Maryam Tafakory’s Haunted Iranian Cinema

Maryam Tafakory, راز دل Razeh-del (still), 2024, DCP 2K, colour, 28 min. Courtesy the artist and ArtReview.

by Gelare Khoshgozaran, ArtReview

What makes the experience of watching Tafakory’s avant-garde films so paralysing?

Maryam Tafakory is part of a new generation of Iranian filmmakers who engage the politics of memory through essay-films and experimental cinema. The London-based Iranian artist’s work consists, almost entirely, of archival footage and the meticulous rearrangement of cinematic fragments selected from hundreds of Iranian films made after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Sourced primarily from her personal archive and YouTube, the dissected and reassembled scenes from the movies are later overlaid with anachronistic sounds from the original audio, or deftly scored by contemporary composers (such as Canadian Sarah Davachi in Tafakory’s 2023 film, مست دل Mast-del).

Tafakory employs a queer feminist gaze to emphasise the Iranian government’s codes of modesty and censorship while simultaneously critiquing the limitations of Western feminist film theory – most notably notions of voyeurism that have been prominent since Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. One of the scenes that best captures this juxtaposition, which Tafakory makes use of in نظربازی Nazarbazi (2022) and مست دل Mast-del, is of the blindfolded soldier in Kamal Tabrizi’s شیدا Sheida. In the 1999 film, an Iran–Iraq War veteran who has temporarily lost his eyesight falls in love with the voice of his nurse Sheida, who awkwardly recites the Quran to him to alleviate his pain and PTSD nightmares: a sinless love affair between a man and a woman in the absence of vision.

Iranian Women Exhibiting Animated Art

Common misconceptions about Iran have prompted two curators to start their new exhibition ‘Iranian Women in Animation’ in Museum Arnhem. This collection confronts the audience with the difficult situation in Iran whilst accentuating and deepening their conceptions of Iranian culture. This exhibition tells various stories of Iranian women with the help of many impressive animations.

Courtesy Museum Arnhem.

by Jet Bierkens & Victor Rikmenspoel, ANS 

The ‘Iranian Women in Animation’ exhibition, curated by Narjes Mohammadi and Nahid Malayeri, contains ten animations that show a manifold of facets and stories, demonstrating the persistence and colourful diversity among Iranian artists. Every animation displays a different personal story that artistically tackles difficult topics, such as domestic violence, dress codes in school and forbidden love. Moreover, the short films, displayed in the white office-like room, contain various styles and subgenres of animation. This allows the viewer to immerse themselves in the world and experiences of Iranian women.

Drawing Freedom:

 Marjane Satrapi and The Voices of  Revolution Through Art and Storytelling

 Courtesy Center For Iranian Diaspora Studies.

by Bahar Momeni, Center For Iranian Diaspora Studies

She throws the paper airplane she had been making while we discuss the interview logistics, saying, “I always make paper airplanes while talking.” The airplane gently flies out of the frame. Relieved, she lights a cigarette and looks at the monitor with bright, curious eyes. “Alright, now I will concentrate. Let’s get started!” she says as she grins. It’s no surprise that this is how the interview begins with Marjane Satrapi, the celebrated Iranian-born French graphic novelist, filmmaker, artist, and one of the most recognized figures within the global Iranian diaspora. Her playful, honest, and adventurously creative spirit is best exemplified in her graphic memoir Persepolis (Pantheon 2003, 2004), which garnered international acclaim for its powerful and compelling depiction of life during and after the 1979 Revolution in Iran. While she’s done so many exciting projects since, this book is what put her style and her vision on the global literary map.

Persepolis (Pantheon). Courtesy Center For Iranian Diaspora Studies.

“Persepolis helped readers understand what’s happened in Iran. I believe graphic novels are such an impactful genre for making this information accessible. Because, even before the alphabet, drawing and painting, it was how humans communicated,” Satrapi says.

Persepolis marked the start of Marjane Satrapi’s influential career in graphic novels, setting the stage for subsequent graphic works such as Embroideries (Pantheon, 2005), Chicken with Plums (Pantheon, 2006), Monsters Are Afraid of the Moon (Bloomsbury, 2006), and The Sigh (Archaia, 2011). Following the immense success of the film adaptation of Persepolis in 2007, Satrapi shifted her focus to filmmaking. Her second feature film, an adaptation of Chicken with Plums in 2011, was another successful collaboration with French filmmaker Vincent Paronnaud. Satrapi’s cinematic journey continued with films such as Gang of the Jotas (2012), The Voices (2014), Radioactive (2019), and her most recent feature, Dear Paris  (2024), exhibiting her versatility and creative evolution across different mediums. After spending recent years focused on filmmaking, Satrapi has returned to her cherished genre, comics, with her latest work, Woman, Life, Freedom. 

‘Everything can just be what it is’:

The liberated art of Nairy Baghramian

The Iran-born sculptor’s colourful new London show continues her practice of playing with convention and collaboration

‘A political experience of a space’ … Misfits by Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman Gallery Paris, 2021. Photograph: Rebecca Fanuele. Courtesy The Guardian.

by Dale Berning Sawa, The Guardian

In 2005 or 2006, Nairy Baghramian arrived for a site visit at Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland to find the pioneering artist Gustav Metzger was there, too. He was scheduled to do a show before her and was walking around the imposing space with the director Adam Szymczyk, when he suddenly became excited at a temporary wall that had been erected. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed. “I’m very happy that this is built in now. Otherwise it would be a totally fascist building, it’s huge. I love this unterbrechung”.

An unterbrechung is an interruption or an intermission. Metzger, the Jewish artist and activist who fled to the UK from Nazi Germany as a child in 1939, found the idea of disrupting this example of monumental neoclassical architecture to be politically potent. Baghramian would go on to base her whole show on that sentence. She left most of the space empty, arranging just a few pieces around that wall.

