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D O C U M E N T/ I N T R O D U C T I O N

INTRODUCTION TO AMIR ESBATI,
“THE STUDENT MOVEMENT OF MAY 1968
AND THE FINE ART STUDENTS”

morad montazami

IL 1979 revolt in Tehran that led to the overthrow of Mohammad
Reza Shah Pahlavi, after a reign of thirty-seven years, could be called
an “image revolution.” Not only was it transmitted live on television
screens around the world, it also generated an extraordinary number of
images. There were so many of them, Infatti, that once “victory” was
won, the immediate fate of those unedited images was to become part
of an indistinct mass of visual ruins. And though these visual rem-
nants of the revolution included paintings, fi lms, photos, graphic arts,
music, slogans, word games, cartoons, and caricatures, there were
arguably more posters than anything else. From the south of Tehran,
inhabited by the newly migrated rural poor and the working class, A
the central areas of the city, any wall or bus station was used for post-
ing messages, slogans, and other subversive imagery. In the area
between Shah Reza street—renamed Enqela¯b after the revolution—
and Tehran University, most of the public statues were covered from
top to bottom with scribblings and handmade bills expressing com-
plaints but also hope.

Not unlike the images that circulate on the Internet today—taking

on a life of their own as soon as they are posted online—the images
del 1979 Iranian Revolution transcend their producers. Take as an
example the manifesto translated for the fi rst time in this issue of
ARTMargins: written by Amir Esbati, a 23-year-old student from the

doi:10.1162/arTM_a_00192

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Faculty of Fine Arts, it was published in January 1980, just a year after
the revolution, in a journal entitled Labor and Art (Kār va Honar).1
Esbati’s manifesto links the visual microhistory of local struggles to the
reappropriation of popular art and agitprop imagery elsewhere, bluntly
qualifying the notion of an “avant-garde” as elitist. His essay is particu-
larly relevant for the way it seeks to capture the essence of a new era for
public communication in Iran, through revolutionary spaces and inno-
vative means of expression. The students from the Fine Arts Faculty
who had embraced the revolutionary cause were most often inspired by
basic Marxist ideas regarding labor exploitation and class struggle, con
either a Soviet or a Maoist inflection. Tuttavia, as Esbati’s text shows,
the local understanding of Marxist ideas, although debated at the time
by scholars and university professors, remained vague and open to
interpretation; translations of Marxist literature were only beginning
to appear more openly in Iran around the end of the 1970s, and they
were still rare in the run-up to the revolution.2

Amid the growing number of anti-Shah demonstrations world-
wide, the newly born local student groups who were committed to
activist visual practices interacted with the Confederation of Iranian
Students (usually referred to as the CIS, or simply “the Confederation”)
in France, Germany, and the United States. The main difference
between the local insurrection and the foreign insurrections of Iranian
students was that the local groups always had to share public space
with other religious and nationalist groups who had even louder voices,
while the Confederation of Iranian students in European and US cities
was able to connect with various leftist and internationalist networks.
The leftist positions actively promulgated by students in the Fine
Arts Faculty of Tehran University—located on the far east side of the
university, along Shah Reza Street—echoed the ideological lead of

Like many insurrectional publications, Kār va Honar (Labour and Art) was short-lived,
existing for only two issues. It had a print run of between 2,000 E 3,000 copies, era
distributed by hand, and was produced by the most active forces among the “agitprop”
leftist Iranian art students. Spontaneous publications and “street journals” such as Labor
and Art usually could not survive for more than a few months before their publishers
were either jailed or tortured, depending on how much attention the newspapers
received.
The student group to which Esbati belonged, Group 57, took its name, posthumously, from
the year of the revolution according to the Iranian calendar (1357). The group included art-
ists as well as former students such as Nikzad Nojoumi and Arapik Baghdassarian. Their
insignia was a fist and a red star printed on the corner of each poster.

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Ka¯r va Honar (Labor and Art). Dey 1358 (Gennaio 1980). Courtesy of the author.

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Ka¯r va Honar (Labor and Art). Dey 1358 (Gennaio 1980). Courtesy of the author.

writers and poets who had paved the way for their Marxist ideas, come
as the communist poet and activist Khosrow Golesorkhi, the writer and
critic Jalal ale-Ahmad, and Ahmad Shamlou, who was known for his
innovations as both a poet and publisher. The work of these writers was
deeply rooted in popular experience and was harshly critical of cultural
westernization and imperialism. More than other leftist students, IL
art activists saw themselves as internationalists, inspired by accounts of
the Prague Spring, the Mexican Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, E
the anti–Vietnam War protests in the United States and elsewhere,
all of which were documented by the Keta¯b-e Jom’e journal, edited
by Shamlou.

