This chapter provides a critical account of the politics of identity and examines issues of reception and the politics of representation within the international (Euro-American) exhibition system. I will discuss how the majority of the artistic events relating to the contemporary art of Iran in Europe and America have tended to rely upon ethno-cultural categories and political identity markers. I argue that the main objective of the majority of these events is to frame essentialised cultural views and a fixed image of ethnicity that tends to reduce the works of artists to geopolitical or ethnic concepts. While these reductive framing devices do offer useful marketing tools for artists who work outside the Euro-American mainstream, they also contribute to blurring the complexities of each individual's art practice. The problem is directly related to the politics of visuality, since it is the exhibition system that determines standards of visibility. The fact is that there seem to be certain criteria within the global exhibition system, such as ‘originality’, which have been used to determine whether or not a work of art is ‘valued’ and worthy of consideration and ultimately decide whether it could be included in the canon. Moreover, the problematic notion of ‘authenticity’ as a way of assessing non-Western artistic productions has played a key role in shaping mechanisms of choice in the global contemporary art scene. The process that I will describe here is somewhat reminiscent of the old question of how the ‘Orientalist gaze’ becomes aestheticised, as first described in Edward Said's Orientalism. My aim is to explore the tensions that arise when artworks created in a specific socio-cultural context are viewed in a different cultural environment. I explore what is emerging and how different subject-positions are being transformed or produced in the course of unfolding new dialectics of global culture in the contemporary art circuit. The strategies of artists – both residents and expatriates – who react vis-à-vis the standardised and essentialised value system embraced by Western museums and galleries are the central issue of this chapter. I will then deal with these practices and the discursive strategies which challenge this standardisation and essentialisation.