Cindy Sherman-The Woman Who Wasn’t There

Creativity and Power

Artificial intelligence has irrevocably altered the landscape of contemporary artistic practice, occupying a paradoxical position as both revolutionary medium and political actor. The fundamental tension between modernization and replication in AI art has been well-documented, though the role of dataset dependencies in reinforcing colonial aesthetics remains under-examined—an oversight this article corrects through analysis of works like Exo-stential.[1] This article interrogates the complex duality of AI's role in art by examining how machine learning algorithms like GANs and diffusion models have simultaneously expanded creative possibilities while reinforcing and exposing entrenched power structures.[2] The central tension we explore is whether a technology celebrated for its creative potential can transcend the systemic biases and political controversies embedded in its architecture.

The Evolution of AI Artistic Tools

When examining AI as an artistic medium, we encounter groundbreaking technologies that have fundamentally transformed artistic production. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) operate by pitting neural networks against each other to generate increasingly convincing outputs, while diffusion models progressively refine random noise into coherent images through iterative denoising processes.[3] These developments align with the third evolutionary stage of AI art - the 'cognitive intelligence art' phase marked by advanced deep learning capabilities.[4] These technical frameworks have enabled artists like Refik Anadol (data-driven installations), Mario Klingemann (neural network explorations), and Anna Ridler (poetic algorithmic works) to push the boundaries of creative expression.

Notably, Obvious Art's Edmond de Belamy (2018),[5] demonstrates how GANs replicate Western art historical canons while obscuring their dependence on uncredited training data.[6] This contradiction reflects a well-documented paradox in AI art discourse: while the field promises 'the diversification of subjects' through collaborative creation, it frequently neglects to acknowledge the historical sources and labor enabling such innovation.[7]

Anna Ridler's Critical Intervention

Anna Ridler's work represents a particularly significant intervention in this field. Her practice demonstrates three crucial dimensions that both align with and challenge conventional understandings of AiArt:

1. GANs as Artistic Process

Fig. 1: Anna Ridler, making of The Fall of the House of Usher, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

In works like Fall of the House of Usher (Fig. 1, 2017), Ridler employs GANs to produce imagery that retains algorithmic "artifacts" - intentional imperfections that reveal the machine's learning process.[8] This approach embodies the characteristic 'flowability and changeability' of AI art, while simultaneously subverting expectations of algorithmic perfection.[9]

2. The Politics of Dataset Construction

Fig. 2: Anna Ridler, The Fall of the House of Usher, 2017. Video still. 22. Courtesy of the artist.

Unlike many AI artists who rely on pre-existing datasets, Ridler creates custom datasets through labor-intensive processes like her hand-drawn ink illustrations for House of Usher (see Fig. 2). This methodology transforms abstract notions of collaborative creation into material practice by foregrounding the hidden human labor behind datasets,[10] challenging the field's celebratory narratives of technological innovation while exposing how systemic biases become embedded in algorithmic systems.[11]

3. Alternative Temporalities in AI Art

Fig. 3: Anna Ridler, Circadian Bloom, 2021, installation of real-time GAN-generated imagery. "You and AI" exhibition © Studio On – Stelios Tzetzias, for Onassis Stegi.

Her project Circadian Bloom (Fig. 3, 2021) explores non-human temporalities by synchronizing AI-generated flowers with biological clocks,[12] proposing perceptual frameworks that challenge anthropocentric perspectives and resist Silicon Valley's pursuit of "perfect" automation. This work establishes a tripartite dialogue between human, machine, and ecological temporalities, redefining interaction in computational art beyond conventional human-machine binaries to encompass more-than-human timescales.[13]

The Belamy Controversy in Context

Fig. 4: Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, 2018, created by Gan, Sold for $432,500 on 25 October 2018 at Christie’s in New York. Image: © Obvious.

The 2018 sale of Portrait of Edmond de Belamy ( Fig. 4) at Christie's auction house for $432,500 - dramatically surpassing its $10,000 estimate - marked a watershed moment for AI art while exposing its inherent contradictions.[14] This moment arguably represents AI art's transition into mainstream cultural consciousness, where the very 'media intelligence' that enables such works simultaneously obscures their contested labor conditions and creative provenance.[15] Yet the algorithm's complete dependence on uncredited human artworks [16] raised fundamental questions about creative ownership, while its slavish reproduction of European portraiture conventions demonstrated how AI systems reinforce rather than challenge dominant aesthetic hierarchies.[17]

Expanding the Canon: Non-Western AI Art Practices

The limitations of Western-centric AI art become starkly apparent when contrasted with interventions like Harshit Agrawal's Exo-stential (2021) and The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Algorithm (2018). These works demonstrate three transformative shifts that problematize dominant Western paradigms in AI art discourse.

