Reclaiming the Geometry of Abstraction

With his latest series of shaped paintings, layered with meaning and symbolism, the artist Kour Pour insists that the so-called canon is informed by non-Western visual traditions that preceded it.

Pour annotated and redacted portions of text for his zine “Re-Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925” (left) and pasted an image of a Tantric Hindu painting from the 5th–6th centuries next to Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 “Black Square” (right). Courtesy Hyperallergic. 

by Tina Barouti, Hyperallergic

For artist Kour Pour, challenging the Euro-American art historical canon has been a decade-long pursuit. In 2015, the artist began a research project titled “Re-Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925” that was later published as a zine and distributed for a 2017 exhibition at San Francisco’s Ever Gold Projects. 

The zine’s title puts a spin on the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) 2012–13 exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, which claimed the titular decade and a half as comprising the early history of abstraction and designated the genre as an invention of the West. For his zine, Pour annotated the MoMA exhibition catalog’s essays with a yellow highlighter and a red-ink pen, correcting the authors’ short-sighted understanding of abstraction. Former MoMA Director Glenn Lowry’s foreword for the catalog argued that “abstraction may be modernism’s greatest innovation” with its “radically new” works first appearing “quite suddenly” only a century ago. Pour responded to Lowry’s claims in the margins of the text with a simple question: “Really?” 

“Did you know that Lowry has a doctorate in Islamic art history? The whole premise of Islamic art is to abstract from nature,” Pour noted to me during my visit in January to his studio in Inglewood, Los Angeles. For him, abstraction visualizes the basic principles of the natural world, and the myth that European artists invented it in the early 20th century must be challenged. Pour, perhaps best known for his massive, hyperrealistic paintings of Persian carpets, often incorporates elements of Persian and Islamic iconography in his oeuvre. He also draws from Japanese woodblock prints and Korean folk art while utilizing painting, sculpture, hand-cut block prints, silkscreen images, and various traditional techniques. 

In addition to his frustrated critiques in the Inventing Abstraction catalog’s margins, Pour cut-and-pasted reproductions of artworks from Western art history’s periphery, such as Persian manuscripts and Islamic tilework, directly onto the bookplates. On one page, he paired Tantric Hindu paintings, the earliest of which date back to the 5th and 6th centuries, with Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square” (1915). The two are nearly indistinguishable. On another, Inca textiles are paired with Piet Mondrian’s De Stijl compositions, and Persian manuscripts are placed together with irregular polygon paintings by a giant of American modernism: Frank Stella.

Seeing Beyond the Visible:

Hoda Afshar at musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac

The acclaimed Iranian-Australian artist’s first solo exhibition in France opens this September

Hoda Afshar (b. 1983), Speak the wind, 2015-2020. Inkjet photographic prints. Courtesy of the artist, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, Australia and Art Africa.

Art Africa

This autumn, the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac presents ‘Hoda Afshar: Performing the Invisible’, the first exhibition in France dedicated to the Iranian-born, Melbourne-based artist. Running from 30 September 2025 to 25 January 2026, the show brings together two recent significant bodies of work—Speak the wind (2015–2020) and The Fold (2023–2025)—each reflecting Afshar’s deep engagement with the politics of visibility, history, and photographic representation.

Curated by Annabelle Lacour, Curator of the Photographic Collection at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, the exhibition spans photography, video, sound, and installation. It is presented in close collaboration with the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Hoda Afshar has become a leading figure in Australian contemporary art, known for blending conceptual, staged, and documentary approaches. Her work challenges the traditional role of photography as a neutral recorder of reality, interrogating its historical entanglement with systems of power and control. Drawing from her own experiences of migration and cultural displacement, Afshar unpacks the tensions between truth, representation, and agency.

An interview about art, hope and building peace

with Iranian American artist Shaudi Bianca Vahdat

Shaudi Bianca Vahdat spoke with Real Change about the importance of representation in art and how it can be a source of inspiration during difficult times.

Photo courtesy of Shaudi Bianca Vahdat.

by Nura Ahmed, Real Change

When documenting the stories of everyday marginalized voices, it is often those closest to the problems who hold the real stories. Stories that become intrinsically linked to the belonging, displacement and memory of the American immigrant experience.

Too many immigrant stories are not told by us, so we are often left out, hoping to see representation where we don’t often fit. When we encounter artists who are working to change the everyday narrative, who are offering a piece of their humanity to the world, hoping to be received and embraced by all, we start to see a significant shift to the national paradigm.

Shaudi Bianca Vahdat, an Iranian-American musician, theater artist and composer based in Seattle, Washington is one of those artists who see themselves as a reflection of the world that we are in. She has a background in theater, performance, producing, directing and composing for theater. She is also a songwriter outside of her theater work. Vahdat studied both drama and music at the University of Washington and earned her master’s degree from the Berkelee College of Music. Ever since she was in her early 20s, she has been a part of Seattle’s extended theater and music communities.

‘Sunrise at the Vortex’

Behind Nima Nabavi’s vast geometric vortex painting: converging energy, labor, and structure

Image by Tonee Harbert. Courtesy of The Third Line and Designboom.

by Ravail Khan, Designboom

Roswell2223: An Energetic Anchor to Sunrise at the Vortex

Nima Nabavi brings together a constellation of radiant energies that converge with structural order in his solo exhibition Sunrise at the Vortex in Dubai. On view at The Third Line, Roswell2223 forms a gravitational center, laying out a monumental hand-drawn piece that stretches across an 18-foot-long canvas. Saturated with color and encrusted with detail, it distills the core of Nabavi’s practice which seeks to evoke awe, resolve inner resonance, bridge abstraction with emotion, and manifest precise complexities and natural energies through geometry.

