Hope Moves History Towards Freedom

Materials Rich in Resistance

Soli Kiani (b. 1981) is an Iranian-born, Vienna-based artist who incessantly pokes at the power imbalance inherent to oppressive political regimes, devoting special attention to the one in her homeland. Emerging from the second generation of feminist art, Kiani’s multidisciplinary practice is rooted in her own background, but its aim is, first and foremost, to encapsulate the collective experiences of thousands of Iranian people. 

Soli Kiani, TRAUMA 1 and 2, 2026, 300 x 210 cm each, wax crayon and acrylic on canvas. Photo Kunstdokumentation.com. Courtesy Contemporary Lynx

by Pola Folwarczny, Contemporary Lynx

The artist’s socio-critical commentary manifests itself through pieces that tangibly evoke the raw feelings and sensations they are meant to capture. Moving between installations, objects, photography and painting, she creates powerful expressions of the loss of control and freedom that so many experience. By bringing audiences closer to conditions of life that they often find unfamiliar, she forces Western society to at last turn its eye to the injustices of the surrounding world. Kiani undermines the seemingly inevitable, pushes at the limits of what’s deemed acceptable and creates resistance in form, material and content.

Work in Progress:

Koushna Navabi

Finishing new works for Frieze London that turn geological maps and found tree trunks into sites of metamorphosis, Koushna Navabi unravels the personal and political histories of her practice

Koushna Navabi's works in progress. Courtesy: the artist

‘For years I was terrified to make political work,’ says Koushna Navabi. For the Iran-born, London-based artist, acts of knitting, stitching and weaving were personal solace from the external horrors of the Iranian Revolution, from which she escaped as a teenager. Navabi was training as a ballet dancer in 1979 when her school shut down and she was forced to flee the country alone. ‘All I had was this bodily memory of dancing,’ she says, ‘and I think I carried that into my work.’  

Originally self-taught, Navabi moved to London in 1993 to complete an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. She works across knitting, textiles, painting, sculpture and mixed media, often presenting multidisciplinary works alongside each other. These materials and processes carry different histories and associations with labour, the domestic, repetition, cultural heritage and transformation.   

Over the years, Navabi has developed a highly personal and intellectual approach, but the power of her work lies in its grey areas. To understand her work is to slowly unravel it. ‘I don’t want the work to be solely political; that’s just one of the layers.’  

As she completes two new works for Frieze London, presented as part of a group with Don Gallery, Navabi discusses transformation as a form of survival, her fascination with ancient mythology and her own process of metamorphosis. 

Interview by Izzy Bilkus, Frieze London

Izzy Bilkus Tell me about your new work for Frieze London. 

Koushna Navabi I’m exhibiting a painting and a sculpture. The painting is a section of the seismic map of the Persian Gulf, which I’ve painted to look like it’s knitted. The sculpture is an anthropomorphic figure made from found tree trunks, Persian kilim, stitches and polished bronze. These works bring craft and canon in the same breath. Both works sound quite different, but there’s a narrative of transformation that ties them together. 

Tehran artists respond to catastrophe — and refuse to surrender to it

The city’s inaugural art month is bringing creators, galleries and collectors together as Iranians grapple with the trauma of war and unrest

At the Artists House in downtown Tehran, Parisa Abbasi’s Repair depicts a human figure fallen apart, with fragments scattered across the floor. Courtesy Najmeh Bozorgmehr and FT.

by Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran, FT

A blackened, cracked and scorched canvas hangs in Artibition Art Gallery in Tehran, its Persian inscriptions emerging through layers of soot and ash. Burnt-out candles sit before it, wax spilled across the floor.

The two-panel painting by Mojtaba Amini reflects his experience at the height of the war, when US and Israeli strikes hit Tehran’s fuel depots on March 7, sending a dark cloud over the capital, followed by toxic rainfall. The text reads: “A black chador has covered the city’s sky . . . a woman with a bottle of mineral water washes a blackened cat . . . how ominous the colour black is.” Yet Amini’s darkness is not without an exit. “I know this darkness will subside.”

The painting is part of immutable, a group exhibition and one of dozens of shows, open studios and cultural events taking place across Tehran until September 11 as part of Tehran Art Month, intended to promote the city’s visual arts. It is the first event to bring together so many of Tehran’s galleries at a time when Iranian society is grappling with the trauma of two wars in the past year and bloody unrest in January, in which thousands were killed.

The ‘Imagined Freedom’ of Iranian women

on display in Seattle

Iranian artist Forouzan Safari’s work, "Imagined Freedom | Revealing Bodies Never Allowed to Be Seen," at ANTiPODE art gallery in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood. Courtesy the artist.

by Ayeda Masood, KUOW

Forouzan Safari grew up in Isfahan, Iran, a city known for its historic mosques, bridges, and Persian-Islamic architecture. When she moved to Los Angeles in 2013 to study painting at Otis College of Art and Design, she immediately missed home. Inspired by memories of Isfahan, Safari began creating scenes of the city, incorporating its distinctive architecture into her work.

This month, Safari's first solo show, “Imagined Freedom,” is on view at ANTiPODEArt Gallery, tucked beneath the sidewalk on South Main Street in Pioneer Square, just past the Seattle Jazz Fellowship. The show is on display until mid-July.

Inside ANTiPODE, its brightly lit brick walls are covered with black-and-white and colorful prints depicting women doing ordinary activities, like swimming in a river, sitting outside in tank tops, drinking alcohol in a field, and expressing their sexuality. However, these are all things that could get women arrested in Iran.

While the show coincides with Iran vs. Egypt World Cup match in Seattle, Amir Amini, one of ANTiPODE’s co-owners, said it was purely coincidental.

After moving to Los Angeles, Safari began drawing digitally in 2018, posting images online that reached audiences in Iran and across the world. For audiences in Iran, the works carry a particular resonance, because they depict freedoms many viewers have imagined but cannot openly experience.

"Sometimes people say, ‘That's what we were thinking,’" Safari said. "It's kind of dreamy. People over there [Iran] also like to see it, like to dream."

For instance, one of her prints depicts a group of women dancing freely in a field, against a vivid sunset and mountains. However, slightly hidden at their feet, tracking devices are wrapped around their ankles. Safari said the juxtaposition was intentional, meant to show that the women are never quite as free as the dancing might suggest.

Iran Under Siege

Tehran Diaries: Dispatches from Iran Under Siege. By Raha Nik-Andish. New York: OR Books, 2025, 90pp.

by Paul Buhle, CounterPunch

The text of this small volume dates from April, a “yesterday” that seems eternal, because we understand so little of what is happening in Iran in wartime, and what the Iranians themselves are thinking.

