Monday 5 February 2024

“The Grandest Orphan Cinema”:

Ehsan Khoshbakht on MoMA’s “Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925–1979” Series

Chess of the Wind (1976),  Image courtesy of Filmmaker Magazine.

Interview by René Baharmast in Festivals & EventsFilmmaker Magazine 

Starting with a packed house on the night of October 13 and concluding right after Thanksgiving, MoMA showcased “Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925–1979,” the largest retrospective of Iranian cinema ever held inside or outside of Iran. With close to 70 films covering the pre-revolutionary period, there were works from Iran’s most famous filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami; the most famous film of this era, the late Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow; and repertory favorites like Ebrahim Golestan’s Brick and Mirror, Bahram Beyzaie’s Downpour and Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black. But, significantly, there were also films by lesser-known but just as vital filmmakers such as the Iranian Hitchcock, Armenian-Iranian Samuel Khachikian (Anxiety) and Masoud Kimiai, whose banned and politically censored The Deer had a rare screening as it was intended to be seen. One of Iran’s most popular actors, Parviz Sayyad, had one of his directorial efforts shown, the harrowing Dead End. Sohrab Shahid Saless, the most influential filmmaker of this era, had three films, including the masterpiece Still Life. Filmmakers who were important figures beyond their directorial work, like Bahman Farmanara and Farrokh Ghaffari were also represented. 

Putting this together was quite a feat. To that end, I spoke to the individual most responsible, the co-director of Il Cinema Ritrovata, Ehsan Khoshbakht—who had his documentary about this era, Filmfarsi, also shown in the series—in a wide-ranging conversation to place everything in its proper context. 

Filmmaker: What’s your background and how did it relate to putting this retrospective together?

Khoshbakht: My background in architecture informs what I do. Like a piece of architecture, I always think of the retrospective’s foundation, the main structure, facade, the ornamentations of all the different films, as fading into different architectural prescriptions that I have in mind.

Saturday 6 January 2024

Persian alphabet 'ART IRAN: Falling into Language' group exhibition features work by Iranian artists

The Written Room, a site-specific installation by Parastou Forouhar, will be created in a narrow corridor of the gallery. Acrylic paint. Courtesy of the artist, Craft Contemporary and Artdaily.cc.

In collaboration with nonprofit Farhang Foundation, a compelling new group exhibition, ART IRAN: Falling into Language, opens at the art museum Craft Contemporary on Jan. 28, 2024 with an artist talk, and runs through May 5.

ART IRAN: Falling into Language presents nine expatriate Iranian artists who engage diverse forms of the Persian alphabet, handwriting, and fragments as an essential part of their artistic practice. This exhibition includes installation works, drawings, collages, site-specific art, and an interactive installation. The methods used range from sewing; assemblages of letters, words, and ceramics; and wall painting.

“The technique of handwriting on objects of different materials, from dishes to architectural tiles, is part of daily life in Iranian culture—and has been throughout history,” notes the exhibit's curation team, Roshanak Ghezelbashand Hoda Rahbarnik.

“The text that appears in ART IRAN: Falling into Language is not necessarily there to be read. It is there to be seen,” explain Ghezelbash and Rahbarnik. “The audience's inability to read these letters captures the in-between state the artists occupy in their daily reality: no longer belonging in their homeland nor in their new home. They chose handwriting over calligraphy— a well-known official expression of the alphabet with a long history within and outside the Iranian art scene; the artists chose handwriting as their voice—to gain a sense of belonging. What they bring with them into this new state of alienation might ultimately be described as a new kind of cosmopolitanism—it belongs to nowhere, so it is at home everywhere.”

For example, The Written Room (pictured above), a site-specific installation by Parastou Forouhar, will be created in a narrow corridor of the gallery. Visitors will feel like they are walking into a room; her handwriting covers the walls, floors, and ceiling with black ink in this entirely white space. The Persian alphabet is presented in a way that may be unreadable even to Iranian readers, but the emotions conveyed in her art are universally understood.

Saturday 16 December 2023

And They Laughed at Me

 Newsha Tavakolian’s images and the scent of roses

Courtesy Collater.al

by Giorgia MassariCollater.al 

A woman intent on smelling a rose. An image that is repeated seven times in the photo exhibition by Newsha Tavakolian, winner of the first Deloitte and Fondazione Deloitte Photo Grant. On view now Dec. 13 at Mudec Photo in Milan, the Iranian artist’s And They Laughed at Me project is a personal account of the collective history of Iran, a country marked by an oppressive political environment. The project was chosen from nineteen others, proposed by ten expert and international figures contacted by Deloitte and Denis Curti, curator and artistic director of the Grant.

Saturday 9 December 2023

A Revolution on Canvas

Documentary Review (2023)

Sara Nodjoumi delves into the mystery surrounding the disappearance of more than 100 "treasonous" paintings by her father, seminal Iranian modern artist Nickzad Nodjoumi.

Image courtesy RogerEbert.com.

by Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com

Till Schauder and Sara Nodjoumi’s “A Revolution on Canvas” is a smart intersection of the political, personal, and artistic, revealing how all three can be intertwined in a way that makes them impossible to extricate. For Iranian artist Nikzad "Nicky" Nodjoumi, art is always political. And art is always personal. His unshakeable commitment to his beliefs and his need to express those beliefs have made him not only an outcast from his country but also one of its most vital voices. “A Revolution on Canvas” sometimes feels a little light on the concept of “Revolution” regarding form and ambition—it’s a pretty straightforward HBO Doc—but the filmmaking here is empathetic and inspiring. Sometimes, the work of an artist being unpacked by that artist’s relative can lead to bland hagiography, but Nicky’s daughter Sara uses her personal angle to an advantage, never hiding her love and admiration, making it easier for us to feel the same.