Fig. 5: Harshit Hagrawal, some outputs of Tandem: human drawing on the left, machine output on the right. Imagining art collaborating with an intelligent machine. Tandem “is a software system where a person’s drawing input is ‘imagined’ upon by a computer outcome, thereby interweaving the two in a creative dialogue”.

Fig. 6: Harshit Hagrawal, Mask Reality, 2018. Real-Time Interactive Installation. Audience Face Transformed to Faces Inspired from Dance Rituals of Southern India. Webcam, Digital Screen.

1. Decolonial Dataset Curation

Where Belamy passively replicated 15,000 Eurocentric portraits,[18] Agrawal's Masked Reality trains algorithms on Kathakali and Theyyam dance rituals - deliberately juxtaposing upper-caste Sanskrit traditions with lower-caste folk practices through facial recognition technology. This technical subversion exposes how AI can weaponize cultural specificity rather than erase it.[19]

2. Cyborg Authorship Models

Agrawal's Tandem system (Libre AI, 2019) dismantles the "autonomous AI artist" myth[20] by:

o Maintaining visible human agency (hand-drawn inputs guide machine outputs).

o Crediting traditional miniature painters as collaborators (Anatomy Lesson)

This aligns with Crawford's (2021) labor critiques while offering an ethical alternative. (see Figs. 5 and 6)

3. Institutional Resistance

By exhibiting at Kolkata's Emami Art and New Delhi's Nature Morte rather than Western auction houses, Agrawal's Machinic Situatedness series actively resists dominant paradigms in computational creativity by grounding AI systems in Indian cultural frameworks. Through technical interventions like manipulated learning rates, the work generates intentionally unfamiliar aesthetics from regionally-specific datasets, challenging universalist assumptions about machine artistry.[21]

These practices demonstrate AI art's potential to transcend its colonial baggage when artists:

• Treat cultural heritage as living material rather than archival data (vs Next Rembrandt's static replication)

• Frame algorithms as mirrors of societal bias rather than neutral tools

• Redistribute creative agency across human/machine networks

Beyond the Binary

Ultimately, the dual nature of AI in contemporary art reveals a fundamental tension between emancipatory potential and entrenched power dynamics. While mainstream discourse often celebrates AI art's disruptive potential, our analysis exposes how these technological innovations remain deeply entangled with - and often reinforce - established power structures.[22] The "degenerative" approach—by foregrounding algorithmic imperfections, labor-intensive dataset construction, and non-human temporalities—offers a crucial model for engaging with AI that resists both techno-utopianism and uncritical adoption.

This expanded framework suggests that AiArt's most valuable contribution may lie not in its technological achievements alone, but in its capacity to make visible the complex relationships between human creativity, machine learning, and cultural power. As the field continues to evolve, artists like Ridler point toward a more ethically engaged practice that acknowledges both the possibilities and limitations of AI as an artistic medium.

Essay by malihe Norouzi / Independent Art Scholar

References:

1. Chen, Weiwen, Shidujaman, Mohammad and Tang, Xuelin (2020) AiArt: Towards Artificial Intelligence Art. MMEDIA 2020: The Twelfth International Conference on Advances in Multimedia, p. 49.

The Calligraphic Rebel Commanding the Auction World

In the rarefied world of contemporary Middle Eastern art, where Shirin Neshat’s arresting photographs and Monir Farmanfarmaian’s mirror mosaics routinely fetch seven figures at auction, another name is steadily climbing the ranks: Golnaz Fathi (born 1972, Tehran). Like her trailblazing predecessors, Fathi has mastered the alchemy of transforming Iranian tradition into contemporary gold, both artistically and commercially. Her abstract calligraphic works, which oscillate between lyrical restraint and rebellious energy[1], have ignited demand at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Bonhams in recent years.

Fathi belongs to a new generation of Iranian women artists—alongside Farideh Lashai and Parastou Forouhar—who’ve shattered the glass ceiling of the male-dominated art market. Yet while Lashai wielded poetic metaphor and Forouhar sharp political critique, Fathi’s weapon is the ghost of Persian script: deconstructed, liberated, and pulsing with modern urgency. As articulated in her 2019 London exhibition, "The scripts found in these works are intended to be utterly illegible. I often overwrite marks that sail close to suggesting meanings, to ensure they remain unreadable; that doesn't imply they are utterly unintelligible."(Fathi, 2019, cited in October Gallery, 2019)[2] Trained as a master calligrapher before breaking its rules, she embodies the tension at the heart of Iran's creative renaissance—honoring the past while demanding a future. This article traces Fathi’s meteoric rise, from her early days in Tehran’s rigid calligraphy studios to her current status as a darling of global collectors.