The writer, using a pseudonym for obvious reasons, is an art historian and an essayist published in the London Review of Books, among other spots. We hope for his personal security.

We enter at a particularly pregnant moment, elaborated here by a three-page preface by another anonymous writer, comrade or admirer of the author. This small text was composed, as explained, during the longest internet blackout since Gaddafi sliced off service by way of Libya in 2011, when the Hillary Clinton-inspired US coup against Libya was underway. Here we are again, or rather, were when this book was composed.

In an apparently unending irony, as the author writes about the current day, the blackout has eased somewhat, but the Islamic Republic posts messages on Telegram that hardly reach anyone. In a book composed under such difficulties and thus inherently problematic, something possibly decisive can nevertheless be said.

The author struggles to make some sense of things and turns to an intriguing narrative technique. The text moves backward in time, chapter by chapter, through Operation Epic Fury, offering readers an intimate view of where things have been seen and experienced at the ground level. We eventually learn that he has a part-time university teaching job that pays too little to survive, and he also becomes a part-time car-share driver.

Raha begins with the announcement of the Ayatollah’s assassination by the Americans and Israelis. People come out on their balconies, unbelieving, just to look around. The Basij paramilitaries, below them on the streets, immediately begin to bash anyone who is seen or heard to be celebrating. The following morning, the mosque down the street from his apartment blares patriotic songs intermittently from the Iran-Iraq War and the seventh-century conflict in which the Prophet Muhanmmed’s son was murdered and martyred. The heavy official tone is mocked by a mood of quiet happiness.

How an Iranian Designer Questions His Guardians of Faith

Courtesy PRINT Magazine

by Steven Heller, PRINT Magazine

Behnam Raeesian is an artist and poster designer from northern Iran, in the Sari, Mazandaran Province. He is working with “political urgency, symbolic minimalism and socially engaged visual language” on a project he titles The Fall of the Guardians. Through stark Eurocentric imagery, in a time of war, Raeesian looks at these figures traditionally “associated with protection, faith, justice, authority and salvation, but reimagines them as unstable symbols of silence, control, violence and collapse.”

The work is deceivingly reductive. I asked him if his employ of Western archetypes is a universal protest or one that in his country is designed to subvert taboo depictions.

What prompted you to do this series of posters?

Social and political questions have always lived in my mind, partly because of where I was born and the conditions I have observed around me. Over time, I learned how to turn these inner pressures into visual systems rather than single images. The Fall of the Guardians happens when the figures meant to protect us no longer protect. What happens when authority, faith, justice and salvation begin to produce silence, fear and collapse instead?

I wanted to make a series that could share this unease with others—not as a slogan, but as a set of images that feel immediate, sharp and difficult to ignore.

Discussing the English Translation of Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime: An Interview

A Conversation with Michelle Quay

Michelle Quay is a scholar and translator of Persian literature and was the inaugural winner of the Mo Habib Translation Prize for Persian Literature in 2023. She teaches Persian Language and Literature, in addition to Iranian Cinema and Culture, at Brown University and holds a Ph.D. in medieval Persian literature from the University of Cambridge. Her contemporary literary translation work has appeared in Asymptote Journal, The Kenyon Review, World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, Two Lines Press, and elsewhere.

by Seán Carlson, The Adroit Journal

This interview took place in person over coffee in Providence, Rhode Island.

Seán Carlson: Your English translation of Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime by Reza Ghassemi (Riz̤ā Qāsimī) has been published as the world’s eyes are on Iran—with the book coming out two and a half weeks after the U.S. and Israel commenced military strikes on the country. Much uncertainty remains around the conflict’s timeline and trajectory. I’d like us to look more deeply past the present, but what about the novel speaks to this particular moment?

Michelle Quay: Some aspects of Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime really relate to the current situation: this is an exile novel written in Paris by an Iranian who was forced to leave and has had work censored under the Islamic Republic. The narrator of the novel is a thinly veiled version of the author and his own experiences of exile, even though he writes in a funny and comic and flippant voice. It’s the main theme, the trauma, the ruptures caused by migration.

But I feel torn up about it, actually. My approach to Persian translation is that I’m really interested in showcasing excellence. People often look to take an almost anthropological approach—like, this is a window into Iran, or this is a bridge, these metaphors we use. The novel was written for its original context. It’s not here just to teach you something. It’s not tourism by another means. Part of the reason I was very interested in this novel is that it’s extremely literary and well-versed in all of these different traditions. I’m worried about all of this getting collapsed into geopolitics.

Ones to Watch 2025

Every year, BJP publishes its Ones to Watch issue – their selection of the artists who epitomise the talent and creativity in international photography today, as nominated by a global network of curators, editors and artists.

Here they look at Atefe Moeini, who was nominated as part of the 2025 cohort by the artist and educator Amak Mahmoodian. 

Image © Atefe Moeini. Courtesy BJP.

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

Atefe Moeini first came across photography as a teenager in Iran. “I was in high school, 15 years old when I discovered photography,” she recalls. “It was the beginning years of Instagram and I was making pictures of myself – selfies – and posting them. Then my classmates said, ‘You make great pictures, you should make pictures of us too’.” These casual, peer-led sessions marked the beginning of a journey that would come to shape Moeini’s creative and political voice.

Moeini arrived in the US in 2024 and has been studying photography at Yale School of Art, “but honestly, my real education came from working in the field, making mistakes, and learning from them”, she says. Moeini marks Gillian Wearing, Chantal Akerman, and Vilém Flusser as inspirations for her work; specifically Flusser’s essay ‘Taking Up Residence in Homelessness’, which deeply shaped Moeini’s thinking on exile and creativity. The celebrated Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad’s poetry has also been important to Moeini, “particularly through her ability to express the personal as political,” she says.

Without access to formal education in the field, Moeini turned to YouTube tutorials and hands-on experimentation. “I couldn’t find any schools [in Iran], so I just learnt things online,” she explains. Now at Yale, she juggles formal study with what she calls a “parallel practice”, driven by feeling, intuition and urgency.

With My Roots

Art in exile on show at London’s Iranian Contemporary Art Biennale

Iran Herself is a Vineyard by Homa Bazrafshan. Courtesy Mall Galleries and The Conversation

by Katayoun Shahandeh, The Conversation

With Iran’s official cultural presence on the international stage increasingly uncertain, the 6th Iranian Contemporary Art Biennale in London, With My Roots, carries significance that extends well beyond the gallery walls.