Saturday 2 December 2023

True to Self

An Interview 

Arghavan Khosravi On Tension, Circumventing Censorship, and the Protest of Iranian Women

“The Orange Curtain” (2022), acrylic on canvas over shaped wood panel on wood panel, 64 1/2 x 49 inches. Courtesy Arghavan Khosravi and Colossal.

by Grace Ebert, Colossal

For Arghavan Khosravi, obscurity is the point. The Iranian artist (previously) translates the experience of living a dual life—that of immigrating, of presenting differently when at school and at home, and of wanting to deny clear interpretations—into disjointed works that are equally alluring and destabilizing. She’s never proscriptive and offers viewers several entrance points into her narratives, which center around agency, identity, and most recently, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in protest of Iran’s strict limitations on women and girls.

I visited Khosravi’s solo show, True to Self, at Rachel Uffner Gallery in mid-November, a week after our phone call transcribed below. In addition to her fragmented wall works bound by cord and layered in multiple dimensions, several figurative sculptures congregate at the back of the gallery as a sort of battalion. The women are armored with chainmail and Persian helmets but aren’t militant, instead forming a structural resistance that both demands their right to be seen and invites viewers to stand with them in defiance and solidarity.

Grace Ebert: You have a background in graphic design and illustration, two disciplines rooted in narrative and storytelling. And in the first article we wrote about your work, you say that before you start a new painting, you keep thinking about what you want to say in it. Of course, your background is influential, but why is this narrative component so crucial to your work?

Arghavan Khosravi: I have always been painting on the side in my spare time, but when I came to the U.S. in 2015 to go to grad school and study painting, I wanted a fresh start. I thought that I should forget about all the skills that I learned during those years as a graphic designer and illustrator, and I had to let go of the set of tools that those fields gave me. I started with abstract paintings that were all process-based and more like happenings, accidents, pouring paint, things like that because I thought I’d have to start from the opposite pole in this spectrum. I didn’t have any sort of narrative in my work. 

Saturday 16 September 2023

A new book documents art and resistance in Iran

Woman Life Freedom offers a wide-ranging look at how people have used all kinds of creative means to make their voices heard

Woman Life Freedom by Mina M Jafari. Courtesy Creative Review.

One year after the death of Jina Mahsa Amini at the hands of the ‘morality police’ in Iran comes a new book named after the movement that rose up in its wake.

Iranians – led by women and girls – poured out into the streets of cities across each and every province, echoed by satellite demonstrations around the world, as they chanted Zan Zendegi Azadi or Jin Jîyan Azadî, meaning Woman Life Freedom in Persian and Kurdish respectively.

Edited by Malu Halasa, a writer and editor specialising in Middle Eastern art and literature, the new book brings together insightful written accounts of the past year – and the pivotal events of long before – with a broad range of images showing how visual media helped to propagate messages of resistance.

Women of Iran by Or Yogev. Courtesy Creative Review.

The Power of Women by Babak Safari. Courtesy Creative Review.

Social justice movements are often emblematised by evocative, symbolic imagery, and for Woman Life Freedom, the image of a woman removing the hijab – mandatory under Iranian law – became shorthand for the uprising.

In the book, the Iranian Women of Graphic Design (IWofGD) describe the image of cutting hair as “a worldwide symbol of protest against cruelty, injustice and anti-women laws”. The collective runs an extensive online resource making protest visuals – among others – readily available to the masses.


Blinding As a Weapon of Suppression in Iran: Special Report by Mana Neyastami, published in IranWire in March 2023. Courtesy Creative Review.
 
The Persian Rosie by Ghazal Foroutan. Courtesy Creative Review.

Illustration by Jalz of the Azadi (Freedom) Tower with Matisse’s dancers and the protest slogan ‘Women, Life, Freedom’. Courtesy Creative Review.

The book covers mediums that have long provided a canvas for revolution, from posters to graffiti to performance. These examples appear alongside modern-day mechanisms like social media posts, which, according to the book, offer “new, nimble ways to subvert regime censors and internet morality police”. Halasa explains that this mix of tradition and modernity underpins “dissident art” in Iran, which “often blends centuries-old indigenous motifs with contemporary global memes”.

It also examines the various everyday means of expressing resistance: the rare women fashion designers recalibrating dress codes, or the group of mostly women who not only show their hair, but dye it in a spectrum of rainbow hues too.

As art historian Pamela Karimi answers in an enlightening Q&A, “the art of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests operates in informal, tangible and profound ways. Art has become an integral part of everyday life.”

Woman Life Freedom edited by Malu Halasa is published by Saqi Books; saqibooks.com. Courtesy Creative Review.




How photography can reveal, overlook and manipulate truth

The fearless work of Australian Iranian artist Hoda Afshar

Hoda Afshar ‘Untitled #88’, from the series ‘Speak the wind’ 2015–22, pigment photographic print, 80 x 100 cm © Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist and The Conversation.

by Tom WilliamsThe Conversation

Through her poetically constructed images, Hoda Afshar illuminates a world overshadowed by history and atrocity. Yet we never see despair: we see defiance, comradeship, reinvention and a search for how photography can activate new ways of thinking.

Afshar was born in Iran and migrated to Australia in 2007. She began her practice as a documentary photographer in Tehran, having originally been attracted to acting.

Staging and creative intervention would become significant features of her work.

Even in her early, nominally “documentary” series, you can sense an embracing of the ambiguity of the still image, and an interest in composing a reality more vivid (and perhaps genuine) than dispassionate reportage might be capable of.

Afshar is now one of Australia’s most significant photo media artists, so it’s a surprise that Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is her first major survey exhibition.

What unites her materially diverse work is a concern with visibility: who is denied it, what is made visible by media, and how photography can reveal, overlook and manipulate truth.