Created over the course of a year during a residency in New Mexico, Roswell2223 marks the furthest the Iranian artist has ever pushed the limits of his process. The result is a sprawling, crystalline composition that channels a spiritual intensity and meditative clarity. While the exhibition presents a range of works — some meticulously hand-rendered, others made with the aid of architectural pen plotters — they all maintain a sense of transcendence. Whether plotted by machine or drawn line by line, Nabavi’s geometries work somewhat like elusive discoveries. ‘These patterns, structures and geometries carry a magical appeal that I’m not getting any closer to understanding,’ he tells designboom. ‘It feels more like archaeology to me – I’m finding and exploring these visual phenomena, not inventing them.’ We spoke with the artist to learn more about the methods, philosophies, and intentions behind Roswell2223 and how they resonate with the introspective and technical undercurrents of Sunrise at the Vortex.

'I Want to Sing Alone':

Iranian Film Wins International Prize Despite Persecution

“Bidad”. Courtesy of KVIFF

by Romina Omidpanah, IranWire

Iranian director Soheil Beiraghi’s film “Bidad” has won the Special Jury Prize at the 59th Karlovy Vary Film Festival in Czech Republic, even as several cast and crew members face prison sentences in Iran for their involvement in the film.

Bidad addresses the prohibition of women’s solo singing voices in Iran. Iranian courts convicted multiple people involved in the production of the film on charges such as “propaganda activities against the system,” “producing vulgar content,” and “encouraging behaviors contrary to public decency through virtual space.”

Beiraghi himself was sentenced to four years and three months in prison, a verdict he announced on Instagram with the comment, “For not reproducing lies, that’s all.”

The film was added to the Karlovy Vary competition lineup shortly before the festival began, in an effort to protect the safety of its creators.

Among those facing legal consequences are prominent actors Amir Jadidi, Leily Rashidi, and Servin Zabtian, as well as crew members including Beiraghi’s wife, Roksana Nikpour.

At the center of Bidad is Seti, a young woman whose bold declaration reverberates throughout the film.

“I want to sing alone, just that,” she says, responding to a music teacher who insists that women’s voices must remain beneath men’s - a reflection of Iran’s effective ban on female solo performances in public.

Iran’s repression of artists in ongoing assault on freedom of expression

My Favourite Cake directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha. Photograph: Mohammad Haddadi. Courtesy The Guardian.

by Parvin Ardalan, Researcher on Iran at Freemuse

At the United Nations Palais des Nations in Geneva on 1 July, the Islamic Republic of Iran came before members of the Human Rights Council to defend its human rights record under the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), the Council’s mechanism that requires each member state to undergo a peer review of its human rights every 4.5 years.[1] The review had been carried out in January 2025, and the report on the UPR outcome was presented for approval of the Council. In its oral statement, the Islamic Republic of Iran gave an orchestrated display of defiance towards human rights, as it refused to support over half of the 346 recommendations for improvements that had been made by over 100 UN states. It’s worth noting that only 16 recommendations related to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, issues of special concern to Freemuse, of these just three were supported.[2]

The Israeli military attack on Iran and the 12-day war between Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran from 13 to 25 June 2025—marked by missile exchanges and intense airstrikes—escalated the longstanding hostility between the two countries from proxy wars to direct war. Iran asserted this aggression threatens its ability to implement human rights obligations under the UPR. This confrontation, which involved large-scale attacks by both sides and resulted in significant casualties and damage, further complicated the situation for freedom of expression and art in Iran. Restricted internet access, bans on citizens taking photos and videos, arrests for these actions, and charges of espionage have narrowed the space for cultural activity. Under the pretext of insecurity and with an emphasis on national security, strict control, a war atmosphere prevailed in the cities, and the judicial system of the Islamic Republic of Iran has intensified the atmosphere of repression in the war atmosphere that has emerged. The law has expanded the definition of espionage and intensified the legal prosecution of individuals, groups, religious and ethnic minorities.

From under the Dining Table

by Amir Ahmadi Arian, London Review of Books

I met the great Iranian novelist Mahmoud Dowlatabadi in 2006. We had the same publisher, and through them he sent me a message inviting me to tea at the Azadi Hotel in northern Tehran. At one point he told me: ‘Everyone says great writers know what to write and how to write. But everybody can figure that out. What matters is knowing where to write from.’

I was too young to get his point. Many of Dowlatabadi’s books are set in his hometown in Khorasan, and I assumed he was championing a sort of primordial loyalty to one’s origins. I didn’t want to be that kind of writer. I longed to be metropolitan and worldly, the kind of eastern writer the West notices and praises. It wasn’t until two decades later, in June 2025, as I watched Israeli jets bomb Tehran with impunity, that I understood what he meant.

In the early hours of the attack I called to check on my friends and family in Tehran. I asked them where they hide when they hear the explosions and the planes. Nowhere, they said. There was no public shelter, no bunker, nowhere to go.

‘You’re going to have to do the dining table thing again,’ I told my father. He didn’t find that funny.

I grew up in Ahvaz, in southern Iran, during the war with Iraq. A few years ago, as I was researching a novel set during the early days of the war, I found (online) a newsreel about a blackout in Ahvaz. It reminded me of my mother waking me up in the middle of a sweltering summer night to give me a cold shower with my clothes still on, then putting me back to bed so I could sleep a few more hours through the heat. It ended with a footage of people crammed into bunkers and under stairs, which reminded me of the basement of our house, its ceiling so low an adult couldn’t stand upright, the room bare except for a picnic stove that we’d huddle round as we took shelter from air raids.

A Land Made of Mirrors and Stone:

 A literary response to the incursion on Iran

by Ezz Monem. Courtesy Arena Online

by Somayeh Falsafi, Arena Online

When Israeli missiles rained down on Iranian soil, many of in the Iranian diaspora froze, not only in fear, but in recognition. We had seen this story before: skies lit up with war, silence from allies, and a region forced to choose between repression at home or destruction from abroad.

I’ve lived half my life in Australia, and the other half between several countries, including Iran. Iran, where I was born, a place that, like Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, is now living under the shadow of aggression, facing the unfolding plans of a so-called “New Middle East.”

For those who have known Iranians or heard them speak of their home, Iran is not just a name on a map. When Iranians talk about their country, they don’t just place a finger over geography. They usually describe their homeland in descriptive detail, pointing to the Caspian Sea, to the green forests and jagged mountains where you can ski and climb, or to the southern islands in the Persian Gulf, where dolphins dance in turquoise water, or to the deserts with their copper skies and wind-sculpted silence.