Held at Mall Galleries from May 22–30, it brings together more than 100 Iranian artists from 17 countries, with over 180 works spanning painting, photography, sculpture, installation and video. Despite its scale, the exhibition feels intimate: a space where Iranian culture emerges not as a single story, but as a field of tensions, inheritances and unresolved attachments.

Iran’s withdrawal from the Venice Biennale earlier this year exposed how fragile national representation has become, at a moment when art and geopolitics are increasingly difficult to separate.

Against that silence, this biennale tells a different – and in many ways more urgent – story. It shows how Iranian art continues to circulate when official platforms falter, and why independent cultural infrastructures matter in moments of political and material crisis.

Architectural Microcosms:

An Interview with Arash Nassiri

Arash Nassiri: ‘A Bug’s Life,’ 2026, installation view at Chisenhale Gallery, London, Co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London; Fluentum, Berlin; and Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, produced by Chisenhale Gallery, photo by Andy Keate. Courtesy of the artist and Berlin Art Link

by William Kherbek, Berlin Art Link

Forms of measurement are essentially arbitrary, the “foot,” after all, is based on a human foot. The “hand,” used to measure horses in the Anglosphere, is based on a human hand. The legendary Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, writing in his poetry collection ‘A Wolf on Watch,’ embraces the relativities of determining scale: “I measure/The depth of the lagoon/By the croaking of frogs”—a reminder that even if measurement is inherently arbitrary it need not be anthropocentric. Philosophers and artists have long evoked the perspective of non-human entities to understand various human conceptions, and scale is no exception.

Tehran-born, Berlin-based artist Arash Nassiri’s recent exhibition ‘A Bug’s Life’ at London’s Chisenhale Gallery offers a lighthearted exploration of the incongruities created by disparities in size and perspective. Nassiri’s film—not to be confused with the Pixar film that shares the same title—follows the spatial and social foibles of an otherworldly insect, a small wooden puppet, that finds itself inside one of the vast Los Angeles mansions known as “Persian Palaces.” The lavish Beverly Hills residence featured in the film was commissioned in the 1980s by Iranian expats and designed by architect Hamid Omrani, and forms part of a small architectural trend that emerged in wealthy LA neighbourhoods after the Iranian Revolution. This style of home combined the grandeur of American luxury estates with eclectic elements of European classicism, later becoming disparagingly known as “Persian Palaces” and banned by the city of Los Angeles in 2004. The results of Nassiri’s film offer novel, and affecting, musings on notions of scale as a physical and a social quantity. Lately, the artist’s work has also inevitably been subsumed into geopolitical events operating at a scale far beyond the scope of an art film and these tensions also feature in our discussion.

Refusing to Perform an Identity

Ahead of his Venice exhibition at the Canadian Pavilion, the artist, Abbas Akhavan, reflected on diasporic distance and withholding as a form of poetic practice in an interview

Cast for a Folly, 2023, installation view, ‘Curtain Call’, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, 2023. Photograph by David Stjernholm. Courtesy the artist, The Third Line, Dubai and Frieze. 

Interview by Aram Moshayedi, Frieze

This conversation between curator Aram Moshayedi and artist Abbas Akhavan took place in the immediate aftermath of military strikes on Iran – an event that inevitably shapes the tenor of their exchange. While the discussion turns to Akhavan’s upcoming projects, including his Venice Biennale presentation at the Canada Pavilion (commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada) and an upcoming survey at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, it also reflects on the uneasy expectations placed on artists in moments of political crisis. Moving between questions of diasporic distance, cultural representation and the limits of artistic agency, Akhavan speaks candidly about the pressures to perform identity – and the possibility that withholding, rather than declaration, can itself be a position. 

Aram Moshayedi: I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around how to begin in light of the last few days in Iran. How to address the situation there obviously weighs upon me, but I also feel as outsiders we don’t have much authority on the subject. The tenor of this conversation would be so different if we’d spoken last week. While the focus is still you and your work, I want to ask before we begin: how do we deal with this military attack on Iran from your perspective as an Iranian Canadian artist? 

Abbas Akhavan: I currently live in Berlin. As I was walking home to get to this call, I was amazed at how everyone is going about their day as if nothing grave has happened. They’re just living their lives. And I thought: Oh yes, so am I. It’s as if it’s just another day, when obviously it isn’t. As of now, there hasn’t been time to reflect on what any of this means. Having said that, I feel like we’re still in the extended version of the ‘shock and awe’ strategy the US military used in Iraq in 2003. It is horrendous.

AM: In my case, I feel an emotional heaviness around this, but I am also apprehensive or reluctant to speak in any direct way about my perceptions or how I feel about what is happening or what will happen in Iran. Perhaps there is a similarity in how you have navigated speaking about your own identity. None of this is made any easier when there’s a war going on and you’re called upon to speak on behalf of an entire population from which you are disconnected. But it’s also a question of how to navigate these conversations, even among other Iranians, and how to talk about something without having to talk about it.

“Tarragon”—a short story

In a wartime childhood shaped by scarcity and ritual, a pair of twins become obsessed with a plant their grandfather cannot grow.

Amani Abeid, Untitled, oil on canvas, 200x150cm, 2024. Courtesy Tewas Art Gallery and the Markaz Review.

by Erfan Mojib, The Markaz Review

Grandpa didn’t think growing tarragon was possible. He grew all sorts of other herbs that filled the plastic container in the fridge year-round: basil, dill, parsley, coriander, peppermint, chives, spring onions, chilies, tiny radishes that Grandma turned into little red roses with two quick cuts of her sharp knife. When guests came over, she shaped spring onions into white hyacinths. With all those colors, Grandma’s herb container looked like the Garden of Eden.

Tarragon was different. It was exotic, hard to find, harder to grow. One spring, Ahmad, a colleague of Grandpa’s, brought him a box of tarragon from the countryside. He tried propagating the cuttings in different pots, applying every farming trick he knew. None of them took. Everyone knew he had a green thumb, but tarragon defeated him.

After that, he stopped trying. Instead, we bought tarragon from the Friday market. Merchants brought it from the south, near the warfront where Father served and which Grandma added to her Garden of Eden. She loved anything that came from the south, believing it carried Father’s smell. We examined the dark green leaves with awe. Grandpa looked at them with frustration. Grandma always saved a couple of batches of tarragon for the winter. She dried it on a big copper tray and stored it in jam jars, sealing the checkered lids to preserve their magic aroma.

