Given the continuous flow of dialogue between past and present, there is something cyclical in the nature of many thematic elements of Iranian art.

“I was really surprised to see Obama’s image there and he looked happy, kind of like he was dancing,” she said. “I barely noticed the figure next to him, a menacing-looking guy in armor.” The menacing figure, she discovered in her later research, was a depiction of a man named Shimr. “There was an article about this billboard in the she said. “It talked about the imagery as being related to the origins of Shi’ite Islam in Iran. It had to do, in part, with the martyrdom of Imam Husain, who’s the grandson of the prophet Mohammed, and how he’s betrayed by this horrible man who’s representing the caliph. Apart from that story, there’s a type of Shi’ite passion play that’s performed in Iran, and it reenacts the martyrdom of Husayn. I later came to find that the person next to Obama is the theatrical version of Shimr. The whole context of the billboard is likening Obama to Shimr. In Iran, to say, ‘You’re like Shimr,’ is a horrible thing to say about someone because it means you can’t be trusted, and would betray your friends.”

Komaroff’s interest, however, was not in the politics behind the image but in the layering of its visual representations. “I got very interested in this form of passion play called [meaning “comfort or expression of grief”] and read up quite a bit on that,” she said. “Then I started rethinking how I think about Iranian art and the history of art in general — that it doesn’t have to be this linear way of looking where you go, as in Western art, from cave paintings to Picasso, in this timeline that moves forward in one direction. Iranian art and Middle Eastern art doesn’t necessarily need to be understood in a linear fashion. There are certainly other pathways to understanding art other than lining everything up chronologically, seeing the influence of what came before and what comes after. I’m not denying that there is this influence. But there are other things in play, especially when artists are themselves playing with time.”

In the Fields of Empty Days, edited by Linda Komaroff, is published by DelMonico Books in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.