But often, they’ll tell you what Iran means to them. And their tone changes.

They’ll speak of the light-catching beauty of muqarnas, those intricate, honeycombed domes and ceilings in houses, palaces, mosques, synagogues, and churches, and fire temples, like in Isfahan, Tehran, or Yazd, built from wood, mirror, and tile. They’ll describe the mirrorwork, where thousands of broken shards are placed in impossible precision. It’s as if the very ceilings are made of shattered history, reassembled into something stronger, something that refuses to disappear.

Hannah Darabi wins the Prix Elysée

In the pages of The Secrets of Sexual Fulfilment, Mahvash – a popular figure among the working class of 1950s Tehran – presented playfully risqué images of herself alongside the fictionalised story of her life.

© Hannah Darabi. Courtesy 1854 | British Journal of Photography

by Simon Bainbridge, 1854 | British Journal of Photography

An audacious act of visual mischief, more sex manual than autobiography, this publication was a key source for Hannah Darabi’s Why Don’t You Dance?, which has now won the prestigious Prix Elysée international photography prize.

In it the Tehran-born ‘artist researcher’ – as Darabi, now based in Paris, describes herself – has woven together photographs, found materials, ephemera and contemporary pop culture, to examine how dance functions as both a form of resistance and a cultural barometer in Iranian society and the diaspora of emigres who left the country after the 1979 revolution. In doing so, she has transformed archival research into a reflective discourse on the body as a site of oppression and liberation.

Why Don’t You Dance? centres on three pivotal figures in the recent history of Iranian popular dance, including Mahvash, an iconic actress and singer whose self-made identity as a cabaret performer is fleshed out in The Secrets of Sexual Accomplishment. The second figure is Jamileh, who rose to fame a generation later via a similar route, popularising an Iranian form of the belly dance at home and in the US, after she escaped the revolution. And the third is Mohammad Khordadjan, a dancer and choreographer who built his career in California after also fleeing his homeland.

The geometry of memory: Persian patterns and diasporic identity

Nazila Keshavarz uses felt to reconnect with her Persian roots

“Persian Garden” — Felt Collage (felt & ceramics sewed on canvas), 75 X 75 cm, 2025. Inspired by the symbolic order of traditional Persian gardens, this textile work blends hand-felted wool with ceramic pieces reminiscent of architectural tiles and ornaments. The composition evokes a sanctuary — a space shaped by memory, geometry, and the enduring aesthetics of Persian design. Courtesy Garland Magazine

Garland Magazine

Memory lives in pattern. It exists in threads and tiles, in grids, spirals, and in silence. For me, memory has always had a shape and texture. It is soft like wool, patterned like a kilim, and layered like the rooms of the houses we leave behind.

The Geometry of Memory is the name I have given to the inner landscape I have been weaving over many years. It is a language made of form, emotion, and tradition that finds expression in my felt collages and broader artistic practice. It reflects my Iranian heritage, my diasporic experience, and my enduring conversation with materials that carry memory in their fibers.

I was raised in Shiraz, a city where carpets were never just decoration. They were poetry underfoot. My mother, with her quiet and instinctive expertise, could read a rug the way others might read a book. She filled our home with woven narratives. Every carpet was chosen, placed, and rotated with care, reflecting not only taste but emotion and family rhythm. Among all the silk and knotted wool, it was the humble namad, the felt rug, that stayed with me most vividly. I remember the winter mornings sitting on those thick white felt rugs with her, wrapped in their warmth. In the summer, she rolled them away and stored them like sleeping animals, resting until the next season arrived. They embodied rhythm. They held memory. They marked the pulse of home.

Andy Warhol in Iran

 How Brent Askari came up with ‘Andy Warhol in Iran,’ now at Mosaic Theater

The playwright talks about his thought-provoking, deliciously funny play about justice, art, and politics and the clash of cultures between East and West.

Nathan Mohebbi as Farhad and Alex Mills as Andy Warhol in Mosaic Theater’s production of ‘Andy Warhol in Iran’ by Brent Askari. Photo by Chris Banks. Courtesy DC Theater Arts

by Ravelle Brickman, DC Theater Arts

“Making money is art.” That’s the credo of the money-making pop artist — known for his portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup cans — whose imagined plight at the hands of a timid revolutionary is the core of Andy Warhol in Iran, the new comic drama making its DC debut at Mosaic Theater Company.

The show, now extended through July 6, begins with Warhol — played by a radiantly comic Alex Mills — musing about his detachment.

Speaking directly to the audience — his face obscured by the signature wig and large dark glasses — he describes himself as an observer. He identifies with his camera, an ancient Polaroid and a relic, even in 1976. (The role is reminiscent of I Am a Camera, the 1951 play by John Van Druten and Christopher Isherwood, in which the latter describes himself as a passive observer, but then is drawn, reluctantly, into the world he observes.)

Warhol is in his room at the Tehran Hilton, waiting to hear from the Shah’s wife about a commission to paint her portrait. But, in the words of Brent Askari, the playwright pulling the strings, Warhol admits that he is really waiting “for something that could have happened … or would happen … or will happen.”

Censorship into art:

why Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s subversive stories are getting the world’s attention

A still from the film Offside (2006) by director Jafar Panahi. Courtesy of the National Museum of Asian Art. Via Washington City Paper.

by Habib Moghimi, The Conversation 

Iranian director Jafar Panahi has spent his career turning barriers into creative inspiration.

Working under travel bans, house arrests and periodic detention, he had made powerful films that show everyday life in Iran through quiet moments, daily struggles, and small talk on streets under surveillance. He shows people who are restricted by repressive rules, yet who hold onto hope – albeit fragile.

Although Panahi is banned from making films in Iran, he has managed to make a new film “underground” almost every two years. He recently stood triumphant as he received the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his thriller It Was Just an Accident (2025).

