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The Iranian Studies Initiative at UCSB and Farhang Foundation invite you to

Siah Armajani

A Pragmatic Deconstructivist

A Free live lecture event by Æli Reza Sahaf Zadeh

This event is a part of a lecture series on Iranian Modern and Contemporary Art, which will be held during the academic year 2020-2021

Siah Armajani’s architectural sculptures between the late 1960s and early 1990s interrogated the viewers’ understanding of space and the human relations regulated by built environments. While in his statements, Armajani would always emphasize the significance of “citizen-artist,” the critical discourse on his art has not yet fully historicized or theorized the social underpinnings of form in the artist’s constructions.

In this lecture, I will be arguing that Armajani’s work can be most accurately seen through the lens of “deconstruction as prophetic of ‘the democracy that is to come.’” Taking clues from Armajani’s persistent emphasis on Jeffersonian democracy and American anarchism as two major interconnected sources of influence on his work, I will show how the artist used vernacular aesthetics and radical decentralization of shared spaces to underline the rudiments of a functioning democracy.

~ Æli Reza Sahaf Zadeh

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This lecture series is made possible with the generous support of the Gramian-Emrani Foundation.

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Æli Reza Sahaf Zadeh specializes in the history of American art and visual culture in the late-twentieth century. In particular, his work probes the representation, production, and critique of biopower across mediums and cultural practices and explores their imbrications with queer theories. He is the founding chief editor of Kaarnamaa: A Journal of Art History and Criticism (2014), and the author of The Art of Identity and the Politics of Representation; A Social History of Art since 1945 (2010). Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Criticism at the State University of New York. He teaches courses on the history of art and photography in the United States, striving to develop approaches that enable the Americanist field to be more responsive to the global turn.

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