Surface Tension: Reconsidering Horizontality in the Work of Iranian ‘Diaspora’ Artists amna malik In the 1990s the so-called ‘crux of minimalism’ – the continuation and break with high modernism – reappeared in an unexpected form. Once condemned as symptomatic of US imperialism, the industrial materials and the labour of the factory worker that defined it in the 1960s gave way in the 1990s to scatter pieces and grid structures evoking repetition as the exertion of an anonymous power or the ephemeral nature of the body and play. 1 This body of work frequently, though not exclusively, drew on the formal organization of the grid, sometimes in a horizontal position on the floor or in the space of the everyday. This normative response to the form of 1960s minimalism is remote from the following: a scene from Rapture (1999, Fig. 3) by Shirin Neshat, a photograph from Goftare Nik (1998–2003, Fig. 5) by Shirana Shahbazi (1999), and Silent Carpet (2000, Fig. 10) by Maria Kherikhah. ฀ere the ground is either the site demarcated by prayer, the setting of sacred ceremonies, or the contested urban space between the civic institution and the street. The model of horizontality is that of the body close to the ground but moving in space, between locations, destabilizing identities and changing the context for spectatorship. ฀orizontality designates an embodied but ‘situated knowledge’ 2 that, in these examples of art, is specific to Iranian cultural politics after the death of Khomeini. After the revolution of 1979 exiled communities of a cultural and social elite of Iranians emerged in Europe and the US, forming cultural and media networks 3 that offer enormous potential 5