Reading in Iran: Literature That Crosses Borders

Photo of Saless Bookstore, Tehran by Sepideh Nazaralizadeh. Courtesy World Literature Today

by Poupeh Missaghi, Emad Mortazavi, Leili Entezari, Rafa Rostami & Moeen Farrokhi, World Literature Today 

Many years ago, in the old days of dial-up internet, when I was still living in Iran, I would spend time reading book reviews online, making a list, and then passing on that list, via email or phone calls, to whoever would soon be visiting Tehran from the US. In a market closed to the outside world, with no global credit or debit cards, no possibility for online orders, no reliable US–Iran postal services, the only option was to put together a network of friends and family travelers who would purchase and deliver via their suitcases. (One particular book that found its way to me in Tehran was Roberto Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth, translated by Chris Andrews, which changed my literary trajectory in many ways. At that time, it had just been released.)

Fast-forward to years ahead, during the 2000s and 2010s. I was living in the US, as an MA and later PhD student, traveling back to Tehran once or twice a year during my academic breaks. Now I would play that role for friends, buying books here and taking them back with me in my suitcase. One friend, a translator and bibliophile who had an expansive personal library, would sometimes send me dozens of Amazon links, for a wide range of books of fiction, nonfiction, and plays, often ordering secondhand for better prices. Many times, it was through his lists that I’d be introduced to authors whose works excited me.

Fast-forward to today. I have not been back to Iran for more than five years. When World Literature Today asked me to write about what Iranians are reading these days and the trends in the literary market, I immediately remembered a video I watched some years ago of a famous Iranian author, of an older generation, who has been living in exile in the US for many years. In part of the conversation, she noted that she continued to closely follow the literary landscape within Iran. Minutes later, someone in the audience asked her opinion about a recent novel by a younger female author in Iran that had gotten a lot of critics’ and the public’s attention. The exiled author said she had not heard about the young author and that book. The reality of that kind of disconnect has terrified me since.

Even today, despite all the access we have—through social media accounts run by a variety of participants in the literary landscape, public groups on platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram, as well as personal groups and one-on-one chats with friends and peers—I am aware that there is still so much that I am missing. Nothing can replace the experience of walking into bookstores, browsing, and chancing upon titles, or being suggested a title by a bookseller who knows you and your literary taste; having in-person meetings with publishers and editors; or sitting around dinner and tea with friends and sharing literary joys and horror stories. What the lived experience offers nothing can. That is why I decided to reach out to a few people on the ground in Tehran and ask them to share with me their observations and insights. The following is what they—a translator and PhD student in anthropology, a journalist/book editor, a bookseller, a translator, and a photographer—sent me.

—poupeh missaghi

Freudian Typo

At the Hayward Gallery: A New Take on Empire and Childhood Lore with Freudian Typo

Artists Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi explore the echoes of British imperialism through nursery rhymes, sculpture, and satire.

Freudian Typo, Black Line and the Edifice (Installation mock up), 2025. Image courtesy the artist, the Hayward Gallery and Art Plugged.

by Art Plugged

This summer, the Hayward Gallery will present Freudian Typo, a new exhibition by Iranian-Canadian artists Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi that reconsiders Britain’s imperial past through the lens of nursery rhymes.

The show, produced in partnership with the RC Foundation, Taiwan (R.O.C.), uses familiar children’s verses such as The Old Woman and Her Pig to explore themes of debt, exploitation and collapse. Drawing from historical records and folklore, the artists reimagine these rhymes as reflections of economic and political systems, both past and present.

Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi of Freudian Typo say: “We’re engaged in a mode of practice that maintains that art emerges through engagement with critical discourse, where dialogue and dialectics serve both as our methodology and medium. The complementary aspects of our work renders collaboration not merely as a beneficial addition but as an essential necessity. Our commitment to critical exchange defines our collective horizon, positioning the dynamic and discursive mode of art-making as the most compelling path forward.”

An alternative political reality

Nazanin Noori’s Acts of Witness

At Auto Italia, London, the artist’s work interrogates Iran’s recent political history 

Nazanin Noori, ‘THE ECHO OF PROTEST IS DISTANT TO THE PROTEST’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Auto Italia, London and Frieze; photograph: Jack Elliot Edwards.

by Kimi Zarate-Smith, Frieze

In 2022, Jina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, stopped by authorities in Tehran for allegedly not wearing the hijab to government standards, died after being severely beaten whilst in police custody. Amini’s death sparked the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests, calling for an end to the systemic oppression of women and girls within contemporary Iran.

At Auto Italia, Iranian artist Nazanin Noori’s first UK exhibition, ‘THE ECHO OF PROTEST IS DISTANT TO THE PROTEST’, responds to this recent political history. At the front of the gallery, THE PARTY OF GOD / WELL DID WE LIVE (2024) features the Farsi phrase معذرت (I’m sorry) in yellow acrylic against a green industrial tarp curtain, inverting the colours of the Hezbollah militant group’s flag. With this work, Noori posits the notion that despots might one day apologize, although the alternative future she envisions is an uneasy hypothetical – one that remains unrealized and is, perhaps, fundamentally unattainable. 

An alarming red glow emanates from the gallery’s second room, where the thick ruby carpeting of the first space is augmented by deep scarlet lighting. At the centre, in stark contrast, stands a circle of 12 white plastic Monobloc chairs. Suffused in red, once visitors assume their seats, the space looms with judgement, witness facing witness.

Foreigner

Nahid Rachlin, Novelist Who Explored the Iranian Psyche, Dies at 85

One of the first Iranian novelists to write in English, she examined the clash between East and West. Her debut novel, “Foreigner,” provided insight into pre-revolutionary Iran.

Ms. Rachlin’s debut novel, “Foreigner,” was published to critical acclaim the year before the Iranian revolution of 1979. Courtesy New York Times and W.W. Norton & Company

by Rebecca Chao, New York Times

Nahid Rachlin, an Iranian-born writer who defied her parents’ expectations of an arranged marriage, instead winning a scholarship to study in the United States in the 1950s and becoming one of the first Iranians to write a novel in English, died on April 30 in Manhattan. She was 85.

Her daughter, Leila Rachlin, said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was a stroke.

