supporting and encouraging partner one could ever ask for. A Play for Public Vida Kasaei, MA, Moving Image ‘Resolution’, Sandberg Institute Student number 1030012 Tutor Ashna Sarkar Proofreading Rosie Taekema Design Anna Bierler, Ghenwa Abou Fayad April 2021