Unpacking Political Aesthetics
Censorship, Truth-Telling, and Resistance
Ashkan Cheheltan
Current
This research focuses on how artists and intellectuals have navigated Iranian state censorship and the “redlines” imposed by a brutal dictatorship. Through literature, film, and visual art, they developed unique “truth-practices” and aesthetic techniques of evasion and resistance. The research aims to study and learn from these techniques while developing new approaches that build upon them, exploring their application in human rights investigations. It unfolds through three research axes—the redline, the narrative, and the image—which intersect in the context of a focal incident that serves as my case study. By centring on an “aesthetic investigation” of this incident—an investigative spatio-visual reconstruction approach drawing on my long-term involvement with Forensic Architecture, the research examines both the event itself, meaning what did and did not occur, as well as the underlying circumstances that led to its occurrence. This dual focus opens pathways to interrogate political aesthetics as a paradoxical co-construction by both the state and its resistors, to analyse the mechanisms of state denial and the deliberate intertwining of violence and negation, and to investigate the socio-political conditions shaping cultural expression under authoritarianism.