In this talk, Dr. Honarpisheh situates works by modernist painter and sculptor, Bahman Mohasses, within the wake of the 1953 coup d'état that toppled Mossadegh in Iran as well as within a broader global critique of state violence. Mohasses was a figure who subverted artistic conventions, art historical movements, and national narratives through an expression of figurative abstraction and other medium-specific experimentations between painting, sculpture, and collage. In an analysis that moves between the aesthetic and political conditions of Mohasses' art making, this paper argues that Mohasses turns to destruction as a condition of possibility to express and critique the perpetual violence of his time.

Donna Honarpisheh is the Knight Art + Research Center Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, where she curates pedagogical programs and hosts the museum's podcast, Tomorrow is the Problem. She received her Ph.D. at UC-Berkeley in 2022 in the department of Comparative Literature and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. Her dissertation was entitled "Disordering Modernism: The Aesthetics of Affliction in Post-Coup Iran." Her scholarly articles are published in Symploke, the Journal of Iranian Studies, Critical Times, and Qui Parle.

See the presentation.