THE WORLD BETWEEN MY FINGERS: LOCATED WORLDLINESS IN THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF MEHRAN MOHAJER
FOAD TORSHIZI
“The World Between My Fingers: Located Worldliness in the Photography of Mehran Mohajer” examines the ways in which Mohajer’s photography enables a “worldliness” that is deeply rooted in the visual and literary traditions to which he, as an Iranian artist, belongs as well as in the history of photography. This rootedness allows Mohajer to effectively resist the widespread demand of Western art institutions that the aesthetic economies of non-Western artworks align with Euro-American understandings of meaning, value, aspiration and desire. “The World Between My Fingers...” is part of a chapter in a manuscript Torshizi is currently working on, entitled “The Clarity of Meaning”: Contemporary Iranian Art and the Cosmopolitan Ethics of Reading in Art History.
Foad Torshizi is assistant professor of Art of the Islamic World at RISD. He holds degrees in Comparative Literature and Society and Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (PhD and MPhil, Columbia University), Art History (MA, University of Minnesota) and Photography (MFA, Honar University of Tehran). Prior to joining the RISD faculty in 2017, he taught graduate students at Tehran University, advanced undergraduates and graduate students at the Università degli Studi di Milano in Italy as well as undergraduate students at Columbia University’s Core Curriculum. His research interests are in the areas of global contemporary art, contemporary Iranian and Middle Eastern art, postcolonial theory, ethics of readership, theories of globalization and cosmopolitanism, comparative literature and politics of translation and interpretation. Torshizi’s research has appeared in academic journals both in the US and Iran. Most recently he has published an article in Herfeh: Honarmand on the works of the prolific Iranian artist Barbad Golshiri.