Sunday 20 August 2023

How female photographers are making their voices heard in Iran

 

"Imaginary CD Covers," from Newsha Tavakolian's series "Listen," 2010. Courtesy Newsha Tavakolian/Magnum Photos and CNN.


by Zoe Whitfield, CNN

On September 19, 2022, three days after Mahsa Amini died after being sent to a “re-education center” by Iran’s morality police for allegedly infringing the country’s strict dress code, photographer Yalda Moaiery was arrested, beaten and jailed. She had been taking pictures of the resulting protests in the capital Tehran, part of a wider, women-led movement that erupted across the country following 22-year-old Amini’s death.

Moaiery was released on bail in December, reportedly pending a summons to begin a six-year prison sentence on anti-state charges. In January, a video of Moaiery was posted to her social media: dressed in an orange uniform, she sweeps the street and announces her sentence.


Saturday 17 June 2023

Alternative Iran: Contemporary Art and Critical Spatial Practice

An interview with Pamela Karimi

Courtesy Jadaliyya.

Pamela Karimi, Alternative Iran: Contemporary Art and Critical Spatial Practice (Stanford University Press, 2022).

by Jadaliyya

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? 

Pamela Karimi (PK): As an architect, I have always been captivated by the ways in which creative agents navigate diverse spatial environments, whether it be a gallery, a studio, the street, or a deserted urban landscape. However, it was my personal upbringing in Iran that served as the primary impetus for exploring how innovative individuals engage in a cat-and-mouse game with state authorities over spatial boundaries. My formative years in post-revolutionary Iran were marked by clandestine art and music lessons, held in private settings beyond the reach of government or public institutions. But as I delved deeper into investigating such spaces, I came to realize that the notion of a wholly “pure” underground was a misconception. There were, of course, some exceptions. In the 1980s, for example, many art events—especially those featuring Western music or women's vocal performances—were held under entirely covert circumstances. However, the majority of creative—even politically daring—endeavors since the 1990s have occurred in areas that are not entirely hidden but are what I call loosely covert. It is within these interstitial zones, such as dilapidated homes, deserted factories, and abandoned urban locations, that alternative dreams and aspirations unfold. 

In 2010 I read the late Svetlana Boym’s Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea, in which she argues that freedom is not a universal idea, but rather an ever-evolving concept that continues to shape our reality. What made it particularly poignant was the fact that, following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, many outsiders assumed that there was no freedom to be found in Iran. Yet Iranians, despite the odds stacked against them, have always been adept at carving out spaces where they can exercise autonomy.

Although the book primarily focuses on nonconforming curatorial projects, independent guerrilla installations, escapist practices, and tacitly subversive performances, it also features case studies that counterbalance the long-held presumption of a deep divide between the progressive art community and the state. Throughout the book, I identify the power of art to take a critical stance across semi-regulated and unregulated spaces, as well as regimes of appropriation and coalition.

Saturday 22 April 2023

Months of Unrest in Iran Have Made It Even Harder for Artists and Galleries to Thrive.

 Here’s How They Are Still Fighting for Ideas

The protests have brought new hurdles but Iranians are determined to keep the art scene alive.

Installation view, “For Life” at Aaran Gallery in Tehran. Courtesy Artnet News.

by Rebecca Anne ProctorArtnet News

On November 4 in Tehran, O Gallery owner Orkideh Daroodi bravely reopened her gallery’s doors after one and a half months of intense protests and upheaval following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody.

Reopening the gallery and staging exhibitions was risky during a moment of unrest and violent crackdown from the Iranian government. It was also socially risky. Galleries and many other businesses initially shuttered in solidarity with the protests. When Daroodi announced her reopening on Instagram, she immediately faced backlash from some members of the art scene, who saw the return to business as lacking in solidarity with the protests. Several other galleries that reopened in November without making public announcements faced a similar situation. On the morning of the gallery’s reopening, someone splattered red paint all over the gallery door and steps. The message was clear.

“They accused us of opening at the wrong time. But when is the right time?” Daroodi told Artnet News. “Our opening coincided with the day that many people were on the streets, being killed and imprisoned, and we were cursed endlessly saying that we didn’t care about the lives of the citizens and that all we cared about was money. But in fact by being open we were showing resistance and actually living the woman, life, freedom slogan.”

While Daroodi and other Iranian gallerists have resumed staging exhibitions and selling art, some remain reluctant to hold solo exhibitions due to safety concerns, afraid of provoking the wrath of the protesters as much as attracting the attention of the oppressive Islamic regime.

Thursday 3 November 2022

Iranian artist's surreal paintings of women take on a new sense of urgency

 

Courtesy of the artist/Stems Gallery and CNN.
by Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

For Iranian artist Arghavan Khosravi, depicting hair in her paintings has become charged with emotion. She posted a video on Instagram in early October that showed her sweeping a paintbrush across the canvas to create fine strands. "These days when I'm painting hair, I'm filled with anger and hope. More than ever," she wrote in the caption.

She added the hashtag #MahsaAmini to the post, the name of the 22-year-old woman who died in Iran's capital Tehran in September after being arrested by the country's morality police for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly. Amini's death has since catalyzed nationwide protests — many of which have seen young women and girls defiantly cutting their hair — and her name has become a rallying cry on social media.

Khosravi grew up in a secular Tehran household in the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution as a new theocratic regime instated oppressive rules for women, including making the hijab, or headscarf, mandatory in public.

"At a very early age I realized that there is this contrast between your private spaces — your home — and then public spaces. At home you are free to do whatever you want," Khosravi said in a phone call from Stamford, Connecticut. "You learn to navigate this dual life."

Khosravi had her own encounter with the morality police in 2011 and was temporarily detained, she explained. Based in the US since moving in 2015 to study painting, the former graphic designer uses long, flowing hair as a symbol in her metaphor-laden works. Her surreal, dreamlike portraits of women, which appear on multi-paneled surfaces that resemble architectural facades, were influenced by the flattened perspectives and meticulous details of Persian miniature paintings.