Ms. Rachlin’s debut novel, “Foreigner,” published to critical acclaim the year before the Iranian revolution of 1979, depicts the slow transformation of a 32-year-old Iranian biologist named Feri from a woman living a comfortable but unsatisfying suburban life with her American husband to an ill-at-ease visitor in Iran to an indistinguishable local after she abandons her job and her spouse and resigns herself to wearing the veil.

“There is a subtle shift in ‘Foreigner’ that is fascinating to watch,” Anne Tyler, who won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, wrote in a review for The New York Times in 1979, “a nearly imperceptible alteration of vision as Feri begins to lose her westernized viewpoint.”

“What is apparent to Feri at the start — the misery and backwardness of Iranian life — becomes less apparent,” Ms. Tyler continued. “Is it that America is stable, orderly, peaceful, while Iran is turbulent and irrational? Or is it that America is merely sterile while Iran is passionate and openhearted?”

Verses of Life:

A Review of ‘Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution’, edited by Bänoo Zan and Cy Strom

Courtesy Guernica Editions.

by Daniel James Sharp, The Freethinker

Are poets really ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, as Percy Bysshe Shelley put it in 1821? This is a question on which the jury has been deliberating since long before there were any such things as modern juries. And this is the question explicitly posed in a new collection of poems edited by Iranian-born Canadian poet Bänoo Zan and freelance editor Cy Strom, Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution.

This collection gathers a range of poets—Iranians and non-Iranians, exiles and emigrants, the certain and the uncertain—who share a single purpose: to declare and embody solidarity with the people, especially the women, of Iran, whose decades-long struggle against theocracy was revivified and intensified by the murder of Mahsa Jina Amini in 2022 for wearing ‘improper’ hijab. Even if these poets are not on the ground in Iran, ‘doing the necessary work’ in Strom’s introductory words, they can bear witness. The struggle is a universal and human one, in other words: ‘No one population or culture is the only victim of the oppressor, the only body engaged in the struggle.’ The revolutionary ferment which followed Amini’s death was nigh-unprecedented in Iran, or indeed in any other country, though one might stop short of declaring it, as Strom does, ‘the first ever feminist revolution’.

“Humour helps overcome the fear imposed by dictatorship”

Mana Neyestani, who lives in exile in France, is among Iran’s best-known political cartoonists. In this interview, he talks about freedom of thought, red lines, and why political satire is especially important in authoritarian countries.

Cartoon by Iranian artist Mana Neyestani. Courtesy D+C.

Interview by Eva-Maria Verfürth, D+C

Mana Neyestani’s life has not always gone as he would have wished: One of his children’s cartoons sparked uprisings in Iran in 2006 and he was sent to the notorious Evin prison. After three months in custody, he fled Iran and travelled via Malaysia to France, where he was granted asylum. He continues to draw cartoons about life in Iran, but also about exile and migration. Social media helps him disseminate his cartoons in his home country and worldwide. Almost one million people follow him on Instagram.

Eva-Maria: Mana, you once said that you’re not a genuinely political person. Yet you’re one of the most famous Iranian political cartoonists. How did you become a political artist?

Mana: It’s true that I prefer to follow cultural and cinematic news. However, living in a country like Iran inevitably makes you political. The country is controlled by a totalitarian religious regime that interferes with every aspect of private life. I believe the most fundamental role of an artist, even the least political one, is to think freely. But in a dictatorship, especially a religious one, thinking freely is itself a crime and a form of political resistance.

Artists of the Middle East

New book on Middle Eastern art 

Arab art expert Saeb Eigner explores the work of more than 250 Modern and contemporary artists spanning diverse art movements across 22 countries in the Middle East

The Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri’s Cherry Orchard (Bagh-e-Gilas), 2008-09. Courtesy of artist and The Third Line, Dubai, and The Art Newspaper.

Interview by Gareth Harris, The Art Newspaper

Saeb Eigner’s ambitious, timely overview of Middle Eastern art from 1900 to today features more than 250 prominent and lesser-known artists, spanning Morocco in North Africa to Iran in the East. It includes detailed biographies focusing on key Modern artists such as Shafic Abboud and Bahman Mohassess as well as contemporary trailblazers such as Nabil Nahas and Shirin Neshat. Eigner tells us how he approached this complex book.

The Art Newspaper: Why was it important to write this book?

Saeb Eigner: The book’s introduction and preface provide a substantive historical overview of Middle Eastern art over the past century. The preface also reflects on my personal engagement with the region, my relationships with artists and the broader art ecosystem—including galleries, curators, museums, biennials, collectors and institutions.

I have been privileged to witness first-hand the remarkable evolution of Modern and contemporary art from the Middle East, and this book aims to share that journey with a wider audience.

The book sheds light on areas that have not been widely covered in a single volume—spanning some 22 countries, major art movements and gender representation. It serves as both a complement to previous scholarship and a valuable resource for those passionate about Modern and contemporary art from the region, while also contextualising the vibrant contemporary art scene.

“O Chimera O Chimera” explores gender and transformation in Iran

The Mine is presenting O Chimera O Chimera, Feathers Whisper, Talons gleam, Mortal Flesh And Mythic scheme a solo presentation by Bita Fayyazi.

Bita Fayyazi, Untitled 14 (O Chimera O Chimera), Ceramic, 25 x 22 x 19 cm, 2024. Courtesy Alserkal.

In the ongoing rupture of Iran’s social and political landscape, the framing of gender has acquired renewed urgency – demanding not only visibility, but reinvention. Bita Fayyazi has long operated within this space of tension and transformation. Her sculptures, often imbued with a dramatic, theatrical presence, do not simply capture the female form – they wrestle with it. Through her interventions, the body becomes a site of resistance, a vessel for resilience, and a move toward metamorphosis.

Fayyazi’s practice does not rest solely on the human. Her forms often slip into the hybrid creatures that blur the lines between species, between myth and material. Totemic and uncanny, these beings echo the intimacy of our everyday entanglement with the animal world, even as they challenge our definitions of what it means to be human. In these amalgamated bodies, Fayyazi creates a charged terrain where personal and collective memory coalesce, where the fantastic becomes a way of reimagining the real. Her work insists on the porousness of boundaries – between gender, form, self, and the world.

