Female Trouble: Melancholia and Allegory in Contemporary Iranian Art
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How can Iranian artists create meaningful art in troubled times? Can allegory be a mode to express the melancholia of a generation's losses, which include those dead individuals who cannot be publicly named and mourned, as well as ideals and aspirations that cannot be publicly spoken? What expressive strategies can be used when the expressions themselves are in question? Judith Butler theorizes melancholia in terms of its productive potential as a voice of conscience opposed to oppressive State power. With Butler's views in mind, this essay will analyze artworks created by three female Iranian artists who exhibited them in Tehran, using allegorical strategies to express the melancholia and anger that ensues from the loss of social and political ideals. The installation of Parastou Forouhar (b. 1962) at the Azad Art Gallery in November 2009, entitled I Surrender , consisted of dozens of white helium balloons imprinted with digital drawings of female figures inflicting torture or being tortured. The exhibition Self Service by Neda Razavipour (b. 1969), also staged at the Azad Gallery in the autumn of 2009, offered visitors opportunities to cut pieces of hand-knotted Persian carpets and take them away in envelopes printed with a phrase from Plato's Republic . The exhibition of Amitis Motevalli (b. 1969) at Aaran Gallery in June 2010 consisted of black velvet banners entitled Here/There , Then/Now , which are symbolic to Shi‘a traditional views of martyrdom and are embroidered with images of the Civil Rights Movement that took place in the United States in the early 1960s.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".