Thursday 13 October 2022

The Many Shades of Iran’s Protest Art

In the four decades since the Islamic Revolution, Iranian artists have used clever tactics and unconventional modes of art-making to display disobedience.

Katayoun Karami, Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deed (2013), Azad Art Gallery, Tehran (courtesy the artist and Hyperallergic)

by Pamela KarimiHyperallergic 

Recent weeks have seen a surge of protest art in Iran, triggered by the tragic story of Mahsa Amini, a young woman killed on September 16 by the morality police for breaching the Islamic republic’s dress code for women. Since then, civil unrest has grown in more than 80 Iranian cities, with calls for justice as well as personal and political liberties, not to mention hundreds of arrests and violence against protesters, especially young women. Internet access remains limited as the government regulates its usage. 

Amid these protests, artists have played an important role in bringing their message to the fore. Shervin Hajipour’s song (#Baray-e [For the sake of or Because of]), recorded in his room and posted on Instagram for limited followers, was shared more than 40 million times on social media platforms in just two days. Taken from #Baraye protest tweets, Hajipour utters the grievances and hopes of Iranians, with a final emphasis on “For Women, Life, Freedom,” the main slogan of recent protests. 

Art coming out of Iran (or by artists in the diaspora) has a radical and rebellious zeal, also evident in the visual arts. Consider, for example, the work of dozens of Iranian artists — many of whom are women — who have been featured by Hyperallergic and the Guardian. Brave works with layered meanings, they appropriate concepts and imagery from earlier periods, especially those familiar to Iranians. Meysam Azarzad’s posters shared via Instagram seem to have borrowed from revolutionary themes of earlier years — found in both leftist and Islamist factions that helped overthrow the Shah’s regime in 1979. Using red, white, and black, they also seem to align the recent uprising with the visual culture of other global revolutionary movements. A filmmaker with university training in graphic design, Azarzad refutes any link to Iran’s revolutionary posters, especially those with religious iconography. Juxtaposing bold black-and-white silhouettes of fighting and fallen young women with nationalistic poetry, Azarzad instead highlights their bravery in nationalistic terms. The content of the texts appearing above the women strikes a chord with rhyming couplets from the 11th-century epic Shahnameh (“Book of Kings”) by the patriotic poet Abul-Qasem Ferdowsi. One poster shows a defenseless young woman raising her fist — unveiled — to rows of soldiers. The couplet praises a hero, but the typical Shahnameh-style male hero’s name is replaced by “a fighting girl” (dokht-e jangi). The other posters draw our attention to the bravery of two 16-year-old girls. Appearing like saints, Nika Shahkarami and Sarina Esmailzadeh were both beaten to death during protests. The portraits are juxtaposed with poetic lamentations over the death of a heroine, again in the style of Shahnameh.

Thursday 4 August 2022

The Iranian Art Scene

 The Cofounder Of Paris’ First Asian Contemporary Art Fair Speaks About The Iranian Art Scene

Arash Hanaei's works explore the urban issues he has witnessed in Paris since he immigrated to this city. PHOTO COURTESY OF AB-ANBAR GALLERY and Forbes.

Contributor Y-Jean Mun-Delsalle, Forbes

Asia Now, Europe’s first Asian art fair, will return for its 8th edition in Paris from October 20 to 23, 2022, at the same time as Paris+, the first-ever Art Basel fair in the French capital. Welcoming 60 international galleries presenting artists from Asia and its diaspora including Almine Rech, Danysz Gallery, Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, de Sarthe Gallery, The Columns Gallery, Perrotin, Yeo Workshop, Galerie LJ and A2Z Art Gallery, Asia Now is moving from the Right Bank to the Left, to the prestigious Monnaie de Paris, and will continue its exploration of the West and Central Asian art scenes, after its focus on Iran last year. Alexandra Fain, co-founder and director of Asia Now, shares her thoughts on the Iranian art scene.

How would you describe the Iranian contemporary art scene and how has it evolved over the past decade?

I’m not an expert in Iranian art yet the few I know, the more I wanted to discover. Also I can listen to the art market here and what collectors want. And what they were screaming somehow was to learn more about the Iranian art scene. The Iranian contemporary art scene is rich, dense, diverse and, over the past decade, it has certainly moved to become one of the most interesting art scenes in the world. After having challenged themes of revolution and war, it naturally focused on a form of introspection that raises awareness of different issues, such as the environment or gender, through mixed media practices including sound, as we featured this in Tehran Now last year. We naturally gathered some of the most insightful insiders of the Iranian art scene to bring to Paris Tehran Now, a selection of emerging and more established artists coming from Iran.

Thursday 28 July 2022

The Iranian Poet Who Became an American Action Painter

A new book introduces two Manoucher Yektais: the stateless, anti-historical Modernist painter and the poet writing narrative verse exclusively in Farsi [Persian].

Manoucher Yektai, "Tomato Plant" (1959), collection SFMOMA, gift of Louis Honig (© Manoucher Yektai, photo by Katherine Du Tiel). Courtesy Hyperallergic.

by Tim Keane, Hyperallergic

How did the Iranian-born artist Manoucher Yektai — a narrative poet and still-life painter who died in 2019 at the age of 98 — end up lumped in with American Abstract Expressionism and its subspecies, famously termed “action painting”?  

Answers to this question emerge in the biographical and critical essays in Manoucher Yektai (Karma Publications, 2022). Its contributors wrestle awkwardly with these counterproductive art historical labels while setting the record straight about the Iranian-American poet and painter who won critical acclaim among New York’s avant-garde of the 1950s — Harold Rosenberg was a fan, as was Mark Rothko — before Yektai slid out of favor, even as he continued to write poetry and paint well into this century. 