And tarragon did work magic. A tiny amount was enough to turn a mediocre lamb stew sublime. On its own, it smelled divine. It was only later, after everything, that I learned it derived its name from the Greek word for dragon. A green dragon in a pot. Grandma knew its power, only adding a pinch to certain dishes. Tarragon was treated almost like saffron, with dignity and respect.

Symbolic accumulation as an act of universal resistance

Navid Azimi Sajadi at Studio la Linea Verticale

Navid Azimi Sajadi, “Untitled”, 2025, carpet, hand-woven wool tapestry with cotton base, 89×151 cm (179 with fringes). Courtesy Studio la Linea Verticale and Juliet Art Magazine.

by Emanuela Zanon, Juliet Art Magazine

Mater Ex Mater – Act I, solo exhibition by Navid Azimi Sajadi (Tehran, 1982) currently on in Bologna at Studio la Linea Verticale, is the first public configuration of a project that was meant to be more expansive and which now, in its lacunae, concretely shows the destructive consequences of every war. Geopolitical pressure made it impossible to complete the original plan, and what the public encounters is what the artist managed to bring out of Iran before the conflict closed every passage. Carpets produced under his direct supervision in the Mozafariyeh district (a historic area within the bazaar of Tabriz, renowned since the twelfth century for the trade and production of high-quality Persian carpets, now a UNESCO site), ceramics belonging to previous cycles, drawings on paper, preparatory cartoons. It is an Act I that bears its own incompleteness inscribed in the title as a structural condition, the hallmark of a cultural resistance exercised precisely in the act of bringing to safety fragments of a visual universe threatened by the violent irruption of history.

But it would be reductive to read Mater Ex Mater solely through the lens of biographical and political urgency. The project has its roots in a question that Navid Azimi Sajadi has been asking himself for years with growing insistence: what does it mean to be a contemporary Iranian artist? It is not a matter of an identity belonging to be defended nor of a folklore to be preserved, but of the ethical and existential need to understand where one’s gaze comes from, what the deep structures (symbolic, formal, philosophical) are that shape it before critical consciousness and design intention set themselves in motion.

Inside Iran’s New Sculptural Language of Memory and Desire

Hanie Rahimian and Shiva Abazariyan are an emerging Iranian artist duo from Mashhad whose collaborative practice spans sculpture, paper mache, ceramics, installation, and animation. Working between painting‑based drawing and three‑dimensional forms, they blend humor, introspection, and material experimentation to offer fresh perspectives on contemporary Iranian art.

Courtesy Emaho.

Interview by Emaho

Emaho: You both grew up in Mashhad. How has the city, its energy, and your childhood environment influenced the way you perceive the world and eventually led you toward art?

Hanieh: Shiva and I both grew up in Mashhad, a crowded city full of contradictions. Our childhood took shape in a religious and ritualistic environment, yet my family was neither religious nor traditional and had a strong interest in art. My father was particularly passionate about art, especially music. My mother was a teacher who decorated her classroom walls with drawings, and I vividly remember how she would often draw small illustrations for me in the corners of my notebooks. Those images became my first encounters with drawing and sparked my early interest in visual art.

Shiva: My family, like Hanieh’s, was not traditional or religious. They were deeply interested in art and encouraged me from a young age to pursue it. My father and brother were involved in music, and my mother painted. I was always an observer of their practices. I remember my mother drawing for me while telling stories, and sometimes my brother and I would draw directly on the walls of our home. These simple, everyday moments naturally placed me on this path.

I Won't Pretend These Missiles Are Stars

Liz Frances, Publisher at Street Noise Books, sits down with Interviews Editor, Andrew Irvin, to discuss the anonymously produced graphic anthology, I Won't Pretend These Missiles Are Stars, by The Cartoonist Collective in Tehran, Iran, on the 12 Days War in 2025.

Content Warning: This collection involves depictions of warfare, violence, and the trauma associated with enduring life in an active war zone under restricted civil liberties. 

Courtesy Comic Book Yeti.

by Andrew Irvin, Comic Book Yeti

Comic Book Yeti: Liz, it’s an honor to welcome you into the Yeti Cave today, though I must admit the subject of I Won’t Pretend These Missiles are Stars is an unfortunate occasion upon which to convene. I apologize for the long delay in my deliberation on putting together these questions. As the international conflict has mounted, it has been difficult to keep everything in perspective. In what way, if at all, did working on I Won’t Pretend These Missiles are Stars surrounding the 12-Day War in 2025 prepare you for the unwarranted escalation of attacks on the Iranian people by Israel and the United States in 2026?

Liz Frances: Working on I Won’t Pretend These Missiles are Stars last year helped me to appreciate how complicated the political situation is there. The two Iranian comic artists who edited the book with me wanted to be free from the oppression of the autocratic theocracy of their government, but they also recognized that the US and Israel didn’t have their best interests at heart, and wouldn’t prioritize human rights in the conflict. So, they were frightened of whatever way things would go. Back at the beginning of this year, when the Iranian government was instituting widespread internet blackouts, the editors had just sent me the finished comics for editing. And then I didn’t hear anything for more than ten days. It was literally radio silence. They ended up sending me a message a few weeks later through a relative who had managed to get to Istanbul. They wanted me to know that they were okay and were trying to stay safe. They told me that they trusted me to make whatever edits and changes needed for the book to be finished. And they urged me to do whatever I could to amplify the voices of Iranians. I took this very seriously and saw my role as even more vital at that point.

Diary of a Massacre: Iran, 2026

This anonymous diary was written during the January 2026 massacre of protesters in Tehran and published anonymously on a diaspora website right after connection was reestablished. Over the course of eight days, it narrates the unknowability of those days as the horror was beginning to unfold.

The Persian ironwood tree, harbinger of spring / Photo by alessandrozocc / Adobe Stock. Courtesy WLT 

We bore the ardor of love in our chests.

—Ezzat Ebrahim-Nejad, “Remember Us”

Editor’s Note

by Daniel Simon, WLT

In the current issue of WLT, “Diary of a Massacre: Iran, 2026,” translated by poupeh missaghi, presents a stark reminder of the stakes involved in bearing witness, whether through literature, journalism, art, or street protest. The author kept her diary during the January 2026 massacre of protesters in Iran and published it on a diaspora website soon thereafter. Such eyewitness accounts remind us that civilians bear the brunt of every war, doubly so when repressive regimes crack down on every form of internal dissent.

