Between the 1950s and 1970s, in a brief moment between the 1953 coup and the 1979 revolution in Iran, dialogues and exchanges between Italy and Iran heightened. The exchanges between Italy and Iran were facilitated by institutional infrastructures: academies of fine arts in Rome, Florence, and Venice; international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale; and transnational networks of galleries, critics, and patrons. Despite their different trajectories, one marked by the aftermath of totalitarianism and war, the other by foreign intervention and internal repression, both societies experienced a shared condition of historical fracture, in which the promises of modernity appeared compromised...
Between the 1950s and 1970s, in a brief moment between the 1953 coup and the 1979 revolution in Iran, dialogues and exchanges between Italy and Iran heightened. The exchanges between Italy and Iran were facilitated by institutional infrastructures: academies of fine arts in Rome, Florence, and Venice; international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale; and transnational networks of galleries, critics, and patrons.
Despite their different trajectories, one marked by the aftermath of totalitarianism and war, the other by foreign intervention and internal repression, both societies experienced a shared condition of historical fracture, in which the promises of modernity appeared compromised and the language of politics increasingly unreliable. The comparison suggests that modernity, when experienced as rupture rather than progress, generates recurrent emotional and perceptual states across disparate geographies: a sense of loss, estrangement, and the urgent need to reinvent meaning. In this sense, the dialogue between Italy and Iran in the 1950s exposes modernism not as a Western narrative exported elsewhere, but as a shared human condition, a way of confronting the fragility of political ideals, the instability of identity, and the persistent desire to rebuild forms of expression when established structures of meaning have collapsed.
Aiming to challenge linear and Eurocentric narratives of modernism, the exhibition brings together five key Iranian modernist figures alongside their Italian contemporaries within a dynamic network of conversations and resonances. The exhibition approaches translation as a methodological framework. Understood as a process of displacement, transformation, and reinterpretation, translation resists fixed hierarchies and linear genealogies. Consequently, the exhibition does not unfold through rigid pairings but through three interrelated chapters, each shaped by new constellations. Artists enter into multiple dialogues across the exhibition, producing a fluid curatorial structure in which shared concerns are articulated through diverse visual vocabularies, material strategies, and conceptual approaches.