Between Shadow and Light

Yosra Mojtahedi (b. 1986) is a Tehran-born artist based in France who explores various fields at the intersection of art, science, and technology with her work prompted by Iranian censorship. Coming from a country where the body is taboo, Mojtahedi’s art reacts with sensuality, tactility, olfaction, and even eroticism and feminity at times. Steeped in a surrealist, obscurantist atmosphere – “a space free of places and times” – her work’s objects and elements all become deeply symbolic.

Yosra Mojtahedi, Lilith, Kinetic, sculptural, and sound installation, Private collection of Fondation Francois Scneider 2023. Courtesy Contemporary Lynx.

by Berenika Balcer, Contemporary Lynx

A Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains graduate, she studies the human being in all its dimensions—physical, cultural, social, religious, and psychological—and its relationship with nature. Through sculptural and interactive installations, drawings, and photographs, she creates organic, sensual, and mystical landscapes. With a focus particularly on soft robotics – deformable robots and a perspective rooted in anthropology and through her research on nature and the place of the human body (especially the female body) in society, she questions the border between the living and the non-living. Through sculptures conceived as “human-machines” and “fountain-bodies”.

“I am enough and whole as I am”:

Bea Dero casts hybridity onto the streets of London

Bound by Two Homes blends Iranian cultural iconography with quintessentially British spaces to dissect identity

© Bea Dero. Courtesy 1854 | British Journal of Photography.

by Dalia Al-Dujaili, 1854 | British Journal of Photography

For Bea Dero, a British-born Iranian artist – as for most diaspora – hybridity presents itself as a method by which one practices their identity as they go. The artist’s debut solo show Bound by Two Homes materialised through a deeply personal journey of self-acceptance, an effort to reconcile two halves of an identity that the world so often forced apart. “When I’m in Iran they call me English and when I’m in England, they ask me where I’m from. I needed to find a way to create a representation that would help me see myself as whole as opposed to in-between things or never enough as either or,” Dero says. “I am enough and whole as I am, I just exist as something new.”

The tension of duality, the inescapable contrasts and parallels of heritage, is not unique but Dero’s response offers a particularly distinctive visual declaration of belonging, an assertion that identity does not have to be fragmented but can instead be layered, complex, and proudly held in its entirety. 

The body of work – co-curated with Green Tble – brings together a portrait series and a reworking of family photo-album images, forming Archive Trellis, an installation that underscores the role of memory and nostalgia in shaping identity. “Through this piece, I’m reinforcing how memory and nostalgia inform my sense of self and in-turn, my practice. It further contextualises the project as my recent explorations have also rooted in my yearning to return to my motherland, which I can no longer do due to political safeguarding reasons,” she explains.

“Song of the North”

Bringing a Persian Epic to the World, With Help From 483 Puppets

Hamid Rahmanian has made it his life’s work to share the richness of Iranian culture. “Song of the North,” at the New Victory Theater, is just the latest installment.

The show, at the New Victory Theater in Manhattan, is aimed at audiences 8 and older. It’s the latest of Hamid Rahmanian’s projects drawing on the “Shahnameh.” Photo by Gavin Doran. Courtesy New York Times. 

by Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times

On a recent afternoon on 42nd Street in Manhattan, a mythological bird was preparing to take flight.

Backstage at the New Victory Theater, a black-clad puppeteer put on an elaborately stylized mask and stepped into a beam of light, throwing the shadow of fluttering hands onto a large scrim.

Nearby, two other performers were gearing up to practice a sword fight. Then the music started, and a crew of nine began a full run-through of “Song of the North,” an elaborate shadow puppet staging of stories from the 10th-century Persian epic the “Shahnameh.”

From the audience, the show unfolded like a seamless animation. But backstage, the next 80 minutes were half ballet, half mad scramble, as the performers grabbed hundreds of different puppets, props and masks stacked on tables and, with split-second timing, jumped in and out of the light beams streaming from two projectors.

Leaning against a backstage wall was the show’s creator, Hamid Rahmanian. His role? “Stressing out,” he said.

A Review on "The Persians" – women on the edge

5 Iranian Women are at the Centre of New Fiction Release, The Persians

This multigenerational saga of an Iranian family fleeing to the US during the 1979 revolution is both funny and poignant

by Joanna Cannon, The Guardian

Courtesy 4th Estate.

“She’d grown pale, her eyes frozen, like she’d seen her own ghost. But aren’t we all exactly that? Each the ghost of an unchosen path,” writes Sanam Mahloudji in her debut, a multigenerational story of five Iranian women from the prestigious Valiat family, separated by personal and political revolutions, and each struggling to accept the path not taken.

The narrative is shared between the five voices, as it shifts back and forth across 80 years. There is Elizabeth, the matriarch, who – not blessed with the perfect features of her sisters – becomes fixated on her looks (“this is the story of a nose”, she tells us). Eventually she falls in love with a boy who loves her back; unfortunately, that boy is the son of her family’s chauffeur: not an ideal situation in 1940s Tehran. Bowing to pressure from her father, Elizabeth eventually marries someone of her own class; frail and elderly by the time the 1979 revolution begins, she decides to remain with her husband in Iran. However, because the family is rich and high profile, and descendants of Babak Ali Khan Valiat, the heroic “Great Warrior”, as the revolution takes hold she insists that her two daughters flee the country for their own safety. Like many thousands of Iranians at the time, they choose to travel to the United States, the land of opportunity.

Seema, who struggles with being both an idealist and a housewife, tries to adapt to 1980s Los Angeles – or “Tehrangeles”, as it’s known, due to the high Persian population (the climate and mountains are reminders of home). Meanwhile Shirin, an outspoken events planner whose outlandish behaviour opens the novel with a bang when she is falsely arrested for prostitution, settles in Houston with designer labels and a mediocre husband.

