In the past two decades, Iranian contemporary art has been eagerly embraced by international art venues. The transportation of artworks from Tehran to mostly western European and North American cultural centers entails inter-discursive translations that will render them legible for their reception in a new context. This paper argues that bound up in these translations are performative acts of language that label these artworks as markers of ethnic alterity, unexplored localities and most of the time associates them with issues of gender and femininity (and therefore limited to the vocabulary of “veil,” “plight of women” and “sexual inequality”). Looking at a seven-minute piece of video-art by Ghazaleh Hedayat entitled Eve's Apple (2006), the article examines this predicament and the possibilities for the artists to circumvent it. It argues that Hedayat's video enables an observation of the performative dominance of Western discourses of art history that mark the limits of inter-discursive interpretation in disciplines such as art history and art criticism.

The present article investigates the relations between the corpus of the five Avestan Niyāyišns and that of the Yašts, showing the dependance of the former on the latter. Four Niyāyišns out of five incorporate chapters attested into the corpus of the Yašts; only the fifth Niyāyišn depends on Yasna 62, although it shares some stanzas with Yasna 27, 33 and 34; in any case this text cannot be considered the source of the parallel passages attested in the Yasna. The paragraphs of the Niyāyišns which do not have a direct parallel in other Avestan passages, cannot be considered as original, but probably depend on other original sources or have been made through imitating earlier passages.

This article sets forth a history (with literary-textual focus) of the Iranian mythological Snake-man, from the earliest Vedic and Avestan evidence, down to Ferdowsi. The continuous development of the myth in Iran is accompanied by changes in the monster's name, which show linguistic reassociations, while a constant in all of this is the figure's representation as an inimical outsider. The Vedic name of the brute's fortification, the background of which in etymology and realia will be shown to be the pre-Aryan Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex, finds a clear but hitherto unobserved correlation in Pahlavi. This illuminates the Indo-Iranian antiquity of the myth in terms of prehistoric inter-ethnic rivalries.