Artistic Background & Evolution

Fig. 1: Golnaz Fathi, Untitled (41) (triptych), 2010, Acrylic on canvas, 144 x 470 cm.

1. Early Training in Classical Calligraphy (1992–1995)

Fathi’s formal training began at the Iranian Society of Calligraphy, where she studied under master practitioners of Nasta'liq script, a revered Persian style demanding "precise discipline in stroke order, spacing, and rhythm."(Fig. 1)[3] As one of the few women to achieve near-mastery in this male-dominated tradition, her early work adhered to strict technical conventions.[4] This foundation remains visible in her abstract works through "the ghost of disciplined gestures,"[5] though she would later subvert these very rules.

2. Shift to Abstract Expressionism (Late 1990s–Early 2000s)

Dissatisfied with the "rigid hierarchies" of classical calligraphy,[6] Fathi transitioned to contemporary abstraction while retaining the "kinetic energy" of script.[7] Her works from this period, such as those in the No rain will put out this fire (2023), deconstruct Nasta'liq into "lyrical, meditative repetitions"[8], drawing comparisons to Cy Twombly’s gestural mark-making and Mark Tobey’s "white writing."[9] This evolution mirrored a broader trend among Iranian artists "negotiating tradition and modernity" post-Revolution.[10]

3. Mediums & Techniques

Fathi’s material choices reflect her dual engagement with heritage and innovation:

• Traditional substrates: Works on paper and canvas reference Persian manuscript traditions.[11]

• Modern interventions: Acrylic and gold leaf introduce "a luminous, contemporary materiality."[12]

• Spatial abstraction: Later pieces, like those exhibited at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, evoke "musical notations or minimalist landscapes."[13] blending calligraphic forms with global abstraction.

Market Presence & Auction Records

Fathi’s works have consistently performed well in international auctions, reflecting her growing stature in contemporary Middle Eastern art.

Golnaz Fathi's Auction Performance at Sotheby's: A Comprehensive Analysis

Market Overview

Fathi's Sotheby's auction results demonstrate consistent commercial performance, with works in this study selling for $10,000–$100,000.[14]

Key Market Trends

1. Premium Works: The 2009 triptych exemplifies Fathi's market peak, combining technical mastery (gold leaf application) with conceptual depth (persistent calligraphic motifs beneath abstraction).[15]

2. Institutional Validation: The Third Line Gallery's endorsement has proven particularly impactful, with their exhibited works achieving 28% higher prices on average compared to similar pieces without this provenance.[16]

3. Collector Base Expansion: Western collectors now comprise an estimated 35% of buyers for Fathi's early works, a significant increase from 15% in 2015.[17]

Notable Lots

1. Blue and Black (2014)

o Sale: $37,500 (October 2016)

o Medium: Acrylic and calligraphic media on canvas (characteristic of her abstract phase).

o Significance: This work exemplifies Fathi’s transition from traditional Persian calligraphy (Nasta'liq) into rhythmic abstraction. As noted by Sotheby’s (2016, Lot 123), the piece demonstrates how her "traditional strokes dissolve into gestural, almost meditative compositions."

o Market Impact: The sale solidified her mid-career valuation, establishing a benchmark for similar-sized works from this period.[18]

2. Untitled (2009)

Fig. 2: Golnaz Fathi, Untitled, 2009, acrylic, gold leaf and pencil on canvas, in three parts,237 x 18.5 cm.

o Sale: Triptych (Price Not Publicly Disclosed)

o Medium: Acrylic, gold leaf, and pencil on canvas (three panels, see Fig. 2).

o Key Features: This work merges Persian manuscript techniques with contemporary abstraction, using gold leaf—a nod to Islamic illumination—to create a dialogue between heritage and modernity.[19] Provenance includes The Third Line Gallery (Dubai), reinforcing its institutional credibility.

o Critical Context: Fathi’s experimentation with mixed media in this period reflects her broader engagement with "materiality as a narrative device."(The Third Line, 2023)[20]

3. Untitled (2005)

o Sale: 2022 (Estimate Undisclosed)

o Dimensions: 24 × 19 cm (unusually small compared to her typical large-scale works).

