On August 11, 2023, the Iran 1400 Project had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Hamid Keshmirshekan about his book The Art of Iran in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries: Tracing the Modern and the Contemporary. Dr. Keshmirshekan analyzed the modern and contemporary art of Iran from the mid-twentieth century to the present, examining how the discourse of art and artistic movements is presented. During the Q&A session, he discussed what institutions provided an arena for these discourses, his contributions to scholarship on the Saqqa-Khaneh school, and the new-orientalist approach to art and its long-term effect on the contemporary art of Iran.
Hamid Keshmirshekan is an art historian, critic and Senior Teaching Fellow at the Department of History of Art and Archaeology, School of Arts, SOAS. His interests are twentieth and twentieth-first century art from the Middle East, with particular attention to the recent developments in art practice and its relation to the context.