Out of fear for her safety, the diarist published her journal anonymously. Throughout, she refers to individuals by their first initial; since the United States and Israel fomented war on Iran on February 28, many Iranians, when talking to Western media outlets—if they manage to circumvent the near-total internet blackout—ask that not even their initials be used. The diarist’s mother, speaking in Azeri instead of Persian, tells her that one doctor in a single hospital signed ninety-three death certificates—for men, women, and children—on the night of January 9. “My mother assumes that calls are being listened to,” the diarist writes, “and perhaps she imagines that whoever is listening cannot understand her mother tongue. My mother speaks in her mother tongue also whenever she is in mourning. ‘Biz chok jeffa chakmishik,’ she says. ‘Biz chok tahhje melatik’ (We are a people who have suffered greatly. We are a people left alone).”

Between Patronage and Rebellion

The creative disassembly of the Golestan Film Workshop, Iran’s first independent film studio

The Crown Jewels of Iran. Still courtesy of Cineteca di Bologna and IDA.

by Ruairí McCann, International Documentary Association (IDA)

In his final years, filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan considered the state of exile that began long before he permanently left Iran in 1975, stretching back as far as his youth, to be the defining characteristic of his life. This profound sense of alienation comes from the dissonance between the aspects of his home country’s history and art that he held dear and the image of Iran cultivated by those who wielded political power. 

He aimed to countermand this control through, as the writer and Golestan’s friend Abbas Milani put it, a “republic of letters.” This imaginary country is composed of the many essays, short stories, poems, and novels that Golestan wrote and published over the last eight decades. Writing was his first and last vocation, and the thoroughfare to his extraordinary work as a filmmaker. In the wake of his death in August, at the age of 101, his films were recently screened as part of the most ambitious film series of the year, Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925–1979, which ran at New York’s MoMA from October to the end of November. 

“Infrequencies”

Kamrooz Aram Breaks Down the Grid

Rather than deconstruct Western modernism or reinsert Islamic visual idioms, the artist loosens the grip of the grid.

Kamrooz Aram, “Exuberant Flâneuse” (2020), oil, oil crayon, oil stick, and wax pencil on linen (left) and detail (right). Courtesy Aruna D’Souza/Hyperallergic.

by Aruna D’Souza, Hyperallergic

Kamrooz Aram was everywhere I happened to be these early months of 2026, and I’m all the luckier for it. He exhibited at Nature Morte in Mumbai for Mumbai Art Week, is currently on view at Alexander Gray Associates in Tribeca, and makes a rich appearance — almost a mini-solo show — in the 2026 Whitney Biennial. 

Aram, born in Iran and a graduate of Columbia’s MFA program, is known for his play with the grid. It’s a project that is archeological and critical at once, as it underlies two traditions that are often understood at odds: Western modernist abstraction, on the one hand, and non-Western, and specifically Western Asian, decoration (above all, pottery and tilework) on the other. Aram’s paintings, with their gorgeous and provoking palettes (why do his colors seem so familiar and unfamiliar at once?), refuse to understand these two sources as a binary. Such a bifurcation only serves Western modernism’s insistence on self-referentiality and immanence, at the expense of other visual languages. For this painter, the organizing logic of the grid is precisely where order breaks down when it comes to understanding how line, shape, color, and arabesque relate to culture, and how cultures relate to each other.

In Mumbai, this grid was on full display, in a series of paintings that emphasized a vertical arrangement across the width of the canvas, interrupted (perhaps complicated is a better word) by curving forms that evoked both the organic (the edge of a flower petal, perhaps a limb or buttock) and the definitively non-organic (enamelwork, the inlay of precious stone in marble). The colors — reds, grays, blue-greens, midnight blues, blacks, and even yellows — likewise sit in a strange space between the natural world and the ur-natural. The problem (or pleasure) of abstraction is the way it acts as a screen for all kinds of projections on the part of the viewer, so indulge me now in my insistence that I saw in these pictures the structure, rhythm, and stylization of Henri Matisse’s “Bathers by a River” (1917), from the Art Institute of Chicago. This callback — and I’m sure this is not the only one, by far — is less a matter of influence than of recasting. It’s a reminder that Matisse’s arabesque — here and in his later abstractions and cutouts, especially — was quite literally a borrowing from Islamic decorative arts. Modernists worked their asses off to distance abstraction from the decorative, and declared ornament a crime, but not without absconding with it in the process.

“Iran After the Fire”—a Speculative Ethnography

Exhibit of a bombed classroom, in the Islamic Revolution and Holy Defense Museum in Tehran, Iran (photo Matyas Rehak). Courtesy The Markaz Review.

by Shahram Khosravi, The Markaz Review

A writer imagines Iran one year from now...

Summer 2027

1.

By the time Mr. Mardani arrives in the morning, the corridor outside his office is already occupied. Men and women sit shoulder to shoulder along the walls, waiting to be called. The guards move them in small groups. Names are checked, then checked again. Files accumulate faster than they can be processed.

The war has not ended; it has only changed form.

Before the war Mr. Mardani had planned to retire. In his mind, the future had been simple: a small house near the Caspian Sea, mornings in the garden, afternoons with his wife, the slow fading of a life spent in service. Instead, one year after the war, he works longer hours than at any point in his career.

But the officer he had served under for more than two decades was killed in the first week of the war, when an Israeli strike hit the central building of the Intelligence Organization. Mardani did not ask for the position, but neither did he refuse it. 

In the first months after the ceasefire, the priority was chasing the infiltrators. Lists circulated, names of suspected collaborators, informants, those accused of contact with foreign intelligence. Some cases were substantiated. Many were not. Confessions were recorded, and some later appeared on television. 

Later, the focus shifted. Protesters, students, those who had been visible in the streets during the final months before the Israeli and U.S. bombs began to fall. Their files were thinner, often consisting of images, fragments of social media posts. Still, the directive was clear enough. Mardani had heard it himself, delivered by the Intelligence Minister before he was killed in an overnight attack: dissent was no longer a civil matter; it was an enemy of the country and should be treated accordingly.

In “When the Div Came Home,”

Soheila Kayoud Mixes Whimsy and Macabre

The Iranian-born artist’s first solo exhibition at Andrew Rafacz uses mythological creatures to explore otherness.

