The Art of Defiance: Dissident Culture and Militant Resistance in 1970s Iran

At a time of growing state control, censorship and wholesale crackdown on opposition in post-1953 Iran, intellectuals and artists began to produce works that defied the Shah’s dictatorship and the regime’s "Great Civilisation" propaganda. With the emergence of urban guerrilla warfare in 1971, dissident artists – spearheaded by Marxist People’s Fadai Guerrillas (PFG) – created symbolic works that popularised the militants’ ideas through artistic depictions and tropes, while portraying the mi...