Margherita Sprio

Performing history: girlhood and the apple (Samira Makhmalbaf, 1998)

Contemporary Iranian Cinema, and its specific use of children as nonprofessional actors in particular, asks important questions that raise a specter from the past both in terms of cinematic history and in relation to the history of girlhood on screen. In an earlier essay, I looked at the way that reenactment was being utilized in contemporary Iranian cinema1 and I argued that this acting style was linked to the politics of performance known to us through Italian Neo Realism.2 In this essay I will look at Sib/The Apple (Samira Makhmalbaf, 1998) in relation to the wider issues of reenactment and performance in cinema but more specifically at how girlhood is explored in the film. In addition to this, my argument will reconsider Laura Mulvey’s earlier writing about Iranian cinema, in which she states that “there is a politics of representation at stake, but also a politics of cultural specificity at a time of encroaching cultural homog-enization.”3 This chapter will examine how can these ideas engage with the performance of girlhood onscreen and how might an analysis into this assist an understanding of contemporary transnational modernity.

Diaspora in the field of vision

Diasporic artists have become visible in small but significant numbers since the expansion in post-war education in Britain – supported in part by those sympathetic to the politics of educational equality and in part by those for whom education and diasporic experience were the enabling factors for their practices. Out of these practices emerged the critical debates about visual cultural diversity, now commonplace within contemporary art education. This article will address some of the key issues that have been made apparent in the work of some contemporary diasporic artists who live, work and have studied in Britain. These issues will be looked at within the frame of contemporary British art education and its changing role in the current era. In addition, the article will look at how emerging contemporary art practices (for example, live art practices) figure in the hierarchies that dominate the existing institutional structures in higher education in Britain.