Some Hybrid Forms: Memory and Imagination in Contemporary Iranian Art more

In this paper I look into the idea of hybrid forms, and some of ways in which contemporary Iranian art treats “reality”. The relevance of this is that the recreation of the past—whether by writers, historians and artists individually, or by “culture” in general—is a hybrid process combining imagination and reality. It is never a simple matter of “discovering”, deconstructing and defining “the past” in “the present”. Generally speaking, collective memory is a major factor in the process of constructing the past of a society: it shapes contemporary culture by bringing together a myriad of individual stories. Moreover, in art, myth and architecture—i.e. in the narratives a society tells itself in words, images and forms—imagination plays a great part in their collective representations. This is not forgotten in terms of the personal imagination, but is often overlooked in terms of the collective imagination, and therefore in collective memory. In the act of remembering and reflecting on the cultural past, the artist brings recognisable, familiar, and obscure “foreign” patterns to the public cultural present (of Iran) by delving into his or her own individual, but also society’s collective, memory and imagination. This amalgamation of memory and imagination by the artist (or historian) may undermine the established, previously accepted view of reality by re-forming, re-calibrating and disorienting present time vis-à-vis the past. Hence, it is sometimes considered as a subversive repositioning of the present time towards the past, and this is often done through the process of hybridisation of memory and imagination, collective and individual.