Statement in the Contemporary Iranian Painting from the Perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Case study: Painting Exhibitions in Tehran Azad Art Gallery between 2006-2016)

The exhibition statement is one of the linguistic modes separate from the work, which, along with the visual mode of the works in contemporary art exhibitions, forms a multimodal discourse. Linguistic and visual modes interact in the form of a single discourse to achieve a unified goal. Statements today are an important part of the process of creating, reading, or shaping exhibitions, especially in situations where conceptual implications outweigh aesthetic meanings. Therefore, one of the new issues in contemporary art is the function of exhibition texts and notes and their relation to the visual mode of artistic discourse. What is the function of these texts? What is the relationship between this part of the language mode and the visual mode in the exhibition and how are their roles related to the functions of the statements?

The purpose of the present article is to examine and classify the additive relationships of the linguistic mode to the visual mode in contemporary Iranian painting.

​​ This article pays attention to the main function of statements through a qualitative study and to this purpose, we examined solo painting exhibitions in the Gallery of Free Designers in the period of 2006-2016. The theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis was used to extract and classify linguistic (statements) and visual relations in the fabric of contemporary painting.

​​ An effective statement can enhance the image by adding details or enhance it through elaboration, and most importantly, it can extend the visual mode. These additive relations conceptualize the visual mode, which is one of the most important functions of the statement as a linguistic mode and moves towards an integrated communication and interdisciplinary formulation that is the result of the process of mode relations.