In his manifesto, Esbati insists on the Iranian students’ interna-

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114

tionalism by drawing our attention to the eloquent affinity between
their activism, on the one hand, and the activism cultivated in May
1968 in the open art workshops (ateliers populaires) at the École des
Beaux Arts in Paris, on the other.

Esbati’s analysis focuses on poster production, from silk-screening

to color compositions, and not for nothing: these young revolutionary
minds studied in the studio of the renowned graphic designer and
visual artist Morteza Momayez (1935–2005), who had elevated cinema
poster design and typography to the level of an interdisciplinary visual
art. By further situating the Iranian Revolution within a larger frame of
other social struggles, the manifesto highlights the cosmopolitanism
of the Iranian student groups, while implicitly identifying Paris as the
capital of third world independence movements in the 1960s. E
while Esbati’s interest in France and French culture could be said to
parallel the Shah’s professed love of everything French, Esbati’s interest
in France was highly strategic: he saw Paris as the home of visual guer-
rilla tactics that could help instruct the Iranian students in how to
occupy sites such as Tehran University, which the revolution had
turned into a “live museum” where the students not only produced but
also exhibited their poster designs and caricatures in the form of collec-
tive display.

The anti-Shah and anti-imperialist propaganda soon translated
into an intense interaction between two places: the streets—covered
with political graffiti and posters—and the Faculty of Fine Arts. IL
more posters the revolution produced, and the more of them circulated
in public space, the more the Marxist students reproduced these
images on the Faculty’s walls, screen-printing or photocopying them
and pasting them up in an incessant back and forth between the streets
of Tehran and the Faculty of Fine Arts.
handmade prototypes that were then printed and made available as
reproductions to demonstrators and activists. Many posters were very
quickly left aside in a corner of the university, tossed onto the garbage
heap of history. Their student producers never considered them art in

The posters originated in
3

This phenomenon is largely substantiated by certain film archives from the revolution,
including Super 8 reels by the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Kamran Shirdel. They
were exhibited for the first time in Unedited History: Iran 1960–2014 at the Musée d’Art
moderne de la Ville de Paris and MAXXI in Rome (2014–15), along with original posters
by Group 57 and other activists of the time. As co-curator of this exhibition (along with
Odile Burluraux, Catherine David, Vali Mahlouji, and Narmine Sadeg), I note that this
introductory article is an extension of our previous collective reflections.

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Group 57. In Commemoration of the 9th Anniversary of the Battle of Siahkal,

19 Bahman 1357 (9 Febbraio 1979). Poster. Courtesy of the author.

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Group 57. The End, 1979. Poster. Courtesy of the author.

the first place; instead, the posters were designed first and foremost
for their power of social mobilization and their ability to gather and
reclaim territory.

From their appearance on a wall to their photographed or filmed

version, posters reflect a meeting of technology, popular arts, E
modernist aesthetics at the time of the 1979 revolution: a reproducible
revolution, as it turned out, as is also suggested by the thousands of

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Group 57. The Factories Belong to Us as We Represent the Work Force, 1979.

Poster. Courtesy of the author.

amateur and professional films showing demonstrators brandishing
posters, banners, and signs—usually depicting Ayatollah Khomeini,
although other revolutionary figures also appear (Ali Shariati, to name
one). If the poster is the medium of public space par excellence, it is
also that of the people and the subjects it engages, from its conceptual
and graphic elaboration to its evolution in the form of reproductions
and nomadic images.4

Not unlike the ateliers populaires of 1968, the Faculty of Fine Arts
served as a community headquarters, with people coming and going,
gathering, and debating: it was a place much more rooted in daily life,
public action, and emancipatory politics than any regular art exhibition
could ever aspire to be.5 The collective display informally known as
“Revolutionary Posters” opened in mid-January 1979—roughly at
the time the Shah fled the country, an event reflected in caricatures
and graffiti often coproduced by students and street demonstrators,
and reproduced on posters inside the Faculty. In the spirit of anti-
imperialism, the posters favored Persian text but at times included
English. Their main target was the Shah, whose image was dismem-
bered and mutilated in every possible way on the posters, and who
was ridiculed as both a stooge of the United States and an apologist
for foreign influence.

