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Surface Tension: Reconsidering Horizontality in the Work of Iranian 'Diaspora' Artists

This chapter, commissioned following a presentation at the Association of Art Historians, Leeds University, April 2006, is a critique of the transgressive concept of horizontality developed by Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois in Formless: A Users Guide (1997). Examining the work of three Iranian women artists it exposes the implicit Eurocentrism of this concept to reinforce a false dichotomy between the secular contemporary art of the ‘west’ and the spiritual and craft based practices of the ‘east’, and evidences excellence in scholarship through its simultaneous attention to the Iranian and Euro-American contexts of visual culture and art history.

This led directly to the commissioning of ‘Political Islam and the Time of Contemporary Art' by Professor Harris for an anthology published by Blackwells Globalization and Contemporary Art (2011) alongside Professors Nicholas Mirzoeff, Julian Stallabrass and Malcolm Bull; a talk ‘Nasreen Mohamedi in Context’ alongside Grant Watson (2009) to accompany the retrospective Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes, Reflections on Indian Modernism at the Milton Keynes Gallery curated by Anthony Spira; an invitation from Professor Gill Perry to present a paper at Tate Modern ‘Abstract Connections, disconnections, ruptures and transformations: Nasreen Mohamedi and the question of context’ (2010) alongside Gill Perry, Paul Wood, David Batchelor and Briony Fer in memory of the art historian Professor Charles Harrison, and a paper ‘Photography and the Colour of Time’ (2010) presented at symposium for the landmark exhibition on photography in South Asia, 'Where Three Dreams Cross', Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, alongside Professor Kobena Mercer and Irit Rogoff.