Featuring hundreds of color reproductions of Yektai’s work (he trafficked almost entirely in oil paint on canvas) along with personal photographs from a long life, Karma’s catalogue reveals a painter with a signature style refined across 70 years of disciplined output. Its hallmarks are deeply saturated colors, hyperactive impasto (often applied with a trowel and even a whip), and an all-over picture plane — he routinely painted standing over canvases placed on the floor, producing the illusion of aerial perspectives on the imagery. He applied these strategies to an early phase of pure abstraction and then to buoyant semi-abstract still lifes, developing that repertoire further to include portraiture, interiors, and landscapes. 

Tuesday 10 May 2022

Shocking the Bourgeoisie With Iran’s Misunderstood Modernist

The Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat (1903-51). Courtesy New York Times.

by Amir-Hussein Radjy,  New York Times

In April 1951, the police in Paris called on my great-grandfather, Prince Mohamed-Hussein Firouz, to identify a dead body. It was that of Sadeq Hedayat, who is today eulogized as Iran’s great literary modernist. Days before, Hedayat had sealed up the apartment on Rue Championnet where he was staying and opened up the oven’s gas valve before lying down on the kitchen floor.

In Tehran, Firouz had known Hedayat, the son of aristocrats who moved in the same courtly and literary circles. An army officer who was educated in czarist Russia and fastidious about his dress, Firouz carried a trim mustache and tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and read Le Figaro daily. While men like Firouz easily found their place under Iran’s army-led monarchy, Hedayat did not.

In the early 20th century, Iranians of their class proudly appropriated European culture, wore Sulka cravats and sprinkled their Persian with French expressions — as Hedayat did in letters when describing existentialism in France as démodé, or praising Henry Miller and James Joyce for their originalité. Among the last interloping foreign words of his published Persian letters is psychose. “They diagnosed me with psychosis and granted me leave for two months of recovery in France,” he writes, after a visit to the doctor in Tehran.

“As long as Hedayat was alive no one understood him,” the intellectual Jalal Al-e-Ahmad said of his literary mentor months after Hedayat’s death. “Perhaps no one took him seriously.” Today Hedayat is spoken of not only as Iran’s first modern writer but also, as one critic suggests, the first “modern Iranian” tout court. His biography has become almost entirely entwined with his most famous work, BLIND OWL (Penguin Classics, 87 pp., paper, $14), which arrives in a new English translation this year. Posthumous Persian editions carried a cover with an owl wearing Hedayat’s signature round eyeglasses, or the author’s head growing into the form of the nightbird. Two years after the author’s death, Roger Lescot published a French translation that André Breton praised as a masterpiece of surrealism. The novel, its Parisian publisher said, was “the curse of a dream that creeps into reality.”

Turn our dark night into bright dawn

Reem Kelani's "The Singer Said: Bird of Dawn"

Singer-songwriter Reem Kelani's latest release – "The Singer Said: Bird of Dawn" – pays tribute to Mohammad Reza Shajarian. The two-song EP features Kelani's unique take on a famous Shajarian anthem and a second track symbolic of the iconic Iranian singer's life. 

Palestinian-British singer-songwriter Reem Kelani pays tribute to the great Iranian vocal virtuoso Mohammad-Reza Shajarian (1940-2020): included with her latest release is a detailed and comprehensive trilingual booklet (Arabic, English & Farsi) featuring musicological notes, literary translations and a detailed glossary. The EP forms part of Kelani's ongoing project "This Land is Your Land", focusing on the music of the various communities with whom she lived in Kuwait, and with whom she now lives in the UK. Reem and her international band recorded their parts separately – in the UK and the U.S. – during lockdown in 2021. Courtesy Qantara


Outside the Persian diaspora, Mohammad Reza Shajarian is little known. Yet, to Iranians around the world, Shajarian remains one of the most beloved and popular voices ever to have graced their country's music scene. He also carries the distinction of having actively protested against both the Shah of Iran's government and the new post-Islamic Revolution state. He didn't wait for them to ban his songs, either; he simply refused to allow either regime to play recordings of his music on state radio.

The voice of "dust and trash"

As a star of Iran's popular music scene, this was no small matter. A supporter of the Green Movement – a popular uprising that followed the 2009 election, triggered by the conviction that hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole victory from reform candidates for the presidency Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi – he found it hard to stomach what the mullah regime was doing to his people. When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad subsequently referred to the people protesting against the stolen election as "dust and trash", Shajarian proudly referred to himself as the voice of dust and trash.

"The Singer Said" (Qala al-Mughanni), the opening song, features lyrics penned by Mahmoud Darwish, whom Reem Kelani refers to as the national poet of Palestine. It was chosen for its thematic connection to the life and ethics of Shajarian. The song addresses the struggles of an anonymous singer, making it a fitting choice to represent Kelani's subject.

Tuesday 12 April 2022

Graphic design in Iran:


 A journey of evolution and practices shaping the future

A review of the outstanding graphic design studios in Iran whose works are enriched by the country's long visual history and diverse contemporary life.

Morteza Momayez poster designs, right: 1976/ left: 1991. Image: Courtesy of Momayez Foundation and STIRworld.  


by Afra SafaSTIRworld

Delving into contemporary Iranian graphic design is impossible without studying its context first. A civilisation at the crossroads of the East and the West, where cultures collide, Iran has been culturally enriched by both; each ethnicity adding something to this cultural melting pot. Through centuries, this diverse cultural unit has delivered an outstanding visual legacy. Crafts, miniatures and illustrations have left an everlasting impact on the Iranian visual culture, one that is still strongly present today.

Illustrations for the Wonders of Creation by Zakariya al-Qazwini, 1750/ Image: Courtesy of Afra Safa and STIRworld.

