After visiting the Ordinary Moments exhibition, curated by Mansour Forouzesh and featuring a collective of Iranian independent photographers at the FUGA Gallery in Budapest, I was once again convinced that the consumption of modern Iranian visual culture in the West is essentially orientalistic. Precisely through the contrast this exhibition provides, one can see more clearly how, in general, its circulation, exhibition, and interpretation follow patterns that privilege exoticism, crisis, and difference over contemporaneity and ordinariness. Reinforced by global festivals and curatorial practices, neo-orientalism reproduces colonial asymmetries and restricts the potential of Iranian art to participate as an equal voice in global discourse.
Western institutions, festivals, and media have historically curated Iranian and more broadly Eastern art through an exotic lens. Festivals such as the World Press Photo, Cannes, Berlinale, and the Oscars, along with museums, agencies, and photo fairs, impose narratives that align with the expectations of their audiences. Iranian works that receive attention often highlight social crises, political restrictions, and marginal experiences, packaged for international consumption. The repeated showcasing of acid attacks, executions, restrictions on women, or poverty does not create meaningful dialogue. Instead, it commodifies suffering and estranges the ordinary from Iranian cultural life. Audiences, while emotionally engaged, are ultimately entertained rather than implicated. This dynamic continues the colonial tradition of exhibiting others as curiosities, shaping a global cultural hierarchy in which Western spectators retain authority over the meaning of non-Western works.
This is not an accidental pattern but a structural one. The neo-orientalist gaze produces what can be called a regime of representation: a system that privileges certain topics, aesthetics, and narratives while marginalizing others. The result is a distorted image of Iranian society in which everyday life disappears, overshadowed by spectacles of crisis. The logic of such a regime is clear: works that confirm existing stereotypes about Iran circulate widely, while those that engage with Iranian contemporaneity on its own terms are ignored. Thus the global consumption of Iranian art is less about Iran itself than about the reproduction of Western cultural dominance.
The term “exotopy” consists of the prefix “exo,” a Greek word meaning “outside” or “outer.” The suffix “-topy” is derived from the Greek word topos, meaning “place” or “position.” Exotopy refers to a place outside of one’s own or another location, referring to an otherness. “Others are almost always people with cultures markedly different from that of the observer or writer or reader” (Legros 1). Exotopy is a concept introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin. It highlights the notions of outsideness and insideness in relation to dialogism that could be defined as the intersubjective creation of meaning at the intersection of different and often contradictory points of view (Pollard 6). Outsideness can enable dialogue and mutual understanding, but in the dominant neo-orientalist practice it tends to exaggerate differences, fetishize the unfamiliar, and flatten complexity into stereotypes. As Legros notes, emphasizing differences can exoticize others, highlight certain traits, and lead to distorted or apparently inappropriate representations of their culture. (Legros 4).
Of course, orientalism itself is not new. Since the Safavid dynasty and the development of relations between Iran and Europe, Iran’s ancient arts and architecture have drawn the attention of Europeans. Religious missionaries, antique dealers, tourists, merchants, military personnel, ambassadors, and orientalists collected treasures and material culture, often under the pretense of archaeological and historical excavations.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, photographers and filmmakers reinforced this gaze. Though they may adopt an anthropological approach, these photographers and filmmakers inadvertently engaged in utilitarianism by institutional circulation of images, imposing a limited, predetermined colonial perspective. In doing so, they became bureaucrats of hypocritical politicians, facilitating further exploitation and colonization. Their work lacked an unbiased study of the subjects’ backgrounds; instead, it capitalized merely on appearance and lifestyle, focusing on suffering, poverty, and pathetic sides of life.
Iranian cultural products that are of interest to foreign spectators, particularly in painting, sculpture, photography, and cinema, traditionally exoticize and fetishize Iranian culture. They employ an exo-anthropological, ethnocentric, and, in recent decades, a socio-political approach that overly focuses on the most exotic moments, crises, and temporal tensions. This mainstream gradually pushes the media and Western cultural outlets toward violations by continuously exhibiting commodified moments of strangeness, tension, and crisis about Eastern otherness. Imperialism’s multifaceted system attempts to deny others their specificities and value systems by reproducing an exotic and distorted mindset: “focusing on differences [between each other] exoticizes others, overamplifies some of their cultural features, and thus gives distorted, even seemingly incongruent images of their culture” (Legros 4).
This emphasis on crisis creates what can be called “Festival Arts.” Local creators, influenced by the selection criteria of international events, learn to reproduce the same aesthetics of crisis and exoticism. A comparative analysis and analogy of selected, shortlisted, and awarded works from recent decades reveal a troubling direction toward systematic generational self-deprecation, erosion of esteem, and scattering constant social anxiety through the continuous exhibiting of crisis over non-Western social spheres. Works become crafted less as explorations of Iranian society for Iranians themselves, and more as deliverables for Western juries and curators. Even immigration patterns are shaped by this media hegemony, as Western societies promote their lifestyles as global norms and frame non-Western societies as zones of endless dysfunction.
