K. Tromp (Kasper) MA

Kasper is an art historian specializing in contemporary art in the MENA-region. He holds a BA and MA degree from Leiden University. In 2017 he did an internship at the Aaran Gallery in Tehran and between 2018 and 2020 he conducted fieldwork in Istanbul for the Forces of Art project (initiated by the Prince Claus Fund, Hivos and the European Cultural Foundation).

Project description
In my research project, I offer an expanded view of Iranian art history, beyond the relatively narrow scope of the fine arts, to include museum curation, documentary film making and illustrating children’s books, among other practices. Contrary to the dominant view of Iranian modern art as autonomous, this heterogeneous set of aesthetic practices was intimately bound up in the Pahlavi monarchy’s project of state modernization and its demand for high quality pedagogical material used for raising an educated modern public. My project critiques the idea that state commissioned art is essentially conservative and merely deals with the national, while the fine arts explore the bigger questions of globalization. I argue that ambitious young art graduates, who found their first jobs working for the state, used the creative environments, communicative channels, and technologies provided for them, to challenge institutional demands and pursue their own ideological and pedagogical visions. In their efforts to create museums, literature and documentaries used to teach the public about Iran’s place in world history, they actively engaged with the dynamics of Cold War cultural diplomacy, novel artistic scenes that emerged in the 1960s in Eastern Europe and the Euro-American sphere, as well as new technologies and formats for communicating ideas about art. My proposal of an expanded history of Iranian art is therefore not only of interest to Iranian art history proper, but to the study of art pedagogy and global modernism more broadly.