Although illustrations and design have always been a part of Persian art and crafts, the dawn of the contemporary Iranian graphic design genius goes back to the 1960s, when in the rapidly reforming country, modern graphic design programmes were offered in the cutting-edge University of Tehran by key figures such as Morteza Momayez, the prodigy whose creations are forever printed on the national memory of Iranians.

As the cultural sphere rapidly developed in the 1970s by the direct support of the monarchy state, Momayez along with Ghobad Shiva, Sadegh Barirani, Behzad Hatam and Farshid Mesghali constituted the pioneers of graphic design in Iran. Though the impact of western artistic discourses is apparent in the general practice of most of these graphic designers, an ever-present search for an Iranian identity in graphic design was already prominent in their works. These graphists would come to impact the entire graphic design practice of Iran in the following decades.

Tuesday 5 April 2022

“To Know No Nation Will Be Home”:

 A Conversation with Solmaz Sharif

by Natasha Hakimi Zapata, LARB

“I HAD / TO. I / learned it.” So begins “America,” the opening poem of Solmaz Sharif’s breathtaking second collection, Customs. The fragmented confessional poem prepares the Iranian American poet’s readers for a shift from her first book, Look — which redeployed US military language to highlight the country’s crimes in the post-9/11 era — to a more intimate exploration of exile in a deeply broken America. Customs, as the title suggests, also examines poetic traditions (often showing us the customs only to break them) at the same time that it introduces readers to aggressive customs officers at the US border. The collection considers the cost of making a life as a woman of color in a country founded on white supremacy.

Unapologetically political and deeply lyrical, Sharif’s second book illustrates why her voice is one of the most illuminating in poetry today. I recently caught up with Sharif to talk about her poetic journey, as well as why she couldn’t write much in the Trump years, and whether poetry can ever become a home to the displaced.

Monday 14 February 2022

Women living "life without a life"

Iranian artist Farzaneh Khademian's "Peephole"

In her latest exhibition in Japan, Farzaneh Khademian depicts figures who seem detached from their surroundings. In interview with Qantara.de, the Iranian photographer and painter explains the impact of photography, migration and gender-based inequality on her paintings.

Painting from the "Peephole" series by Farzaneh Khademian (photo: Farzaneh Khademian. Courtesy Qantara).
In November 2021, Khademian's second exhibition in Japan, called "Peephole", opened in Tokyo, displaying naked, faceless figures. In the introduction to her exhibition, she wrote: "Peephole is a small opening through a door allowing the viewer to look from the inside to the outside in the same way that a camera lens does. In this series, I tried to look at my surroundings through this lens".
 
by Changiz M. Varzi, Qantara

In 2016, acclaimed Iranian photojournalist and painter Farzaneh Khademian emigrated to Japan and entered a world fundamentally different from her home country, Iran. Khademian was born and raised in the capital Tehran; she was seven years old when the Islamic Revolution changed all aspects of life in Iran. She belongs to a generation of photographers who graduated from art universities, but decided to use their cameras to document social and political themes.

In 1995, she entered Azad University Art School, where she studied photography. Immediately after her graduation, at the height of the late 1990s reform movement in Iran, she was one of the pioneering photographers who covered the 1999 students uprising, the assassination of senior reformist theorist Saeed Hajjarian, and many protests in support of the then-president Mohammad Khatami.

At the same time, she focused on documenting women’s life in Iran. One widely acclaimed project was about female passengers on the women-only section of public city buses in Tehran. In another, she took photos of women athletes when covering women sportspersons was still a taboo in Iran. She also covered various topics in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Pakistan for international outlets.

Thursday 3 February 2022

How Oscar-tipped Iranian drama A Hero nails social media fallout

The film by Asghar Farhadi is a rare example of capturing how social media influences our postures offline, while barely engaging with the internet itself

Sahar Goldoust and Amir Jadidi in A Hero. Photograph: AP. Courtesy The Guardian. 

by Adrian HortonThe Guardian

A Hero, a tense, mazy drama from the Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi, centers on a figure familiar to anyone who’s attuned to the ebbs and flows of internet celebrity: the social media Main Character, the subject of an internet backlash. Rahim (Amir Jadidi, endearing yet inscrutable), is a man imprisoned for debts in the city of Shiraz, who becomes a local hero for an act of charity of ambiguous motivation. His girlfriend, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldoust), found 17 gold coins who she says were left in a purse at a bus stop, but instead of paying toward his freedom, Rahim contacts a bank and arranges a return to their owner. Within days, on furlough from jail, he’s the feelgood story of the moment.

I’ve written before about how there are few films which successfully capture the internet and/or social media without tipping into flat moralism, obsolescence or laughable facsimiles. (Social media and the internet are of course not the same thing, though in today’s climate of platform consolidation, to refer to one is basically to refer to the other, especially in the context of film and television.) This is partly because text phrasing, online references and digital interfaces change so quickly – at a much faster pace than the production of a film, let alone its distribution – that including it in text messages or social media references can jarringly distract from the story at hand; timestamped phone and computer screen risk locking the story into a tight, hyper-specific timeline that can constrain narrative, filming location or cultural references.

Thursday 20 January 2022

A new home for digital scholarship in Iranian poetry and cinema


Whether contemporary or classical, Iranian artists regularly command the world’s attention. Courtsey  A&S News.

by Cynthia MacdonaldA&S News

Iran is home to some of the world’s oldest and richest artistic traditions. Painting, literature, film and music all continue to play important roles not only as sources of pleasure, but of social and political influence in both the country and its worldwide diaspora.

Recently, an innovative multiyear partnership was signed between the University of Toronto and the Encylopedia Iranica Foundation. The latter was established in 1990 with the ultimate aim of publishing a reference work that covers all aspects of Iranian history and culture. Under the partnership, researchers will gather and share a wealth of information on projects exploring two important artistic topics: Iranian women poets and Iranian cinema.

