'It will rock your house!' Inside the Iranian electronic underground

Ten years ago, electronic music in Iran was suppressed by the government. But now these strange, often punishing sounds are finding their way into the world

‘It feels really good to be part of this family’ ... Rojin Sharafi. Photograph: Igor Ripak. Courtesy the Guardian.

by Alastair Shuttleworth, The Guardian

Ten years ago Bahman Ghobadi’s film No One Knows About Persian Cats followed a young Iranian songwriting duo’s efforts to form a band with other underground musicians in Iran. It presented a country in which music deemed politically or culturally incendiary was prohibited, since artists hoping to perform or distribute their work had to acquire permission from the Iranian ministry of culture and Islamic guidance, or risk arrest.

Western journalists seized upon a narrative of sensitive outlaws holed up in underground studios, but today a new story is emerging: of a visionary music community now able to openly share its strange creations. Increasingly, Iran is becoming recognised as a hub for some of the world’s most vital, forward-thinking experimental music.

Its affable prime mover is Ata Ebtekar, a long-celebrated figure in electronic music under his alias Sote, meaning “sound” in Farsi. His last album, 2017’s Sacred Horror in Design, received widespread acclaim for its haunting, challenging fusion of electronics with Iranian classical music; this year he will release a new electroacoustic album entitled Parallel Persia, led by the breathtaking single Artificial Neutrality.

'No to war': Middle East musicians collaborate on a 'peace album'

Iranian musician Mehdi Rajabian brings together artists from the region to promote 'resilience, hope and empathy'.

In Iran, Rajabian is barred from releasing any music or leaving the country over security-related charges. Famous photographer Reza Deghati's photo was used for the cover of the album. Courtesy Al Jazeera.

by Al Jazeera

Nearly 100 musicians from across the Middle East have collaborated for an album put together by Iranian musician Mehdi Rajabian to promote peace in the embattled region.

The album, titled "Middle Eastern", consists of songs played by artists from Iran, Turkey, Yemen, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Oman, Egypt and Bahrain along with some musicians from Azerbaijan and Tajikistan.

"We have tried to use local instruments in the album because our priority was to highlight the native tunes of the Middle East," Rajabian, 29, told Al Jazeera.

"For my research on Middle East music, I had been in touch with musicians from all over the region. I discussed the idea of an album with many of them and they showed a lot of interest."

Some musicians who participated in the project came from places ravaged by years of wars and conflict, mainly Palestine, Yemen and Syria.

Most songs in the album, released on Friday by the Sony Music company, have been written by the artists themselves and produced by Rajabian.

Rajabian said one of the tracks was recorded while the air attacks were on. He refused to speak further about the details of the track, the artist involved or the location where it was recorded.

A musician, he added, took part in the project while grappling with "extreme poverty" while another tune was "recorded on a boat by a fleeing refugee".

Artist accuses Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art of selling off works at a premium

Rokni Haerizadeh sold his work to the museum at a reduced rate before it was auctioned without his permission

Haerizadeh’s N Vel Ab 2 (2002-03) was auctioned in Tehran on 12 January and sold for 3.6m rials ($86,680) Tehran Auction. Courtesy of the artist and The Art Newspaper.

by Gareth Harris, The Art Newspaper

A growing number of artists claim that their works in the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) have gone “missing” and may have ended up on the market without their knowledge. Rokni Haerizadeh, who was born in Iran and is now part of an artist collective in Dubai, has accused TMoCA of buying one of his paintings at a reduced rate and then selling it at a premium. Haerizadeh says his canvas, N Vel Ab 2 (2002-03) was consigned to Tehran Auction, selling on 12 January for 3.6 million rials ($86,680), a sum significantly over the price at which it was acquired.

Meanwhile, the Tehran-based artist Barbad Golshiri fears that his work in the TMoCA collection, Bahram Doesn’t see a Right Wing (2003), may have also been disposed of. “TMoCA confirmed that my work is indeed in the collection, yet when I ask them to say this in writing, they turn tail. I no longer have any motivation to find my work. That piece was about my own death. I consider it dead. It is as if it never existed,” he says.

The big picture: a surreal scene in the Iranian desert

Gohar Dashti’s take on the aftermath of the Iran‑Iraq war captures her nation’s ongoing sense of trauma

Untitled, from Gohar Dashti’s series Stateless, 2014-15. Photograph: © Gohar Dashti, courtesy the artist and the Guardian.

by Tim Adams, The Guardian

The photographer Gohar Dashti was born in 1980 in Ahvaz, a city in south-west Iran, near the border with Iraq. For the first 10 years of her life, her home was a battlefield in the brutal war between the neighbouring states. She spent many childhood nights in an air-raid shelter and she looked on as the place that was all she knew was reduced to rubble. Dashti’s work has always focused on the legacy of conflict, a fallout that continues around Ahvaz both physically – the rivers are poisoned, the wheat fields barren – and psychologically.

From her earliest work a decade ago, Dashti has approached this post-conflict history not as a documentary photographer, but as a conceptual artist. She grew sick, she has said, of foreign photojournalism – women in chadors brandishing machine guns. Instead, she wanted to use her pictures to locate the more intractable insecurity that she recognised all around her. She started staging pictures that juxtaposed the expectations of normal life events – celebrations of weddings or birthdays – with the ever-present detritus of war.

5 Photographers Show What It’s Like to Be a Young Iranian Today

Labkhand Olfatmanesh and Gazelle Samizay, Bepar, 2018. Courtesy of the artists and Artsy.

by Jacqui Palumbo, Artsy

What is like to grow up as an Iranian today? The third edition of Focus Iran, a biennial exhibition presented by the Iranian arts-and-culture nonprofit Farhang Foundation, hopes to provide an answer through photography and video that explore contemporary Iranian youth culture.

The juried show—selected by Iranian photographers, filmmakers, and curators such as Babak Tafreshi, who shoots for the likes of National Geographic, and documentarian Maryam Zandi—features works by more than 40 image-makers and runs through May 12th at Los Angeles’s Craft & Folk Art Museum.

Here, six of the exhibiting photographers (two of whom work as pairs) share the backstories of their works.

Iranian artists revisit their relationship to a contested past

London's Mosaic Rooms showcases the work of Iran’s current generation of artists and writers

Visitors watch The Fabulous Life and Thought of Ahmad Fardid (2015), a film by Hamed Yousefi with Ali Miresepassi, at the Mosaic Rooms. Photo by Andy Stagg. Courtesy Mosaic Rooms and Middle East Eye.

by Sahar Esfandiari, Middle East Eye

This month marks 40 years since the Iranian revolution, an anniversary which has prompted many to turn their attention to Iran and discuss historical events and current realities.

Spanning over two floors of London gallery The Mosaic Rooms, When Legacies Become Debts is a group exhibition of contemporary Iranian artists revisiting their relationships to a recent, tumultuous past.

“The exhibition is about the personal bonds between two generations of artists and writers, and coming to terms with the desirable, but also confusing and problematic legacies of a generation who were involved in the Iranian revolution in 1979,” says Iran-based curator Azar Mahmoudian, who is an independent arts educator in Tehran.

The older generation of artists were “situated in a network of other struggles happening at the time, from independence movements to struggles against colonialism, gender inequalities and racism," she adds.

"It is an attempt to understand how we ended up in the current state of culture in the country, while refraining from producing an isolated narrative, and go beyond the 'Iranian–ness' of this situation."