The Artistic Journey of an Iranian Designer

 A New Book Shares the Artistic Odyssey of Iranian Designer Farshid Mesghali

Man & Lion (sculpture), 2006. © Farshid Mesghali; Courtesy PRINT Magazine. 

by Majid Abbasi, PRINT Magazine

In the 1960s and 1970s in Iran, with economic development and government support, as well as the expansion of activities and the establishment of various institutes and cultural centers, art and graphic design flourished. During these years, Iranian graphic design drew from the country’s rich visual heritage, eschewing the Swiss International Style, and found influences in Polish graphic design styles and the historical reinterpretations of Push Pin Studios. Farshid Mesghali is one of the most influential and prominent representatives of graphic art and illustration of this period. With a deep understanding of both Iranian and international visual languages, Mesghali creates works that, while poetic and simple, invite entirely personal and free interpretations. He often reimagines these diverse sources into innovative forms, embodying a generation that laid the foundations of the golden age of graphic design in Iran.

A comprehensive book, Selected Works of Farshid Mesghali, was recently published in Tehran by Nazar Art Publishing. This book, unparalleled in its kind, offers a relatively complete collection of Mesghali’s works in graphic design, illustration, painting, sculpture, and photography. It also includes essays exploring various aspects of his life and work by Mahmoudreza Bahmanpour (publisher and curator of Islamic Art at LACMA), Ali Bakhtiari (curator and writer), Behzad Hatam (graphic designer), and Amir Nasri.

Filmed underground and in secret:

The story behind this 'banned' Oscar-nominated film

Acclaimed director Mohammad Rasoulof filmed The Seed of The Sacred Fig in defiance of Iran’s strict filmmaking laws. It’s earned him an Oscar nomination — and a prison sentence.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is set against the backdrop of the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, during which mass protests erupted in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini. Photograph courtesy of Neon.

by Alexandra Koster, SBS News

Four weeks into shooting his latest film, Mohammad Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years in prison and lashings in Iran.

It isn't the first time the award-winning Iranian director has been punished for his work.

In 2010, he was sentenced to six years in prison by the Iranian regime for his film The White Meadows. In 2017 he was banned from leaving the country and later convicted by the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Iran for “collusion against national security" over his film A Man of Integrity.

In 2020, Rasoulof was again sentenced to a year in prison for three films authorities deemed "propaganda against the system".

But this time, he had to think about his future.

‘Embracing imperfection is key to artistic evolution’:

An interview with Iranian artist Sadegh Adham

‘These works invite humanity on an aesthetic journey, free from political and social biases’

Sadegh Adham, in his studio in Tehran, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Global Voices.

by Omid Memarian, Global Voices

Sadegh Adham’s artistic journey began in the most unexpected of circumstances. The sounds of war marked his early years as he grew up during the Iran-Iraq war. Born in 1978 in Masjed Soleyman, a city in southern Iran in Khuzestan province, Adham’s childhood was shaped by the intensity of conflict and its lasting impact. He recalls how, at the age of five, a missile destroyed their home, and his family was forced to seek refuge in his maternal grandmother's house in Shushtar. Yet even amidst the chaos of war, Adham’s innate creativity began to take root.

Adham recalls the first sparks of his artistic journey — his father working with melted lead and his mother’s drawing book, where he first copied a mermaid. These early experiences laid the foundation for his passion for art.

Sadegh Adham, ‘Soldier Helmet,’ ‘War’ Series 2013. Image courtesy of the artist and Global Voices.

Growing up in a region with limited access to art education, Adham’s determination to create was unwavering. He fondly remembers gazing at a box of 96 colored pencils in a bookstore window, longing to own them. Eventually, after a year and a half of saving, he bought the set, fueling his artistic drive.

The Barbican as muse:

Composer Shiva Feshareki on bringing the brutalist icon to life through music

For the last two years, British-Iranian experimental composer and turntablist Shiva Feshareki has been drawing on the Barbican’s hidden history as a gateway for her new piece. She talks to Wallpaper about her Brutalist muse

Image credit: Dion Barrett. Courtesy Wallpaper.

by El Hunt, Wallpaper

Whether you love or loathe the concrete geometry of the iconic Barbican estate, it tends to inspire strong feelings: for every Londoner charmed by its sharp Brutalist architecture, you’ll find another person just as eager to brand it an eyesore.

First constructed in post World War II London by architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, the sprawling complex aimed to revive an area of the capital that had been devastated by bombing, but was originally the site of a Roman fortress, marking the gateway passage through London’s walls, and into the ancient city. Created with a Utopian vision in mind, and inspired by the fortress that used to stand here – both in name and its construction – this city within a city now contains a huge performing arts centre, a tranquil, one-hectare lake, and a hidden conservatory packed with tropical plants.

And for the last two years, British-Iranian experimental composer and turntablist Shiva Feshareki has been drawing on the Barbican’s hidden history as a gateway for her new piece, 'Bab-Khaneh: Gatehouse of Memory'. The work’s title refers to the ancient Persian word ‘Bab-Khaneh’ – thought to be a possible origin of the word Barbican – and Feshareki has imagined the project as a sonic survey of the Barbican Hall’s acoustics and design.

If you’re not already familiar with Shiva Feshareki, her work is part of a rich lineage of experimental composition, drawing on everything from musique concrète pioneer Daphne Oram to warped, acid-flecked dub. In essence, the Ivor Novello-winning artist offers up a fascinating exploration of how sound moves through space, incorporating turntables, orchestras, cutting-edge ambisonic technology, choirs, and bespoke art installations to bend, morph, and reshape sound as we know it.

Filmmaking as Rebellion:

 An Interview with Nahid Hassanzadeh

Another Time (2016), Directed by Nahid Hassanzadeh. Image courtesy of Visions of Iran: Iranian Film Festival in Cologne.

by Abhimanyu Bandyopadhyay, Zamaneh Media

In the Islamic Republic of Iran where the state has waged a relentless war on women for decades, artists like Nahid Hassanzadeh becomes an act of defiance. A midwife-turned-filmmaker, she is part of a growing wave of Iranian artists using cinema as resistance—unflinching, poetic, and dangerous. From Tehran’s hospitals to international film festivals, Hassanzadeh’s journey is a testament to the unwavering spirit of Iranian women in their fight against the Islamic Republic’s iron grip.