The principal investigator on both projects is Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, a U of T professor of Historical Studies & Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations. Tavakoli-Targhi is also the inaugural director of U of T’s Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies, which opened last year.

“In the past decade, the University of Toronto has emerged as the most important site for the study of Iran,” he says. “The new institute has over 20 faculty with twice as many graduate students, and there is a vibrant Iranian community in Toronto and Canada, all linked to sources of intellectual and artistic creativity. So it has been rather timely for the University to initiate a project like this.”

The Encyclopedia Iranica will publish the digital research compendia on both subjects via its website, and the material will be freely accessible to anyone — not just academics, but those who may wish, for example, to organize readings or film festivals.

Thursday 28 October 2021

Burning Wings

Odile Burluraux on Iranian Women Artists

Samira Eskandarfar, I am here (2012). 5 min 47 sec. Courtesy the artist and Ocula Magazine.

In Conversation with Sherry PaikOcula Magazine

As curator at the Musée d'Art moderne de Paris (MAM) since 1990, Odile Burluraux has organised solo and group exhibitions at the museum and beyond to bring compelling and rarely seen examples of contemporary art to France.

The Power of My Hands (19 May–22 August 2021), among Burluraux's latest exhibitions at the MAM, was organised in collaboration with Angola-based independent curator and writer Suzana Sousa to show works by 16 women artists living on the African continent or in the diaspora. Including Stacey Gillian Abe, Gabrielle Goliath, Senzeni Marasela, and Portia Zvavahera, it considered the various explorations of concerns that have long followed women's lives, such as the female body, self-representation, sexuality, motherhood, beliefs, and empowerment.

Exhibition view: The Power of My Hands, Musée d'Art moderne de Paris (19 May–22 August 2021). Courtesy Musée d'Art moderne de Paris. Photo: Pierre Antoine. Courtesy Ocula Magazine.

Burluraux was also behind Hans Hartung's major retrospective exhibition La Fabrique du Geste in 2019, a project with assistant Julie Sissia, that brought together 300 works by the artist for the first time in Paris since 1969.

Sunday 10 October 2021

Manhattan exhibition combats view of Iran as 'hostile anti-American state'

Asia Society group show from Mohammed Akfami collection shows 'great diversity' of Iran’s often unseen arts scene

Untitled from the Rapture series, 1999. © Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of the artist, Noirmontartproduction, Paris, the Mohammed Afkhami Foundation and The Art Newspaper.

by Daniel CassadyThe Art Newspaper

Few other countries are as misunderstood as Iran. But an Iran exists beyond the headlines of authoritarian rule and theocratic Islam. It’s a country full of thriving artists — and they’re now on show in the US. 

Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians — The Mohammed Akfami Collection, on view at the Asia Society in Manhattan until 8 May 2022, aims to broadening one’s idea of what Iran is, or can be, by giving a profound look at the country’s dynamic contemporary arts scene.

Of the 23 mid-career and emerging artists included in the show, all but one was born in Iran and over a third still live and work in the country. Three generations are represented, with the work touching on subjects as diverse as gender identity, politics and spirituality. The work takes multiple forms, from traditional Persian figurative painting to photography and abstract sculpture.


Saturday 2 October 2021

The Unseen Women of Afghanistan

Photographer Fatimah Hossaini spent three years trying to upend Western narratives about women in her country. She didn't get to finish her work.

"Burqa behind the steering wheel," from work-in-progress by photographer Fatima Hossaini. Courtesy Guernica.

by Fatimah Hossaini, Guernica

I was born in Tehran, to parents who fled Afghanistan when the Soviets invaded. For most of my life, I knew everything about Iranian culture and history: I knew its education system, its capital; my friends, my family, everything I knew was in Iran. And I knew very little about Afghanistan — just a few stories, from my parents and grandparents. And I wondered where I belonged. I always looked for a sign.

In 2013, I visited Afghanistan for the first time, to get paperwork I needed for university. I fell in love with it. In 2018, when I was 25, I moved back permanently. I was a professor of visual art at Kabul University, and I worked as an art and documentary photographer.

I poured my heart into my personal project, a book on the unseen women of Afghanistan. I was tired of always showing the war and the poverty, always talking about the murders, the explosions. When I traveled to other countries, capitals of art and culture abroad, people would ask me, “If you’re an Afghan artist, where is your burqa?” The only thing people knew about Afghanistan was terrorism and women’s oppression, the twin sins of the Taliban. Why doesn’t the world know anything about our culture and our beauty? About our carpets, our textiles, our diversity, all of our cultural heritage? Why is it never reflected in the world? This question preoccupied me, and I think it’s why I was so inspired to work on the beautiful side of Afghanistan.

I had only five more portraits to make to finish my book when the Taliban took Kabul and, with it, the country. I had to escape with only what I could carry in two small shoulder bags. Leaving my photo project behind was one of the hardest parts of fleeing. It was everything I worked on for over three years. And what will happen to those pictures? What will happen to the women in the pictures?

I’d worked hard to find special locations — interesting places, forgotten streets — and to show off our cultural heritage. I did everything I could in these photos to show some beauty in a corner of Afghanistan. I can’t imagine I can’t go back and finish this work.

Words like fire

 Book review: Shida Bazyar's novel "Drei Kameradinnen"

Shida Bazyar's new novel is the literary surprise of the year. It tackles the pressing issues of our time, and yet it is timeless. This is a story of friendship, marginalisation and society's blindness to its own deep-seated problems. 

