A Utopian Stage is a multi-faceted and open-ended, evolving project that revisits the intersection of modernism, art and revolution through the radical aspirations of the hyper-modernist networks of artists and experimentalists which defined the 1960s and 1970s. This reconstruction of a complex space of international modernity is defined by the ‘third worldist’ sensibilities of the immediate post- colonial period. The project traces a Cultural Atlas through which knowledge was exchanged across alternative (often non-European) plateaus. This process of global ‘reorientation’ takes us through a reconstruction of the gaze – subverting the single ‘reading’ of West to East into a more cyclical model, engaging in cultural, philosophical and political negotiations from East to East, East to West, South to East, South to South – constructing a panoramic exchange of global philosophical and artistic discourse. The project explores how in the aftermath of the collapse of European hegemonies and the rise of the Global South a fluid artistic exchange was possible across geographies, histories and forms in ways and on a scale that had never been possible before.
The ideals, as well as, the highs and lows of 20th century modernist universalisms are explored from the vantage point of the sensibilities and urgencies of the emerging Global South and their alliances with the international avant-garde.
As a multipartite project, A Utopian Stage takes the decade-long Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis (1967-1977) as its point of departure and as a case study. The festival, whose excavated archives have been banned in Iran since 1979, is considered as one of the most uniquely transformative inter-cultural experiences, perhaps the most radical multi-disciplinary crucible of any commissioning festival in history.
Curated by Vali Mahlouji / Archaeology of the Final Decade
Excavated Archives: Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis
Archaeology of the Final Decade (AOTFD) unearths the archival materials of the radical and virtually-forgotten decade-long Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis (1967-1977). Over fifty years since its inception, A Utopian Stage explores the genealogies and implications of the festival’s modernist ambitions, using it as a lens through which to reconsider the legacies of modernism’s radical progressive arc. Embodying an optimistic drive to reimagine the world as an open universal arena for mutual exchange, the festival exalted in the dawn of the post-colonial age, aspiring to new solidarities and connections which marked the emergence of a potential new world.
Situating the festival against the background of contemporaneous political events and movements like the Non-Aligned Movement and Pan-Africanism, we examine how Shiraz-Persepolis acted as a contested site of competing solidarities and proliferating visions of an interconnected world; and how, importantly, it facilitated the encounter between international and local avant-gardes. It is precisely the festival’s pronounced rejection of a tension-less, homogenizing fusion of cultures, and its alignment with the principles of particularism, cultural difference, and alterity that demand our attention today. For these qualities make the festival not only a unique historical object but point to the still latent possibilities of the utopian impulses that marked the cross-cultural histories of art and anti-colonial struggle in the 1960s and 1970s.
The festival itself was targeted and attacked through moralising, religious accusations of decadence, obscenity and blasphemy in 1977 by Islamists and was subsequently banned in Iran in 1979. Many of the artists involved were banned from work and its archives were destroyed or removed and remain banned to date.
AOTFD’s painstaking retrieval of those archives aims to push back those accusations to reveal a seminal modernist event in line with the euphoric drives and ideals of progress, openness, emancipation, inclusivity, and the overarching notion of a unity of disunities.