Iranian graffiti during political transformation: A semiotic analysis of graffiti before and after revolution

ABSTRACT: Each movement is associated with political protests from people and political parties. History showed in the biggest revolutions had biggest support from protestors. Tools which uses for protesting are different, some groups choose political dialogue, some protest by writing their critical texts as a letter and some other prefer to use artistic way and most effective method for protesting like ‘Graffiti’. This study attempted to survey on signs in Iranian graffiti mostly during ‘Iranian Revolution’ in 79 and also after revolution during Iran-Iraq war until 2011. The thing which is certain is undeniable role of governments in this area; controlling public spaces, creating replacing methods for hiding graffiti, these are matters that governments do against protestors’ graffiti but these people—‘wall writers’—also use their creativity in innovating new techniques which make governments duty hard. Creativity of protestors changes according to time and place. This study does scrutiny about methods that during and after revolution is created with progress of technology. This study analyzed graffiti in the case of Iran before and after revolution on 1979. The signs—textual and visual—are studied by the position in Iranian culture and religious. In Islamic beliefs there are many metaphorical relations between signs which this study attempt to analyze the small part of these signs in Iran. Keywords: Graffiti, Wall Writing, Wall Painting, Iranian Revolution, Iran-Iraq War, Green Movementiv ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………