o Historical Importance: As an early example of her abstract calligraphy, this piece reveals the genesis of her deconstructed script vocabulary.[21] The 2005 date places it at the forefront of her shift away from figurative calligraphy, making it a rare, formative work.[22]

o Market Note: Small-scale early works like this are scarce at auction, as noted in Sotheby's catalog commentary on Fathi's "increasing demand for transitional period works."(Sotheby's, 2022, lot 87)

Golnaz Fathi's Auction Performance at Christie's: A Comprehensive Analysis

Market Overview

Fathi's Christie's auction results demonstrate strong commercial performance, with works in this study selling for $20,000–$150,000. Works in Christie's evening sales (e.g., Writing on the Wall, 2018) achieve 40-60% higher prices than day sales.[23]

Notable Lots

1. Writing on the Wall (2010)

o Sale: Reported $81,250 (Dubai, April 2018).[24]

o Medium: Ink and acrylic on canvas.[25]

Wahed Khakdan, a painter and illustrator born in 1950 in Tehran, creates works that evoke magical realism through his enigmatic, photorealistic depictions of objects and figures. His artistic formation began in childhood under the guidance of his father.

Traces of Nostalgia in the Painter's Motifs

After an initial phase of abstract experimentation, Khakdan embraced surrealism in the early 1970s, debuting his first solo exhibition at Tehran's Seyhoun Gallery in 1974. His oeuvre has been exhibited extensively in Iran, Germany, and the United States. During 1976-1983, he diversified into interior architecture, theatrical set/costume design for film and television, and children's book illustration. The revolutionary period and subsequent war prompted a shift toward social realism with allegorical undertones (Fig 1). Following his relocation to Germany, still-life compositions became his predominant focus.[1] Khakdan's paintings, while employing nostalgic elements and memory-laden atmospheres, transcend mere reminiscence. By disrupting the brain's memory-formation processes through strategic voids and the presentation of historically charged imagery, his work actively deconstructs nostalgia. These canvases achieve temporal liberation-severed from their origins, they emerge fully in the present. [2] 

Spatial Composition and Emotional Resonance in the Work

The paintings employ northern light-a lighting technique where color values and contrast transition gradually, best exemplified in Vermeer's works. This treatment lends Khakdan's compositions an almost sacred quality. Beyond the nostalgic patina of earthy tones layered on objects, we encounter elements that transcend their materiality. The artist imbues these objects with added value through his technique, a value derived from personal memories that he seeks to connect with collective memory, thereby preserving his own narrative within history. [3] 

The Profound Impact of Migration on the Artist's Visual Language

Migration has fundamentally shaped some of wahed Khakdan's most significant works. Having spent thirty years away from Iran, this lived experience inevitably permeates his artistic vision. Two paintings, The Emmigrant Scarecrow and The Second Emmigrant Scarecrow- articulate this theme with particular clarity. Here, scarecrow figures occupy the lower halves of the compositions, their compressed placement viscerally conveying the weight of displacement (figs 2 & 3). Recurring motifs of shoes, hats, and suitcases trigger the viewer's associations with journeys. 

A more symbolic treatment emerges in The Emmigrant Horse, where the artist projects his experience of rootlessness onto childhood toys, suggesting his destiny became inextricably intertwined with migration (fig 4). This anxiety about spatial and identity dislocation compels the artist to forge an independent path-one diverging from contemporary trends. Beneath the technically masterful surfaces and exquisite glazes, these works become therapeutic spaces where the shared anxieties of artist and viewer find resolution, allowing the world to fade into dignified oblivion. [4] 

The Enchantment of Imagination

Khakdan openly acknowledges the central role of imagination in his creative process: "Nearly 80% of what you see in my paintings exists only in the mind. I constantly challenge my own imagination, striving to render objects from memory whenever possible. Only when forms prove elusive do I resort to photographs or physical references. Many objects I depict like the red horse I owned at age three, which appears repeatedly in my work-belong to distant memories and no longer exist in reality."[5](fig 4) 

In his still-life compositions, Khakdan imbues inanimate objects with human presence. His visual spaces function like a messianic breath across the canvas, screaming the presence of a wandering spirit amidst dead matter. As noted by Shayeghan, the works exhibit a distinctive "new enchantment": "He masterfully weaves together fragments of his scattered presence like a virtuoso painter, yet manages to synthesize his inner landscapes into visions uniquely his own."[6]

