خوانشی بودریاری از شاخص‌های پساواقعیت در نقاشی معاصر ایران و نسبت آن با شبه‌مدرنیته ایرانی

Introduction: During the final decades of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century, the relationship between reality, truth, representation, and visual culture underwent profound transformation. The expansion of mass media, the proliferation of digital technologies, the acceleration of information circulation, and the increasing dominance of images in everyday life have altered how reality is perceived, experienced, and represented. Under such conditions, reality can no longer be understood as a stable external reference merely reflected by images. Images increasingly participate in constructing, mediating, and organizing what is experienced as reality. Within this context, post-reality becomes an important framework for understanding the changing relationship between image and world. Although the term is often associated with post-truth politics, misinformation, and media manipulation, its aesthetic and cultural implications extend beyond political communication. In visual culture, post-reality refers to a condition in which signs, representations, and mediated experiences increasingly replace direct engagement with reality, weakening the distinction between representation and referent.
Background: The theoretical foundations of this perspective can be traced to Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of simulacra, simulation, and hyperreality. Baudrillard argues that contemporary societies are increasingly characterized by systems of signs that no longer refer to an original reality, but circulate within self-referential networks of meaning. Simulation, in this sense, does not simply imitate reality; rather, it produces forms of experience that become more influential than reality itself. Although the present study employs the term post-reality rather than hyperreality, it draws extensively on this theoretical tradition to examine how contemporary painting participates in the reconfiguration of reality, meaning, and subjectivity.
The significance of this question becomes clearer in societies whose historical trajectories differ from the Western contexts in which many postmodern theories first emerged. Iran is a particularly important case, since Iranian modernity has not developed through a linear and fully institutionalized process. It has been marked by discontinuities, uneven transformations, and the simultaneous presence of traditional, modern, and global cultural forms. To address this specificity, the study employs the concept of quasi-modernity. Quasi-modernity refers to a situation in which the visible signs, technologies, and lifestyles associated with modernity are present, while the institutional, epistemological, and historical foundations of modernity remain incomplete, fragmented, or unstable.
Existing scholarship on post-reality, hyperreality, simulation, and post-truth has largely focused on political communication, media studies, photography, digital culture, or broader discussions of postmodernism. Even when Baudrillard’s concepts have been applied to visual culture, they have often been used in relation to photography, interactive media, or digital art rather than painting. Studies on Iranian contemporary art have also frequently emphasized identity, tradition, globalization, or modernity without systematically examining how changing relations between image and reality reshape artistic representation. This gap necessitates a contextualized framework that considers both the theoretical insights of post-reality and the historical conditions of quasi-modernity.
Research methodology: This study is qualitative, descriptive-analytical, and interpretive. It does not aim to test a quantitative hypothesis or provide statistical generalization; rather, it seeks to understand how post-reality appears in contemporary Iranian painting and how its visual mechanisms relate to quasi-modernity. The research analyzes selected works by four contemporary Iranian painters—Mohammad Khalili, Omid Hallaj, Mehdi Farhadian, and Khosrow Khosravi. The works were selected purposively because they make visible different aspects of the relationship between post-reality and quasi-modernity.
The unit of analysis is the individual painting, examined at three interconnected levels: first, the descriptive level, including composition, spatial organization, color, light, figure, absence, stillness, density, and void; second, the semiotic-interpretive level, including instability of reference, simulation, suspension of meaning, crisis of subjectivity, emotional distancing, and the spectralization of everyday life; and third, the conceptual-contextual level, where the findings are interpreted in relation to Iranian quasi-modernity, historical non-synchronicity, the coexistence of tradition and modernity, and the transformation of visual experience.
Findings: The analysis shows that contemporary Iranian painting can no longer be understood solely as a medium for representing external reality. In the selected works, painting increasingly functions as a space in which the conditions of reality itself are questioned and reconfigured. Images do not simply depict the world; they participate in producing alternative realities, fragmented identities, unstable memories, and ambiguous forms of meaning.
In Khalili’s works, architectural and industrial spaces appear recognizable but detached from everyday functionality, producing a cold, suspended, and emptied modern space. In Hallaj’s works, the human figure or body becomes unstable and sign-like rather than a coherent subject, foregrounding the crisis of subjectivity. In Farhadian’s works, historical and cultural references appear as layered reconstructions rather than transparent representations of the past, revealing the transformation of memory into a mediated image. In Khosravi’s works, cultural signs, motifs, and forms are displaced into contemporary structures, generating a spectral relationship between tradition, absence, and representation. Across these cases, reality is not presented as fixed, immediate, or external; it emerges through networks of image, memory, reference, simulation, and suspended meaning.
Results: The central result of the study is that post-reality in contemporary Iranian painting cannot be understood independently of quasi-modernity. Quasi-modernity provides the historical, cultural, and experiential conditions that make post-reality visually operative in the Iranian context. The relation between post-reality and quasi-modernity is therefore not merely stylistic or technical, but conceptual, epistemological, and cultural. The selected paintings reveal that post-reality in Iran does not necessarily result from a completed transition from modernity to postmodernity. Rather, it can emerge from the simultaneous presence of incomplete modernity, cultural memory, media saturation, and historical discontinuity. Accordingly, contemporary Iranian painting functions not merely as a reflection of social reality, but as a critical arena in which the authority of reality, the coherence of the subject, the stability of meaning, and the status of visual truth are continuously negotiated and questioned.