De-Orientalizing Iran: The Art of Sevruguin, Neshat, Navab and Ghazel

Culturally hybrid persons are often caught in the crossfire of prejudices. For Iranians living in the West, the demonization of the Other becomes a daily negation of the Self. How do they find agency between hegemonic representational systems that seek to dichotomize and essentialize East and West? The purpose of this study was to investigate ways of re-presenting and critiquing self and culture through camera-based art, using a comparative analysis of four culturally hybrid Iranian artists: Antoin Sevruguin (ca. 1838-1933), Shirin Neshat (b. 1957), Ghazel (b. 1966), and Aphrodite Désirée Navab (b. 1971). Several research questions were addressed, navigating five major issues: Orientalism, cultural recall, cultural identity, diaspora, and self-narration. The results of the study demonstrate how an Orientalist tool has been transformed into a means for self-representation and cultural critique. These artists use the camera to reclaim their life narratives in autobiographical productions, challenging both the Orientalist hegemony over and the Iranian censorship of the telling of their own life stories.