Following on from the previous chapter, this chapter deals particularly with different strands of identity politics, their association with the post-revolutionary state's cultural strategy and the artist's aesthetic rebellion versus the state's expectations. I explore the ways in which the artists’ focal beliefs about social relations and cultural essentialism find expression in their artwork. I further examine strategies employed by artists and art activists in Iran concerned with re-thinking notions of embodiment and performativity in tension with the political contexts of the country. I attempt to identify what has happened in the course of contemporary Iranian cultural politics during the post-revolutionary period, which has formed the current power relations between the state's cultural prescription and the artists’ attempts to reclaim their cultural spaces. This chapter explores how artistic involvements with activism are increasingly moving away from the utopian and prescriptive agendas promoted by the state, and hence echoing more broadly the ‘subjective turn’ of social movements. As was mentioned earlier – and I would like to reiterate it here – artists have not been absorbed by the state's soft power, which aims to impose its political and ideological values on the nation's life. Artists’ resistance is debated through their works by referring to themes such as history, memory, social conventions and power relations.

Power Relations and Artistic Subjectivity

It was addressed in earlier chapters that in contemporary Iranian cultural life, including artistic activities, one can detect the central presence of the Iranian state and its role in standardising the conventional paradigms in all cultural and artistic moods. Political scientist Shireen Hunter rightly argues that in addition to Islamicising Iran's cultural life, the post-revolutionary state sought to install a revolutionary spirit into the country's cultural and artistic life. Indeed, a principal tenet of the Islamic Republic's cultural philosophy was that art must be in the service of the revolution and Islam. In other words, artistic expression had merit only to the extent that it advanced the goals of the revolution, meaning instilling an Islamic and revolutionary spirit into the people. The autocratic state has sought to dismiss demands for democratic rights and values by dismissing them as Western-imposed values, foreign to the Islamic ‘nature’ of the Iranian nation.