Museum and mosque: The shifting identities of modern Tehran

This dissertation investigates identity, art, and architecture in twentieth-century Iran. Through case studies of two museums and a mosque in the capital city, Tehran, the project aims to elucidate the interdisciplinarity of identity formation and its relationship to nation building at three moments in Iran's modern history: the 1930s, during which the modern nation was designed; circa 1980, the years of revolution and the rising power of Islamism in Iran; and 2000 through 2004, part of the Khatami-era of reform. In particular, the research delves into the role of museums, their participation in the codification of various identities (and art categories), and the ways in which western epistemologies are negotiated in their design, collections, and exhibitions. What has ensued in Iran, and in many other nonwestern places, is a dichotomous understanding of modernity, placing "the modern" in opposition to "tradition." This binary has accrued increasing relevance over the course of the last century throughout the nonwestern and postcolonial world. This research begins to explicate the fallacy of this opposition, which has been garnering increasing ideological and political relevance in Iran. Through analyses of Iranian arts institutions, visual arts, and related discourse, this project demonstrates the polemical nature of artwork, exhibition, and dialog, indicating the ways in which the discourse continues to respond to and reify political rhetoric-however unwittingly. By dissecting varying strategies from mimicry to subversion, this research charts modern and contemporary artistic developments in Iran, not in relation to themselves or the west, but in tandem with national identity politics. Ultimately this dissertation shows that despite positioning by artist, curator, and politician, a century of dichotomous rhetoric has obscured the very real negotiations that highlight an Iranian modernity that is decidedly dynamic.