Spurred by recent elections in the US and abroad, there’s been a resurgence of interest by artists and critics alike in so-called “political art.” Today from our archives we bring you a review of Taravat Talepasand’s work at Beta Pictoris; author Jordan Amirkhani argues that Telepasand’s work operates much in the same way as Andy Warhol’s, wherein a cultural actor becomes a symbolic fetish to[…..]

Taravat Talepasand’s work takes on the representational codes and image systems of the Iranian state: national currency, political propaganda, religious iconography, and gendered forms of identity making. The paintings in Not an Arab Spring open up the ideological assumptions that index Iranian identity, state power, and gender in order to consider how the body (male and female) comes to signify the state as well as[…..]