Soheila Kayoud, “Divs #11,” 2025, Hand dyed wool on muslin, 19.75 x 16 in. Courtesy Newcity Art.

by Emma Riva, Newcity Art

To understand reality, Soheila Kayoud turns to the fantastical. The Iranian-born artist’s first solo exhibition, “When the Div Came Home” at Andrew Rafacz, uses mythological creatures to explore otherness. Where it can be alienating to be on the outside, Kayoud uses the div, a demon-like figure from Middle Eastern mythology, to show the whimsy in being an outsider.

Kayoud had a long career as an engineer and began formally making textile work during the pandemic. “When the Div Came Home” is the work of an artist with a lifelong love of learning and a mixture of technical skill and a vibrant imagination.

The dynamism Kayoud achieves with thread is astounding. She renders fabric as a painterly material. The divs’ bodies have vertical threads defining their figure, whereas the landscapes have swoops and long horizontal lines to create structure and composition. The works have real movement in them, even more so than some painted canvases. “Divs #11” is an impressive example of this, with the cross-legged div sitting on a glamorous chaise on a checkered floor. The sheer amount and depth of patterns is staggering—with only one material, Kayoud creates multiple planes.

Bashu, Beyzaie and the Paradox of Iranian Identity

In 1986, as the Iran – Iraq war raged on, Bahram Beyzaie completed a film that would define his career and challenge Iranian self-image for decades to come.

Bashu Gharibeh Kouchak (Bashu, the Little Stranger). 1986. Iran. Directed by Bahram Beyzaie. Courtesy Little White Lies.

by Johnny Massahi, Little White Lies

Few filmmakers have loved their country as deeply or as tenderly, as Bahram Beyzaie loved Iran. A founding father of the Iranian New Wave, Beyzaie emerged, alongside Dariush Mehrjui and Masoud Kimiai, as one of the most culturally significant directors of his generation. His films – a pick-and-mix of Persian folklore, symbolism and allegory – favoured stories of outcasts on fraught journeys toward societal acceptance. Beyzaie, himself a member of the persecuted Bahá’í faith, was able to draw on his own direct experiences of exclusionary politics to become a rare, and necessary, champion for minority resistance. Nowhere is this clearer than in his 1986 film, Bashu, the Little Stranger.

Bashu stands as a sobering antidote to Iran’s state-supported ​“Sacred Defence Cinema”, a genre of war films commissioned during the Iran-Iraq war that attempted to reframe martyrdom (particularly child martyrdom) as a divine act of nationalist self-sacrifice. Beyzaie instead turns his camera toward a tragedy of displacement, uncovering an Iran far more divided than wartime propaganda dared to acknowledge. In response, the Ministry of Culture banned Bashu from screening publicly for almost three years. ​“At that time,” Beyzaie explained in a 2025 interview, ​“any word that did not glorify the war was met with threats and was strictly forbidden.” 

When the film was finally released in 1989, it was hailed as a humanist masterpiece, with a 2018 poll of Iranian critics declaring it the greatest Iranian film ever made. Now, 40 years later, at the dawn of a new conflict, Bashu has re-emerged – thanks to a timely restoration that premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival – as an urgent and enduring work that not only explores the perennial perils of war but also the complexities of Iran’s national identity.

From the Rooftops of Tehran

We in Iran own our grief, mourning all by ourselves.

Leanne Shapton: Untitled, 2022. Courtesy The New York Review.

by Anonymous, The New York Review

For the author’s safety, the translator’s name has also been kept anonymous.

It’s the second time in a year that we in Iran have found ourselves in the middle of a war—the first was launched by Israel with US aid, the second by the two armies hand in hand. In Tehran the night sky lights up when missiles hit the ground, and we look at one another with terror. Many people have already left the city. Between these two wars the Islamic Republic, our own government, killed thousands and thousands of Iranians around the country who were protesting the rulers’ incompetence and corruption, the rising price of goods, the economy’s stagnation, and the country’s lack of social and political freedom, and who by a certain point were asking for regime change. During all three of these horrors the Internet has been all but completely shut down. (I still have highly unreliable, limited access today.) Checkpoints have been set up across cities; militia forces threaten people in the streets. This paragraph is the shortest summary possible of what we have been living through since the beginning of last summer.

As I write this, on the ninth day of the war, oil facilities have been hit and black columns of smoke have darkened the horizon, rising to the heart of the sky. I cannot tell where the sun is anymore, and I write quickly, for fear that at any moment I might be killed. Writing under such urgency demands an economy of words. If I have only a few more minutes left of my life, would the things I want to say even be considered of value? What should I put down on the page as some kind of trace of myself in this world, or as a document of our time?

To Measure the Emotions of Others

Golnar Adili’s Family Archive

Golnar Adili’s work at Smack Mellon, New York, embodies the desire to account for loss through art

Golnar Adili: To Measure the Emotions of Others, 2025 (installation view). Photo: Etienne Frossard. Courtesy Smack Mellon, New York and ArtReview.

by Louis Bury, ArtReview

‘If only one could measure the emotions of others,’ reads a letter sent from Golnar Adili’s mother in Iran to Adili’s father in the US. He was living there in exile as a result of the couple’s leftist activism in the years after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. An enlarged reproduction of the letter, printed on pink Japanese paper, hangs towards Smack Mellon’s entrance like a state document in a history museum. In the main gallery, a 15-metre sculpture, Ye Harvest From the Eleven-Page Letter–Installation (2016), attempts something like the accounting Adili’s mother pined for. Attached to a dowel scaffold that resembles a model roller-coaster support, the artist has reproduced in archival cardboard every Persian ye character, which has the shape of a swooping check mark, from a long letter her father sent – not to her mother but to his US lover. As if by repeating the Persian alphabet’s terminal letter she might close this unsettling chapter of her family history.

This delicate row of repeating characters forms the exhibition’s figurative spine, an embodiment of the futile desire to account for loss through art. Ye Harvest… gives architectural form to text culled from the artist’s extensive, ongoing archive of family letters dating back to 1981, creating a kind of concrete poetry that renders script as sculptural gesture. Other text works in the show incorporate similar poetic techniques: the rumpled transfer print on Japanese paper, When All the Tears Filter Through the Forest of Alef and Collect in My Ocean of Ye (2016), for example, reproduces all the vertical alef characters (the first letter of the Persian alphabet) from the same love letter, the accumulation of which resembles a prisoner’s tally marks. Eleven-Page Letter Redaction (2016) emphasises disappearance, superimposing a sheet of paper, with apertures cut out, over a copy of the letter, to reveal glimpses of Persian words that use the ye character, with English translations of those words handwritten on the cover sheet.