In recent years, the World Press Photo festival has highlighted various projects or single photographs that have particularly impacted the photography scene and the Iranian art community. This pattern of behaviour is also traceable in such events, targeting other non-Western nations, as this is a metaphysical hegemony of institutional trading of art with its direct impacts on the mainstream of the work’s origin that often exists in a vulnerable position under the dominance of neo-orientalism.
The photography essays Hanging in Iran (2012), about public executions in Iran, and Victims of Forced Love (2013), focusing on victims of acid attack by Ebrahim Noroozi, Majid Saeedi’s photography project Life in War (2013) about living experience in Afghanistan, An Iranian Journey (2017) on theocratic restrictions in Iran by Hossein Fatemi, Crying for Freedom (2019) about restrictions on female fans entering football stadiums by Forough Alaei, Bullets Have No Borders (2025) by Ebrahim Alipoor about Kolbars, and No Woman’s Land (2025) on women denied by the Taliban in Afghanistan by Kiana Hayeri are examples of this path.
Furthermore, highlighted movies that have garnered attention at trending festivals such as the Oscars, Cannes, and Berlin include Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation (2011) and The Salesman (2016), as well as My Favourite Cake (2024) co-directed by Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha and Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident (2025). These films also follow the same route in motion pictures, speculating on social themes and injustice.
What is shown is just the tip of the iceberg. From a non-Western perspective, the works presented at these festivals often serve only to provide superficial information for spectators. These audiences, who are unlikely to take any meaningful action regarding the issues depicted, engage with the works merely as entertainment or to satisfy their curiosity about non-Western societies and feed their exo-anthropological resources. This dynamic can be seen as a continuation of colonial hegemony, which reinforces control and marginalizes the diverse yet ordinary viewpoints of non-Westerners.
In contrast, Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up presents a different mode. It is not about a convict’s story but about identity, self-esteem, and their relation to the truth of life. It presents a humanistic narrative that addresses a universal contemporary issue while avoiding telling a story. Close-Up de-aestheticizes the medium, evading scheming and dramatic twists and turns to represent the truth. It is a pure normal East in which the audience never sees a strange otherness in a circus show to be entertained.
It is an ordinary issue that could happen everywhere, regardless of geographical location. Being East in this work is not a strange otherness, and the issue it is focusing on is not only for them. Therefore, the spectator looks at it with empathy instead of transient, pathetic emotions emerging from an exotic sympathy.
So, Close-Up is an artwork made to impact humans regardless of their ethnic or geographical situation, but not to amuse a specific group of outsider viewers by manipulating the exoticized and embellished material of reality. Therefore, unlike other renowned Iranian films, such as The Salesman by Asghar Farhadi, which exploit the curated social situations by leveraging the drama components to attract box office attention, Close-Up does not aim to present a handpicked situation for external consumption and to satisfy the culture industry. Instead, it adopts a more nuanced interpretive perspective that distinguishes it from the neo-orientalist tendencies in such works.
Close-Up starts the narrative with a story but does not finish the movie with it, meaning it does not entirely rely on the story. The story in this movie is a departure point, but not everything. It interprets the concept emerging from the situation and echoes the manifest for everyone, instead of merely exploiting the selected situation. It tries to enlighten the viewer about the narrative. The result is a transfusion, pouring the meaning from one container to another, artwork to the viewer.
Showing and observing the world the way it is does not make an influence, but once one starts to shape the invisible with the material of reality, they create art. It is a matter of the invisible, truth, and timelessness versus the visible, reality, and temporality. The immediate attractive visible reality has this vulnerability of commodification, exoticization, and becoming vulgar. Naive ordinary invisible is like stoicism that avoids exploitation and exoticization.
Stoicism in art and aesthetics emphasizes simplicity, restraint, and emotional control. It values harmony, balance, and the portrayal of enduring human truths and virtues. Stoic-inspired art often avoids excessive emotion, drama, or fascinating story, focusing instead on calmness, clarity, and the lasting truths beneath appearances beyond fleeting trends. It de-aestheticizes the medium and shifts towards post-media condition, simplicity, and minimalism, avoiding extravagance or excess to express pure and essential beauty. Art that incorporates Stoic elements is both moralistic and naturalistic.
When encountering a difference, one, as an observer, should refrain from positioning oneself as a standard or source of authority, blaming others for the difference, or attributing weakness or flaws solely because the other is different from the observer. Instead, from an anti-colonial perspective, if one feels a sense of shortcoming in relation to a difference in others, it is essential to direct that self-reflection inward and recognize that weakness within themselves. This approach should be adopted as a way of engaging with other cultures.
