Representation of Islamic-Iranian Identity in Contemporary Iranian Art

In recent years contemporary Iranian art has caught the attention of the people across the world more than before. Undoubtedly, successful presence of Iranian artists in recent auctions and their numerous exhibitions throughout the Europe and USA have been influential in the process of globalization of contemporary Iranian art. Meanwhile since nationality and religion are two significant factors in creation of distinctive identity for an individual and build his identity versus the identity of the other Iranian artist insists on his national and religious identity in order to continue to be successful in global scene and recognized by western audience.
On the other hand, western audience does also consider these elements to be the source of the distinction of him and the oriental other and via these identity-related features he recognizes Iranian artist and accepts him in the global scene. Thus, Iranian artist represents these identity elements in his work in order to be seen in global market. In this way Iranian artists seek to keep their eyes on the form and content of successful works in auctions for their fast entering to sale and transaction cycle. In other words, these new artistic works struggle to reproduce the same familiar national and religious elements with which the previous successful works have earned their fame. Insofar as in many of these works the use of the aforementioned elements by artist is not based on the relationship of the formal and content structure rather for the sake of injection of the symbols which are reminding national or religious notions that catch the attention of the audience. The methodology of the current research is descriptive-analytic and the data have been gathered by means of library studies.