All of You

Installation view: Andisheh Avini: All of You at Martos Gallery, New York, 2026. Courtesy Martos Gallery, Steven Probert Studio and The Brooklyn Rail.

by Ekin Erkan, The Brooklyn Rail

Iranian-American artist Andisheh Avini’s All of You consists of printed postcards, blown glass, steel sculptures, found objects, and sound as one immersive installation. To varying degrees, each of the works draws on Iranian/Persian leitmotifs as recollected by the artist. The structures are endowed with a mediated sense of cultural-historical remembrance as the assemblages, with their various connotations to Persian mythos, architecture, and decorative art history, are filtered through Avini’s episodic memory. Ultimately, it is less so Avini’s remembering that us viewers are able to participate in, foreclosed as we are to his phenomenology and biographical history; rather, the works’ strength is in their reconciling well-examined symbolic folk traditions.

There are several constituent series within the show, each of which requires cultural-anthropological explication to properly appreciate. That is, one should not be overly taken by the presence of twelve postcards, some of which depict Avini’s works and others which provide photographic glances of various Tehran semblances. For, while we are admittedly in the grips of Avini’s nostalgia here, there are also strictly sociological referents that have fixed reference. Without possessing a command of the latter, one is left spinning in the wheels of sheer aesthetics—delighting in the installed marquetry spines and glass organs by misinterpreting them as merely colorful delights. This is, however, to improperly retrofit formalism on Avini’s more layered art practice.

Iranian Artist Highlights The Long Resistance

At Ball and Socket Arts.

Mahsa Attaran, Sweep It Under the Rug. Courtesy Midbrow. 

by Brian Slattery, Midbrow

Mahsa Attaran's I Still Can See can seem at first like the latest piece in a long lineage of artists putting household objects on a gallery wall — pipes, bananas — and declaring them to be art. Attaran echoes that move, but adds a twist. Perhaps the grater first catches the eye, because the face on that one is the most visible, even if the face itself is half-covered. Then the other faces emerge on each of the other implements. The nod to the hiddenness of the work women do in the kitchen is on the surface. But it also matters where those faces are. On the grater, the face is where the most friction is. On the pan, the face is to the flames. There's violence there, too, oppression, difficulty.

I Still Can See, Attaran writes, is about transforming the objects "into potent symbols that expose the hidden struggles of women. By recontextualizing these familiar items, the work challenges the societal expectation that confines women to domestic roles, revealing how internalized oppression is woven into everyday life. It highlights the unsettling duality of the home: while it is traditionally seen as a sanctuary, for many women it can be a site of danger and threat, where the very spaces meant to nurture become arenas for control and violence. The work also addresses the harsh reality that many women are killed annually by male family members, often under the guise of preserving modesty or asserting ownership over women. This juxtaposition forces viewers to confront the complex interplay between domesticity and violence, urging a reexamination of the power dynamics that shape everyday life."

Silence Spoken and a Cry in the Dark:

Bani Khoshnoudi at the Vanishing Point

A director considers stills from her latest film as sources of infinite mourning for Iran’s past—and collective hope for its future.

A still from Noghteh-e-Goriz (The Vanishing Point). 2025. Iran/USA/France. Courtesy Bani Khoshnoudi.

by Bani Khoshnoudi, MoMA Magazine

Filmmaker and artist Bani Khoshnoudi was born in Tehran and emigrated to the United States as a child during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Beginning in the late 1990s, she returned to Iran regularly to see family and make films, which explore themes of daily life under the Iranian regime and a long-running resistance. After her film about the 2009 Green Movement was banned by the Lebanese government, who called it an affront to the Iranian regime, she was permanently exiled from the country of her birth; today she resides in Mexico and France.

In her newest film, The Vanishing Point, which screens in MoMA’s Doc Fortnight festival on March 6 and 7, the artist delves into her family history through archives and years of diaristic filming in her home country, connecting the lasting effects of state violence that impacted her own family with present-day protest movements. In this personal essay, Khoshnoudi reflects on the “vanishing point” from which her work emerged, and reckons with the past from an uncertain present. —Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator, Department of Film

*******

When I packed the last boxes of objects left in my grandparents’ home in Tehran, I did not know when I would see them again. Exactly 10 years later, when they finally reached me in Europe, I discovered what had seemed important for me to keep. While packing, I didn’t quite know why I should keep these particular objects or how I would use them later. I only knew that for some reason I had to. What I kept, besides family photo albums, was a small selection of what surrounded me in the last house I inhabited in Tehran: everyday objects, things from a distant past, and others that I had meticulously collected over the years. Paraphernalia attesting to a time that would soon disappear, at least for me. It was the last time I would walk down those streets.

Artist invites public to tune out to tune in, as part of new local exhibition

Artist Abbas Zahedi on his new artist residency at the Stanley Picker Gallery

Photo credit: Valentina Vinciarelli. Courtesy Kingston Courier.

by Valentina Vinciarelli, Kingston Courier

There is some art which can only be appreciated through meticulous focus. Think Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose paintings are saturated with masterly minutiae. However, there is other art which can only be appreciated through a surrender of rational scrutiny; art which exists in the blur of an unfocused eye. The artwork by London-based British Iranian artist Abbas Zahedi is of this brilliant second kind. 

Zahedi’s work is often described as an inquiry into “dissociative realism”. He achieves this through an interdisciplinary approach which appeals simultaneously to numerous senses – sight and hearing – to allow the artworks, and himself, to hover between the realms of reality and dissociation. 

“In my own practice, I’m quite interested in this role of dissociation,” said Zahedi, whose latest sonic work is currently exhibited at the Stanley Picker Gallery. “I noticed that when I’m in this dissociated condition, I kind of lose touch with the world, with my body, the surroundings, but somehow the sounds still carry through.” 

Composed of chromed forms with trumpet-like endings, Zahedi’s new installations stretch vertically and horizontally within the gallery space. Low, resonant tones echo around the room. It remains intentionally unclear whether the sound is produced by the sculptures or by the space they occupy. As a result, the distinction between interior and exterior begins to blur.

90 Works by Ardeshir Mohassess

LACMA’s New Acquisition

Ardeshir Mohassess, Census 1, 1986, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Ardeshir Babaknia, M.D., M.2026.24, © Estate of Ardeshir Mohassess, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA, by Sarah Newby. Courtesy LACMA Unframed.