Between 2001 and 2012, Hassanzadeh made five documentaries and short films while working as a midwife in Tehran. Her debut feature film, Another Time (2016), won the Best Film Award at the 22nd Kolkata International Film Festival and has been screened at several international events, including the São Paulo International Film Festival in Brazil, the Raindance Film Festival in the United Kingdom, the Exground Film Festival in Germany, the Seoul International Agape Film Festival in South Korea, and Ohio’s Athens International Film and Video Festival (AIFVF) in the United States. Nahid was recently invited to serve as a jury member at the 30th Kolkata International Film Festival, where she discussed her own journey, the significant challenges faced by women filmmakers in Iran, the prevalence of male dominance in the Iranian film industry, and the unstoppable “Women, Life, Freedom” movement.

“I am an Actress, Where is my Country?”

A Seattle actor explores what it means to be an artist in exile

Julia Rahmanzaei’s student project at the University of Washington, called “No Way to Go, No Way to Stay,” formed the basis of her upcoming solo show “I am an Artist, Where is my Country?” (Christie Zhao). Courtesy The Seattle Times.

By Gemma Wilson, The Seattle Times

Of all the scenes in Julia Rahmanzaei’s upcoming solo show — scenes with titles like “how to change my blood,” and “Iranian art department” — the one she’s most nervous to perform in public is called “asylum or artist visa.” 

The show, “I am an Actress, Where is my Country?” which runs Feb. 27-March 1 at Theatre Off Jackson, tells the story of Rahmanzaei’s life and, she said, of so many silenced Iranian artists. “Asylum or artist visa” — seeking asylum protection or an artist visa — are two options ahead for the actor, who left her home country due to government censorship of her art. Neither one is certain. Her immediate future may be unknown but Rahmanzaei knows art will be a part of it, no matter how difficult — this is what it means, for her, to be an artist in exile.

“I’ve fought for art, for being an artist, since I was 15 years old,” said Rahmanzaei, now 33, who arrived in Seattle around four years ago to attend the University of Washington School of Drama’s professional actor training program, from which she graduated in 2024. 

Rahmanzaei hasn’t been back to Iran since relocating; she’s here on a still-valid student visa and isn’t sure what would happen to her, or her passport, should she return home. She’s performing without a hijab, she’s telling her story of Iranian censorship — she just doesn’t know.

A Review on "Maximal Miniatures: Contemporary Art from Iran"

The artists twisting Persian masterpieces with stunning color

With dreamlike imagery and bold patterns, contemporary Iranian artists have reinterpreted the Persian miniature tradition.

Farah Ossouli. David and I (2), 2014. Gouache on cardboard. 75 x 110 cm. Courtesy Middle East Institute.

by Vanessa H. Larson, The Washington Post

Two contrasting works boldly set the stage for the Middle East Institute Art Gallery’s “Maximal Miniatures,” a showcase of contemporary Iranian artists inspired by Persian miniature painting.

Elham Pourkhani’s “Zahhak’s Castle Is Calm” exemplifies many characteristics of the centuries-old artistic tradition. At just about 23 by 27 inches, the intimate piece is striking in its brilliant colors and rich ornamental detail. Its subject is Zahhak, a mythical ruler in the Persian national epic — the Shahnameh, or “Book of Kings” — whose evil, bloodthirsty reign lasted 1,000 years.

Why Reading Lolita in Tehran Holds Up

 A new film vindicates Azar Nafisi’s humane literary ethos.

© Photographer: Sasan/AFP/Getty Images. Via MSN

by Arash Azizi, The Atlantic

The past few years may well be remembered as the nadir of Iranian-Israeli relations, and the first occasion when the two countries attacked each other directly. But they were also a golden period for Iranian-Israeli collaboration in cinema. In 2023, Tatami was the first-ever film to be co-directed by an Israeli (Guy Nattiv) and an Iranian (Zar Amir). And in 2024 came Reading Lolita in Tehran, directed by Eran Riklis, who is Israeli, and adapted from a book by an Iranian author, with an almost entirely Iranian cast. The film premiered at the Rome Film Fest last year and is now starting to tour the United States.

Anyone old enough to remember cultural life at the beginning of this century will know the book. Azar Nafisi’s memoir came out in 2003, spent 36 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, and quickly developed a cult following. A reviewer for The Nation confessed to missing a dental appointment, a business lunch, and a deadline just because she couldn’t put the book aside.

Iranian artist redefines calligraphy through tradition and innovation

 An Interview

 Korosh Ghazimorad’s work embodies a unique synergy of historical reverence and innovative spirit 

Korosh Ghazimorad, ‘Breathing with Nature,’ 2024. Mixed media on canvas, 120 x 80 cm (47 x 31 in). Photo courtesy of the artist and Global Voices.

by Omid Memarian, Global Voices

In contemporary Iranian art, Korosh Ghazimorad, 55, is a leading artist known for his unique approach to blending traditional calligraphy with modern artistic expressions.

With a degree in wood industry and paper engineering and certifications from Iran’s Calligraphy Association, he has spent decades merging established techniques with innovative forms. 

His work embodies a unique synergy of historical reverence and innovative spirit, as he masterfully blends classical styles with contemporary forms, most notably through the development of the Sarir calligraphy style. As a seasoned educator, he has imparted his knowledge in calligraphy and typography for over 25 years at esteemed institutions, nurturing the next generation of artists.

A commitment to graphic design and art direction marks Ghazimorad’s professional journey. He has played significant roles in various high-circulation newspapers and in curating exhibitions for renowned Iranian artists. His artistic influence extends beyond national borders, with notable works in prestigious public collections, such as the Museum Funf Kontinente in Munich, Germany.

As a board member of the Iranian Graphic Designers’ Association and a jury member for journalism competitions, he has consistently championed originality and artistic design, reinforcing his dedication to elevating visual arts standards in Iran and beyond.

In an interview with Global Voices, Ghazimorad shares insights into his artistic philosophy, exploring the themes of cultural identity and the sensory experience of letters in his work.