Brothers/soldiers: trauma and wartime Ahwaz in the art of Sadegh Tirafkan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay explores the significance of a series of posthumously discovered, staged, colour photographs of twin boys holding rifles, as well as a short screenplay entitled ‘Tulips Bloom’, that the internationally-recognized artist Sadegh Tirafkan (1965–2013) created as a youth in Ahwaz, Iran, in 1982. Taking into consideration the context of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) and the related culture of martyrdom that so strongly affected the region and the artist's imagination reveals a subtext of trauma that may – the author proposes – explain the prominence of visual motifs, symbols and themes that recur throughout the artist's subsequent 30-year career. The author relies upon visual analysis of the artist's photographic art, published interviews, comparative visual analysis involving Iranian visual culture from the era (Balaghi; Chelkowski and Dabashi; Saramifar; Varzi); art history (Daneshvari; Foster; Keshmirshekan; Nazari; Porter); and theories of trauma from psychology (Herman), literary theory (Caruth) and sociology (Alexander; Erikson), in order to provide a new understanding of the artist's work throughout his career, from 1982 to 2013, and how the Iran-Iraq War shaped notions of Iranian post-Revolutionary identity in terms of military sacrifice and death.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".