There were also side events accompanying the Faculty exhibition,
from theater programs to short film screenings and broadcasts of revo-
lutionary songs involving major figures in contemporary Iranian
music, such as Mohammad Reza Lotfi and Hossein Alizadeh. IL
whole activity continued intensely until the day of the “final victory”
SU 22 Bahman 1357 (Febbraio 11, 1979), the fall of Shapoor Bakhtiar’s
government and the first proclamation of the Islamic Republic by
Ayatollah Khomeini. As soon as the situation became slightly more sta-
ble, the students organized a display of books presenting children’s
drawings of street demonstrations and police and army crackdowns.
Even more significantly, between the 11th and 19th of March 1979 Essi

Iran early on honored the work of graphic designers such as Morteza Momayez, Ghobad
Shiva, Ali-Akbar Sadeghi, Aydin Aghdashlou, and Reza Abedini. Their role was only reaf-
firmed by the institutionalization of posters in theater, film, music, and festivals. Both an
echo of traditional imagery (per esempio., curtain painting and calligraphy) and a plunge into
modern constructivist techniques (agitprop, photomontage, reporting), the medium of
the poster emerged in the hands of these artists as de facto political art.
The students’ initial idea, circulated already in the fall of 1978, had been a traveling exhi-
bition, but the Faculty of Fine Arts remained the only venue.

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119

put up a photo exhibit entitled Report on the Revolution that featured
works by Bahman Jalali, Rana Javadi, and Maryam Zandi, all of whom
would later become highly distinguished photographers. Once again
this display was strictly collaborative and “unfinished,” allowing for
new photographs to be printed and added each day (the famous photo
book that came out of it, quickly censored under the Islamic Republic
and only republished later, was Days of Blood Days of Fire by Bahman
Jalali and Rana Javadi).6

As the Islamic Republic became more and more authoritarian, one

event in particular shook the students to the core: the firing of the
teaching staff from the Institute for the Intellectual Development of
Children and Young Adults (Ka¯noon-e Parvaresh-e Fekri-e Koodaka¯n va
Nojava¯na¯n, better known as Ka¯noon). As part of the purges and ideolog-
ical purifications carried out by the new regime, the firings led to a
backlash among the art students, who found themselves grappling
with a regime they themselves had helped establish. In response, IL
students organized large sit-ins and public protests for several days in
front of the main university building, and they even created specific
posters for the occasion, which unfortunately were not preserved.7

The different sets of posters archived in state and private collec-
tions illustrate these political and aesthetic dissonances: throughout
the entire period between fall 1978 and spring 1979, among the many
images arising from the revolution, posters erupted into a chorus of
discordant voices that included Marxists, students, workers, the middle
class (whether or not linked to the Communist Tudeh party), national-
ist, and Islamic groups. The archives emphasize the heterogeneity of
visual styles and narratives during this revolutionary period: the mix-
ing of genres, the repurposing of symbols, and the hybridization of cul-
tural codes. Inoltre, the politically organized voices were joined by
other solitary voices with no party affiliation that occasionally popped
up in wall writing and graffiti. All of these disparate voices were
immortalized in many photographs and collections from the period,
but they cannot easily be reduced to one common denominator. In a
sense, Iranian poster art was protected from too much distortion or

6
7

Later, the students also organized an exhibition to celebrate International Workers’ Day.
The regime radicalized its “cultural revolution” by closing the doors of Tehran University
for a period of almost two years, thus depriving the students of their main stage for activ-
ism and preventing them from pursuing their studies.

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Kourosh Shishegaran. For Today, 1978. Poster. Courtesy of the author.

cultural homogenization by the diversity of its roots, even though in
the 1980s the Islamic Republic successfully reappropriated the rich
heritage of Iranian poster art.

Amir Esbati’s essay helps us grasp retrospectively the grassroots
visual strategies behind the Iranian Revolution. He not only articulates
the formation of a collective “language” and the performative gestures
underlying the “portrait” of a diverse group of people and their com-
mon political utopia, he also shows how Iran, a country that was never
colonized in the strict sense of this term, echoed the independence
movements and anti-imperial struggles taking place in other parts of
the world, from the spirit of the Non-Aligned Movement to the protests
of May 68.