The problem is not limited to film and photography. In curatorial practice more broadly, the temptation to highlight exotic otherness is powerful. Exhibitions often present artifacts or artworks as if they belong to another time or world, disconnected from the present. Spectators view these works in a manner devoid of familiarity and empathy, and their interpretations do not result from co-existence. This failure in intersubjective creation of meaning is exactly what Bakhtin warns against, for “there is no better prelude to successful dialogue than this ability to maintain one’s alterity during empathy” (Legros 10).
The Ordinary Moments exhibition in Budapest offers an opportunity in this direction. By foregrounding Iranian independent photographers, it opens a space for artworks that do not rely on crisis or spectacle. The curatorial decision to emphasize ordinary life challenges the dominance of exoticism and provides an alternative narrative. Yet even such initiatives must remain vigilant.
The exhibition is a series of selected photos depicting the daily life of Iranians in various locations across Iran, focusing on a range of moments. In some cases, these are event-driven, unfolding in different seasons. The photographs are aesthetically well composed, by virtue of spatial properties, color, timing, and even the photographer’s vantage point. Street photography, using candid techniques and attention to decisive moments, represents another group of photos, while others include environmental portraits, documentary images, or even staged scenes. The subjects are primarily women and children. Still, the depiction of women and the hijab, scarf, veil, or the challenge to it plays a central role in most of the photographs. The contrasting lifestyles of different generations of Iranians are another key focus. Religious ceremonies, mourning rituals, and pilgrimage traditions are also emphasized.
The imagery includes a woman with a hijab sitting on a chair blowing and popping gum, another sitting on a rock looking out at the sea, one with her face bandaged gazing into a mirror, another hanging from a shrine door, and a young girl set against an urban background. Weddings, social gatherings, sporting events, people in cafés, a woman passing by a historic urban landscape, and women and children on the beach all contribute to the visual narrative.
The curatorial practice in this exhibition involves engaging with an Eastern society through the visual medium of photography. The exhibition aims to avoid crises, conventional narratives of conflict zones, and exoticized appearances, while also resisting the imposition of Western predefined norms onto Eastern culture. This approach represents a step forward in challenging the cultural hegemony discussed in this essay. However, the boundaries of this claim remain somewhat blurred, and the visuals continue to flirt inadvertently with dominant narratives.
A crucial question arises: when the exhibition chooses to avoid and eliminate these hegemonic components from the visuals, does it not risk rendering the exhibition devoid of meaning, stripping it of both conceptual depth and creative substance? Why do photographers choose to explore moments through a Western modern lens, and why do the visuals fail to convey the distinct characteristics of native culture? Furthermore, what causes the exhibition to lose confidence in articulating an original and authentic narrative of its own?
An exhibition that presents itself as showing unretouched and authentic stories needs clearer methods and criteria for selecting works. Relying only on an open call and loose guidelines to choose from a pool of artists, who themselves are already shaped by a wider art scene influenced by globalized visual culture, risks reproducing familiar patterns. Many artists, consciously or not, follow paths that are already marked out by neo-orientalist frameworks and institutional agendas.
As Hoffmann and Lind remind us, “there is a qualitative difference between curating and the curatorial” (Hoffmann and Lind). ‘Curating’ is business as usual in terms of putting together an exhibition, organizing a commission, programming a screening series, et cetera. ‘The curatorial’ goes further, implying a methodology that takes art as its starting point but then situates it in relation to specific contexts, times, and questions in order to challenge the status quo.” The curatorial practice is more like a process of cultivation, referring to the Hegelian Bildung. “Bildung is conceptualized as a fundamental, social-historical project of the spirit’s self-cultivation, a path toward rational autonomy and actively attained freedom from natural immediacy of life; a path which unfolds through contradiction, difference, the dialectic of alienation, intersubjective interactions within the social realm, and participation in cultural history” (Bykova et al. 427).
For curatorial practice to move toward a non-colonial approach, it needs this deeper commitment. That means resisting exotopy when it leads to fetishization, recognizing the outsideness of Western spectators without letting it define meaning, and rejecting neo-orientalism so that non-Western culture is not reduced to a spectacle of otherness.
References
Bykova, Marina F. “Hegel’s Philosophy of Bildung.” The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, edited by Kenneth R. Westphal and Marina F. Bykova, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2020, pp. 425–449.
Hoffmann, Jens, and Maria Lind. “To Show or Not to Show.” Mousse Magazine, no. 31, 1 Dec. 2011, www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/jens-hoffmann-maria-lind-2011/. Accessed 15 July 2025.
Legros, Dominique. “In Praise of Exotopy.” Mainstream Polygamy: The Non-Marital Child Paradox in the West, Springer Science+Business Media, New York, NY, 2014, pp. 1–11.
Pollard, Rachel. “Ethics in Practice: A Critical Appreciation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Concept of ‘Outsideness’ in Relation to Responsibility and the Creation of Meaning in Psychotherapy.” American Journal of Psychotherapy, vol. 65, no. 1, Jan. 2011, pp. 1–25.