- Title
- Untitled ('Down with Communism')
- Date Made
- 1978, printed 2014
- Medium
- Inkjet print (pigment based)
- Dimensions
- Image: 22 1/4 × 33 in. (56.52 × 83.82 cm)
Frame: 26 × 36 3/4 × 2 in. (66.04 × 93.35 × 5.08 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2015.2
- Collecting Area
- Art of the Middle East: Contemporary
- Curatorial Notes
This striking image was made in 1978 in Tehran at the beginning of the Iranian revolution. It captures
graffiti on a corrugated metal door of the type that began to appear throughout the city. The message
here—"Down with Communism"—subsequently effaced by those with a contrary point of view, is framed in
the manner of an abstract painting. It eerily presages the full-blown revolution and its immediate aftermath:
the dripping red paint blotting out the political slogan evokes the violence that followed in its wake.
Best known as a photographer, Ahmad Aali has been an active force in the Iranian art world since the
early 1960s. His subject matter is most often Iran itself—its landscape, architecture, and people—framed
against the tumultuous political, economic, and social changes that have taken place over the last fifty
years. Though he covers some of the same territory, Aali is not a photojournalist; rather his main interest,
as in this work, is composition.