Art of the Middle East Department, LACMA Unframed

LACMA has recently received a landmark gift of 90 works by Ardeshir Mohassess, significantly expanding the museum’s modern and contemporary Iranian art collection and positioning LACMA as the leading international repository of the artist’s work. Created between the 1950s and the 1990s, these drawings and watercolors span transformative decades in Iran, observed by Mohassess first from within the country and later from the diaspora. They document the final years of the Pahlavi regime (1925–1979), critique its rushed modernization and expanding bureaucracy, and ultimately bear witness to the authoritarian forces surrounding the 1979 Revolution and the repressive years that followed under the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Colour Me Beautiful

Fierce and political, ‘The Chromophiliacs’ explodes like a paint factory demolition. And it’s glorious.

Moozhan Ahmadzadegan, Ruth Paul’s Drag Race: Iran, 2025, UV screen print. Courtesy of the artist and The Tyee.

by Dorothy Woodend, The Tyee

The Pantone 2026 colour of the year is a whiter-than-white shade called Cloud Dancer. When the colour was revealed at the end of 2025, universal derision popped up across the internet as pundits rolled their eyes and hooted about the tone-deaf — or, maybe more correctly, colour-blind — choice.

The idea that colour is political isn’t new, but in the year 2026 it’s taken on even greater resonance.

The controversy over Cloud Dancer did not come as a surprise to Zoë Chan, curator for the Richmond Art Gallery’s new exhibition The Chromophiliacs.

The exhibition derives its title from David Batchelor’s Chromophobia. Published in 2000, the book addressed the fear of colour in western culture. The manifestations of this are myriad.

The idea that white, grey and beige are synonymous with good taste is everywhere, from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop empire to the so-called quiet luxury of fashion houses like the Row.

Absence, restraint and minimalism are still regarded as high culture, whereas colour is tarred with associations of gaudiness, cheapness and lower culture, Chan explains.

In his book, Batchelor makes the case that this extinguishment serves a couple of different functions: “In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body — usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic.”

Islamic Art, Rewritten, The Modern Islamic Artists Reshaping Contemporary Culture

Maha Malluh, Food for Thought 'Al-Muallaqat', 2014. Courtesy the artist and A&E Magazine.

by Nour Jarmakani, A&E Magazine

Modern Islamic artists are redefining how cultural heritage operates within contemporary art. Rather than preserving tradition as static history, they engage with Islamic visual language as a dynamic system, capable of responding to questions of identity, memory, power, and modern life. Across the Middle East and its global diasporas, these artists draw from calligraphy, geometry, repetition, and abstraction not as symbols of the past, but as tools for shaping new cultural narratives that resonate far beyond regional boundaries.

The foundations of Islamic art, such as geometry, calligraphy, repetition, and abstraction, remain central, yet their meaning has expanded. Where these elements once served primarily spiritual and architectural purposes, today they are tools for exploring identity, memory, and modern life. In studios across Dubai, Beirut, Doha, and Riyadh, artists draw on these forms not as fixed symbols, but as flexible systems capable of expressing both continuity and change.

Calligraphy, in particular, has taken on renewed relevance. Contemporary practitioners often push Arabic script beyond legibility, allowing it to function as form and rhythm rather than text alone. The Tunisian-French artist eL Seed exemplifies this shift, merging classical calligraphy with the scale and immediacy of street art. His monumental works—found across the Arab world and beyond—transform language into a visual experience, challenging perceptions of Arabic culture while preserving its poetic essence.

For Hearts in Exile,

at Summerhall Arts Edinburgh

Taraneh Dana, A Heart in Exile, 2025, stoneware, glaze. Courtesy Summerhall Arts.  

by Omur Sahin Keyif, Artmag

Summerhall Arts is hosting four solo exhibitions in its galleries by artists whose work calls for social, political, environmental, or cultural change, presented under the theme of CATALYST: Art as Activism.

Scottish multidisciplinary artist Eilidh Appletree’s sculptural installation addresses the great contradiction of the global capitalist economy: with its industrial agriculture and aquaculture techniques for maximising profit, often described as ‘efficient’, it’s driving biodiversity loss. What Eilidh emphasises with her artworks is that animal life is interconnected with human life; an end to one means an end to the other.

As you walk into the room, a tall sculpture made of woven steel wire greets you. The resemblance to fishermen’s nets and the fish-like form of the sculpture together reminds us of the reality of ‘bycatch’ in industrial fishing, and Appletree connects these nets with the lives being taken by industrial fishing.

Every year, millions of sea animals die as an unintended capture in industrial fishing methods. These animals, which are thrown dead into the sea, are represented in the exhibition by the striking artwork Mother and Baby. Two fish-like forms, woven from steel wires, remain side by side: the baby was caught as a bycatch in the net – we can see the baby’s flesh. The surface on top of the wire net is completely dry, while the wall surface has been deliberately kept moist, under transparent plastic.

Who Can I Dance With?

From sneaking into underground basements in Tehran [...] to learning to dance with almost no words in Northern California, I had done everything I could.

“Dancing Couple (Tanzpaar)”, by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Courtesy Guernica.

by Arash Dabestani, Guernica

After the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the rise of Islamists under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini, dancing and singing were banned by his decree. People were divided: Khomeini’s supporters believed they could see the Ayatollah’s image on the moon, while others, by contrast, were captivated by Michael Jackson’s invention of the moonwalk.

All the dance clubs were repurposed after the revolution. One former Tehranian nightclub and restaurant-bar, Chattanooga, was well-known and featured in many films. But after the revolution, it became a storage place; its doors and walls all plastered over, it was now filled from floor to ceiling with cables and wires. This was my workplace for years. I would walk through tangled spools to the back of the hall, where I’d sit in a small room behind a computer, doing accounting for the company that sold the wires around me. There was no sign of music, and no sign of dancers. The only smells were of plastic and dust.

Tape players existed with the justification that they were for listening to the Quran or religious prayers. The Hezbollahi—religious vigilantes who acted as moral enforcers—would set up checkpoints on the streets and ask to pop the trunks of vehicles to look for good speakers or sound systems. It was easier than checking inside houses. If someone had a tape player that was clearly high quality—suggesting it could play non-religious music—they would stab its surface with knives.

In order to stay safe, families who didn’t align with the government would hang up thick curtains during their parties, so the insides of their homes couldn’t be seen by the Hezbollahi. They would nail rugs to the walls so the sound wouldn’t escape. One or two people would be stationed outside the garden or house to warn others if any officers showed up. There was always an older sober person at the party keeping watch, ready to pay off the authorities if needed so the gathering could go on unhindered. Others were in charge of hiding alcoholic drinks—possession of which could lead to lashes or imprisonment.