"'Drei Kameradinnen' demonstrates that all the talk about the lack of social relevance of art and literature is a fatal mistake. The great literary prizes, above all the German Book Prize, are meant for books like this," writes Gerrit Wustmann.  Courtesy Qantara.de.

by Gerrit Wustmann, Qantara.de

Let's get straight down to brass tacks: Shida Bazyar's second novel, "Drei Kameradinnen" (Sisters in Arms), published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in April, is the best and also the most important German-language book of 2021 – no matter what else comes out between now and December.

Bazyar has already proven that she is a brilliant narrator and an outstanding figure in contemporary German literature with her impressive debut novel "Nachts ist es leise in Teheran" (Tehran Is Peaceful at Night, 2016). Her new book is a triumph. It has all the makings of great literature, literature that will endure, that will become part of the canon.

But first things first ... The title raises a question that needs to be answered directly: Yes, the book's German title pays homage to Erich Maria Remarque's novel "Drei Kamaraden". Not only the title but also the story. This is a book about friendship, a novel about trauma. While Remarque wrote of the trauma of the First World War, Bazyar reflects on the trauma of the NSU and the series of murders it committed. But in addition to the core themes, the two novels also display further parallels: the setting for both is Berlin and, like Remarque, Bazyar never explicitly mentions the city's name. The characters in both books drink and smoke a lot, and both stories are about friends standing together firmly against the evils of the world.

Thursday 2 September 2021

A Poetic Monument to Folly

Abbas Akhavan review

The Isis-destroyed ancient ruins of Palmyra rise again in precarious straw and London clay, shaped by the hands of this deeply allusive Iranian artist

Curtain Call, Variations on a Folly, 2021 by Abbas Akhavan at Chisenhale Gallery. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Andy Keate. Courtesy The Observer.

The scent reaches you before the sight – an exhilarating combination of evergreen and fresh sap emitting from the gallery entrance. It seems to presage woods in deep summer. And sure enough, the spectacle inside is like a glade of high trees, their dark trunks rising to crowns of leaves, scatterings of soil on the floor. But at exactly the same moment, what you are looking at is also something quite else, immediately distinct and recognisable – the colonnade of a magnificent classical temple.

The trees are both trunks and columns; the leaves might be acanthus on a Corinthian capital. The whole structure is formed out of what seems to be organic matter, possibly straw-strewn black earth.

That is the one-two surprise on arrival: what you see is entirely archaeological – a Greco-Roman colonnade – and at the same time wholly botanical, even arboreal. How can it be both at once? That is the opening wonder.

Each column is in fact a sculpture, formed by the hands of Abbas Akhavan. Born in Tehran in 1977, Akhavan moved to Canada with his family during the Iran-Iraq war and is now based in Montreal. He is an extremely subtle thinker. Anyone who saw his Delfina exhibition in 2013 (he has scarcely shown here since then, alas) may remember the way he brought the outside indoors, letting nature take over a townhouse with high hedges, leaking waterfalls and sprouting floors. With his unhurried cast of mind, Akhavan is constantly pondering our place on earth as contemporary beings living among old buildings, quite often ruins, and the strange relations between people, archaeology and nature.

Tuesday 13 July 2021

‘I Felt in Between Places’:

Iranian Artist Arghavan Khosravi on Studying Art in the U.S., and Why She Paints Preoccupied Women

Khosravi recently debuted her first solo show at Rachel Uffner gallery.

Arghavan Khosravi, "On Being a Woman" (2021). Photo courtesy Rachel Uffner Gallery and Artnet News.

by Noor BraraArtnet News

The U.S.-based Iranian painter Arghavan Khosravi’s sculptural, multi-paneled paintings capture the claustrophobia and disorientation of being split between worlds. In her critically acclaimed recent show, “In Between Places” at New York’s Rachel Uffner gallery—which was extended past its original end date several times, and finally closed in mid-June—women assume agency as they move through their daily lives, all the while preoccupied with looming concerns, represented by depictions such as a ball and chain, puppet strings, prayer rugs and other religious objects that seem to hang, quite literally, over their heads.

Each work is, Khosravi said, a visual representation of how she feels as an Iranian woman artist living in the U.S. who worries for her family, friends, and women more generally back home.

Khosravi sat down with Artnet News to discuss her incredibly successful exhibition, how she came to be a painter, and much more.

To start, I would love to know about your background. Where did you grow up? And when did you first have an inkling that art would be something you’d want to pursue?

I was born in Iran and I spent almost my whole life there. I grew up in Tehran. I think most kids are inclined toward art, to drawing and things like that. My parents were very supportive of me, in part because my father is an architect, so he already had that artistic gene. But in Iran, we need to decide at an early age what our majors will be, in high school. I thought my future career should be something more practical and art could be something beside it. I decided to study mathematics.

Monday 28 June 2021

Shirazeh Houshiary: Pneuma

Iranian Painter Shirazeh Houshiary Explains the Benefits of Painting on the Floor, and Why Nothing Is More Abstract Than Nature

Artnet News caught up with the artist at her West London studio.

Shirazeh Houshiary. ©Shirazeh Houshiary, courtesy Lisson Gallery and Artnet News.

by Naomi ReaArtnet News 

For Shirazeh Houshiary, being close with nature is key. Even her West London studio is located right by the woods so she can listen to birds and keep in tune with nature’s ebbs and flows.

Houshiary moved to London in 1973, leaving her native Iran to study art. Her installations, paintings, and sculptures often take inspiration from Eastern culture, poetry, and mythology.

Her profile rose alongside some of the U.K.’s most prominent sculptors—such as Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg, and Richard Deacon—in the 1980s, and she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994.

To create the five works in her latest solo exhibition, “Pneuma,” now on view at Lisson Gallery in London, she placed her supports flat on the floor and poured water mixed with pure pigment onto canvas, before meditatively layering inscriptions on top of the forms.

We spoke to the artist about connecting with nature, the joys of ambiguity, and what taking long walks along the river can do for her practice.