Anti-Hegemonic Aesthetics and Iranian Art Cinema: Toward a Transnational Political Image

Join the Bass School’s Graduate Student Speaker Series for a talk by Ahmad Khoshniat, “Anti-Hegemonic Aesthetics and Iranian Art Cinema: Toward a Transnational Political Image.”

About the talk

This talk examines the resistant cinematic strategies of Iranian art cinema through a dialogue with Jacques Rancière’s politics of aesthetics, Laura U. Marks’s intercultural cinema and Hamid Naficy’s accented cinema. Drawing on selected examples from films by Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Jafar Panahi from the 1980s and 1990s, Ahmad explores how strategies such as absence and silence, ambiguity, self-reflexivity, uncertainty between documentary and fiction, and the foregrounding of marginalized and forgotten subjects acquire political capacity through cinematic form.

By tracing a network of affinities among these resistant cinematic strategies and the anti-hegemonic aesthetic frameworks of Rancière, Marks and Naficy, particularly the exilic and diasporic practices theorized by Marks and Naficy, Ahmad conceptualizes these Iranian filmmakers as “internal exilic filmmakers” — filmmakers who developed resistant aesthetic strategies while remaining in Iran under conditions of censorship and political pressure. This framework situates Iranian art cinema within a broader transnational field of anti-hegemonic aesthetic resistance and establishes a foundation for his dissertation’s concept of a transnational political image.

About the speaker

Ahmad Khoshniat is a doctoral candidate in visual and performing arts at The University of Texas at Dallas. His research and creative practice explore experimental animation, Iranian art cinema and political aesthetics. He has presented his research at international conferences, and his films and artworks have appeared in international festivals and juried exhibitions.