NEW YORK— The hottest ticket on a warm evening in Chelsea last night was for the invitation-only opening of “Iran Inside Out” at the Chelsea Art Museum. Guests in their best art world finery began arriving before 6, and by 8 a line stretched down 22nd Street, made up mostly of folks intent on explaining why their name wasn’t on the guest list.

With remarkable, though obviously unplanned, topicality, this is a show that — as its mouthful of a subtitle explains — sets out to present “influences of homeland and diaspora on the artistic language of contemporary Iranian artists.” The fact that it manages not only that but a far broader perspective on art’s intersection with politics is not entirely due to the fact that the show opens as Iran burns.

There is nothing theoretical about how art might engage with politics for the 56 artists included here, 35 of them living and working — though mostly unable to exhibit — inside Iran, the rest of Iranian birth or background but living scattered throughout the world.

Dorothea Keeser, CAM’s president, told ARTINFO that the museum had originally planned to bring half a dozen artists over from Iran for the opening and give them the chance to talk openly about the situation in their home country. But given the current political upheaval, she said, only one was able to make the journey: the erudite and inventive Farideh Lashai, whose video projection on painted canvases, I Don’t Want to Be a Tree (2008), with its complex references to Iranian legend and to Manet’s Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, is one of the most striking pieces here. The museum also had to consider carefully how much media attention it gives artists who are still inside Iran, Keeser said. (She once worked on a show of Iranian art with a curator whose father was imprisoned in Iran, she explained, but canceled the project in its early stages when word crept out that he was suffering worse torture as a consequence.)

This time around, the organizers have kept their nerve. “We wanted to overturn some of the redundant stereotypes that are still embraced in the West,” the show’s co-curator (and CAM Managing Director) Till Fellrath told us, and in that regard “Iran Inside Out” succeeds remarkably. It might come as a surprise, for example, that a country that, according to its disputed president, doesn’t have homosexuals provides 600 licenses a year for sex-change surgery under Sharia law, as the show’s other co-curator, Sam Bardaouil, explained.

This provides the autobiographical subject of Maria (2007), a beguilingly forthright series of photographs by Newsha Tavakolian, a sometime truck driver and now female café waitress. These hang next to Abbas Kowsari’s only slightly less surprising photographs from the series Masculinity (2006) and Women Police (2007). Their uniforms shrouded under full chadors, these women rappelling  down buildings or aiming their handguns out of the windows of speeding police cars make for bizarre sights.

It’s hardly surprising that the interplay of appearance and reality, or of reality and disguise, is one of the recurrent themes for artists in or from a country where so much, including most artistic expression, is suppressed. In Islamic Carding (2007), Shahram Entekhabi, who works in Europe, takes the postcards that London hookers leave in telephone booths to advertise their services and overpaints them to grant their subjects proper Islamic modesty. Conversely, Shirin Fakhim, who works in Tehran, uses a range of found objects and cast-off clothing to make an assortment of life-sized Tehran Prostitutes (2008). These are absurdly caricatural, but possess a real haunting presence and draw attention, if nothing else, to the fact that, despite the posturing of the Iranian state, there are actually something like 100,000 prostitutes working in its capital city.

Elsewhere, and very differently, Shirin Aliabadi and Farhad Moshiri’s Operation Supermarket series (2006) of photographs is genuinely tragic-comic: cleaning products that spell out on their labels “We Are All Americans” and a Tony the Tiger cereal box that reminds us that “Families Ask Why” are presented in some of the most eloquent pieces.

“Iran Inside Out” is a must-see, broad-ranging and consistently provocative in both medium and subject matter. There a lot of references here that the non-Iranian viewer has to work pretty hard at, but the Chelsea Art Museum has done a splendid job with its wall texts and catalog, and you’ll come away from this show knowing and thinking about things that had never occurred to you before. At a moment of crucial political imbalance, what more might you ask of an art show?