The Martyrs' Museum in Tehran: Visualizing Memory in Post-Revolutionary Iran

Abstract

The Central Martyrs’ Museum in Tehran is the largest cultural repository in Iran displaying personal items and art relating to individuals who died during the Islamic Revolution (1979) and the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988). Although scholarship often considers the museum a secular invention of the Enlightenment, this study argues that it also can provide a ceremonial setting that prompts ritual activity. The Martyrs’ Museum, a case in point, reveals how a cultural institution can provide a dramatic field in which visitors engage in communal acts of remembrance and mourning, thereby uniting them into a civic body. Based on analysis of this museum, its layout and displays, and interviews with its staff and visitors, this study explores the institutionalization and aesthetizication of trauma and violence in post-revolutionary Iran with the aim to expand and challenge prevailing theoretical approaches to the concept of “the museum.”