My project rethinks artistic modernism in Iran by recuperating the Farsi keyword of jahani, which I translate as “being situated in world-space.” My work on jahani underscores the challenge of translating socio historically specific keywords to assimilate them into a universalist lexicon and pre-established systems of knowledge categorization. Jahani reimagines a set of non-hierarchical and interdependent connections between the self and others, as well as the local and global scales of human experience. I foreground how a group of mid-twentieth-century Iranian artists practiced jahani to inhabit and mediate differences with global others by reconfiguring relationships between people, sites, animate, and inanimate phenomena. My project addresses a historiographic lacuna by challenging the prevailing art historical views of Iranian modern art as state-enforced narratives limited to identitarian tropes of Shiite religious icons and calligraphy. Such imagery emerged from the post-coup cultural policies of the Shah when his secular state paradoxically promoted “Islamic Iran” as its hallmark of modernity. Embittered by the coup and the imperialist rivalry between the US and Soviet Union over Iran’s natural resources, jahani artists resisted the ethno-nationalist framework of the Shah’s puppet state, while unyielding to both the West’s universalizing modernism and the Soviet Union’s socialist realism. Through their blend of literary and visual works the figures I study emphasized nature, transience, and corporeal change as sensory representations of being in a world marked by constant flux. Contemplating themes of birth, demise, and the mundane, they treated the surface of their paintings and drawings as a thing of physical substance that engaged with the world and solicited the viewer’s perception to experience the sensible world through their jahani work.