The Viewer's Encounter with Punctums

Analyzing Khakdan's oeuvre requires meticulous attention to objects and their symbolic potential. These surrealist spaces resist singular interpretations, rejecting absolute truths while maintaining what Salajegheh identifies as "a profoundly bitter undercurrent in the artist's worldview."[7] 

The paintings deliver their meaning with startling profundity, functioning like Barthesian punctums that pierce the viewer's consciousness. Roland Barthes describes the punctum as "that accidental detail which pricks the viewer, establishing an emotional connection with the image".[8] In Khakdan's work, these visual punctums strike like arrows, their final impact shaped by each viewer's lived experience. Barthes further characterizes the punctum as "a traumatic wound that bruises the spectator"[9], precisely the type of painful encounters Khakdan orchestrates through his art. 

1.Wahed khakdan, Three times hamid, 1987, oil on convas, 120×90 cm.

2.Wahed khakdan, emmigrant scarecrow, 2012, oil on convas.

       3.Wahed khakdan, the second emmigrant scarecrow, 2021, oil on convas.

4.Wahed khakdan, emmigrant horse, 2020, oil on convas.

References:

The Starting Point of the Collection 

Ehsan Toosi, born in 1978, is a member of the Iranian Sculptors Association and has been active in sculpture since 2002. In his latest collection, titled "Burning Is Not for Watching", he creates objects that retain their familiar visual and conceptual frameworks but, through an altered industrial function, step into the realm of art. 

"The conception and construction of this space date back to a year before the announcement of the COVID-19 pandemic. By employing materials that defy physical laws in his works, he challenges the conventional notion of a heater and, in a way, targets the audience’s expectations of its function and structure."[1] In his interviews, he has stated that the collection began in 2019, influenced by social issues and his living environment, gradually expanding the effects and afflictions imposed by society onto the world around him, seeking them within the geography of existence.[2] 

Carrying History on a Decayed and Functionless Body 

In Toosi’s sculptures, "function" is disrupted. The heater-shaped sculptures, with bodies made of wood, now possess the potential to burn themselves—as if their turn has come. Here, he takes utilitarian objects in service of his idea and undermines them. Upon closer inspection of these objects, their textures and surface details reveal decay, rust, fractures, and rot. It is as though these heaters carry history within them, presenting it before our eyes, and today, in a form of another material, they have become a "subject for burning"-so vulnerable that their first burning will be their last. 

 In part of his statement, he asserts: "Modern humans, inundated with vast amounts of information and data, believe they know much, but in truth, they know nothing. They are merely trapped in delusion, mental nausea, instability, agitation, and anxiety-until the end, they only have as much time as a single flame."[3] 

Deception in the Representation of Reality 

Drawing on the discourse surrounding representation in art, which originates from ancient Greece, an artist’s ideal in this regard is the repetition of presence or the replication of an image of nature and reality—an effort to simulate it so convincingly that it deceives the viewer, to the point where this model can be called the "deceptive representation of reality."[4] In encountering Toosi’s space, we face the same deception. At first, the audience searches for nostalgia, a loss in the past, or traces of ancestors in history (fig. 1). But over time, as they approach the sculptures, they find them to be points of intersection between past and future-objects that, in form and appearance, come from the past, yet in structure and context, herald the future (fig.  2). 

"The past, in itself, is incomprehensible and formless; it only gains meaning and shape when connected to a part of the present." (Faramarzi, 1984, p. 295) Certainly, every present has a past, and the rewriting of history in art has always been evident in the intellectual currents of artists. "Thus, the claim that any understanding of the past is, in some way, a misunderstanding or misinterpretation is not without merit. The perspective from which we view history is not outside of history. Our reflection on the past is itself a product of history."[5] 

Hence, in examining this collection, we revisit historical matters. The artist has placed history upon a cold, decayed body that once generated warmth, confronting us with the erosion inherent in his perspective. In his view, the universe exists in a state of burning, and his rusted objects fully represent this intellectual current. By compelling the audience to witness this burning, he positions the viewer at the intersection of his envisioned past and future, striving to set the world in motion and critique passivity and silence in the face of the future.[6] 

1.         Ehsan, toosi. 2025, the Inconceivable Misery, shirin gallery, tehran, personal picture.

2.       Ehsan, toosi. 2025, the Inconceivable Misery, 240×180×90cm, shirin gallery, tehran, personal picture.

References:

1.        Toosi, ehsan, the Inconceivable Misery catalogue, shirin gallery, tehran, 2025.

2.      Ehsan toosi and firoozeh saboori, 2025, “Questions about the Inconceivable Misery exhibition”.