Murals as a Play on Space in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Abstract

Iranian street murals are mined for insight into the political and religious proclivities of the Islamic Republic. As a function of sovereign power over physical street space and the urban canvasses offered up by the sides of Iran’s apartment buildings, the murals purport to offer privileged access to the changing techniques and enduring purposes of a revolutionary regime that, as Chelkowski and Dabashi argue, is “in full semiotic control of the representation of itself.” Against this thesis of representational mastery, however, this essay argues that Iranian murals exceed the logic of sovereign control. Through perspective illusionism and their own material ambivalences the murals “play on space”, challenging the terms of sovereign control. They materially disrupt both the legal claim about the competence of sovereign decision over space and the aesthetic claim about the mastery of public images. The murals suggest a limit to sovereignty located not, as in Benjamin, in the capacity of the sovereign subject, but rather in the evasiveness of the cement and paint of space itself, and in older Neoplatonic approaches to space that the murals share with older traditions of Persian painting.