Contemporary Art and Everyday Life in Tehran:

My paper traces two interrelated subjects of everyday life and contemporary art in Tehran. I explore the limits of the technique and discipline of Art History regarding contemporary art in Tehran in absence of an overview to everyday life outside of the country. The disciplined aspect of everyday life and its repetitiveness inscribes dispositions on subjects that are starting point in this paper. Focusing on the crossover of everyday life and art affords an opportunity to look more closely at the hinge between everyday life and contemporary art practices that are increasingly moving towards shifting the boundaries of art and non-art. This paper’s approach puts forth question of how different aspects of everyday life in Tehran function to re-formulate an apprehension of the sensible within artistic practices. Taking into account the literature about everyday life produced by scholars such as Asef Bayat, I will analyze two artistic practices to demonstrate how they poetically reconsider the perceived boundaries between language and matter, mind and body, and sensation and cognition. I elaborate on the ways in which everyday life articulate and also tensely negotiate the habitual production of artistic practices. This paper will discern how artistic practices re-work ordinary experience of everyday life in symbolic, and linguistic level in order to introduce a new experience that elevate collective apprehension of art.