At first Szymczyk questioned the decision: “Do you know how big the space is and you only have these works?” he asked. But she insisted that Metzger’s neat summation of “a political experience of a space and also an architectural experience” was the only prompt she needed.

Baghramian is always looking for openings. For ways of letting the outside in. She was born in Isfahan, Iran, in 1971, and after the revolution fled to Berlin with her family in 1984. She has been exhibiting since the late 1990s, but it was taking part in the once-a-decade Münster Sculpture Project in 2007 that pushed her firmly into the spotlight.

From the outset, she has made her playful, deliciously tactile work in a constant back and forth between photography and sculpture. In her latest show, portraits of a young child sit alongside sculpted elements in stone and metal. It stops her from getting stuck on any one idea: “It keeps my artistic dominance in check, so that nothing becomes too tight and everything can just be what it is.”

Report Details Persistent Persecution of Iranian Artists

Courtesy Artistic Freedom Initiative

DOWLOAD THE REPORT HERE

by Anna Lentchner, ArtAsiaPacific

A new 100-page report by the American advocacy groups Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI) and Voices Unbound (VU), in partnership with Berkley Law, details how Iranian artists have been systematically targeted in the aftermath of the “Women Life Freedom” movement in 2022, during which time Iranian security forces are believed to have killed more than 500 protestors and arrested more than 19,000.

Titled “I Create; I Resist: Iranian Artists on the Frontline of Social Change,” the report was released on September 10, ahead of the two-year anniversary of Mahsa Jina Amini’s death in Tehran in September 2022. Arrested for wearing an “improper hijab” and later dying in morality-police custody, Amini became a symbol of female oppression and persecution, with demonstrations in her memory ensuing across Iran and worldwide. Iranian cultural figures in the region and the diaspora were particularly active, and graphics, songs, drawings, photographs, and videos—dozens of which are featured in the report—became essential to the movement’s dissemination and sustenance.

According to the AFI’s and the VU’s research, the Iranian regime ramped up its suppression of cultural figures after September 2022, “including through online surveillance, the creation of celebrity task forces, issuing work bans, and threatening legal action.” The report features interviews with several visual artists who fled persecution before or during this time, such as multidisciplinary artists Jinoos Taghizadeh, who remains in exile in Canada, and Nazanin Noroozi, who has been in the United States since 2012 and fears returning to Iran. Noroozi’s mixed-media collages, which appear to integrate photographs of the 2022 protests, are featured on the cover of “I Create; I Resist,” as well as beside its chapter title pages.

Mirza Hamid, the ‘Banksy of Iran’

Image courtesy of UP MAG. 

by Maura Rosner, UP MAG 

Within the city of Tehran, there is an anonymous street artist The Tehran-based Street muralist who goes by the pseudonym Mirza Hamid. To locals, he is known as the “The Banksy of Iran.” in his home country, where his work is well known. Hamid’s identity is unknown. Hamid’s captivating street paintings depict mostly monochromatic conceptual figures painted with red earth pigment, reminiscent of ancient cave paintings. The photographs of these street murals in Tehran (including some that no longer exist because they were painted over by the city) were taken by Morvarid Khalilzad, whose images are works of art themselves. I recently spoke with Hamid, in a first ever interview. He explained that he uses red earth because it is the first pigment that humans used. It can be found in ancient Persian pottery, in paintings in the Grand Canyon and on Egyptian mummies, where it symbolizes life after death. For him, it is the color of humanity. All of humanity is battling the same red-hued sense of estrangement and exile, he said.

Sometimes Hamid finds unmarked walls on busy streets, in ruins, even on government buildings. After painting, a new story begins for that wall, he said. Once, he painted three murals on one of Tehran’s water department’s walls. All three were painted over the next day, but Hamid received a direct message on Instagram that said, “This is the security guard at the water department, I just wanted to say I did everything I could but was not able to convince my colleagues not to cover your paintings, I’m sorry.” Hamid said this was a particularly meaningful moment.

Tehrangeles

Tehrangeles by Porochista Khakpour

New York. Pantheon Books. 2024. 308 pages.

Interview by Basmah Sakrani, CRAFT

In a writing workshop during my undergraduate years in Pakistan, we were asked to share our favorite books and why we liked them. I talked about Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, and the author’s masterful depiction of diaspora stories, the quiet moments of reckoning about identity and home. And though it’s been nearly fifteen years, the negative reaction of another student has stayed with me. I was met with condescension and derision, classification of South-Asian literature in English by writers living outside of South Asia as “ethnic lit” and “diaspora lit.” There was discussion about how this type of writing did not reflect the true realities of South Asianness and was over-the-top with mentions of mango and monsoons. At the time, I did not possess the clarity of thought to argue back, to posit that the diaspora experience was an indelible part of the South-Asian experience, to assert that literature which illustrated the nuances of those who moved away was as relevant as literature about the ones who stayed. But I believed it deep down, and over the years, that belief has strengthened.

As I read Porochista Khakpour’s Tehrangeles, I thought about that classroom interaction again and again—it made me want to travel back in time and hold up Tehrangeles as proof of diaspora stories that are rich and full and funny and relatable. With the Milanis, Khakpour has created a family of Iranian-American characters who are flawed yet appealing, their imperfections making them as accessible as our own family members. In Roxanna’s hubris and Violet’s irrational sweet tooth, I saw myself. In Haylee’s gullibility, I recognized my fourteen-year-old niece. In Mina’s dedication to justice, I met my sister. In Homa’s retreat away from her boisterous family, I thought of my mother.

“I love the idea that people can change,” Khakpour tells me in this interview, “and I believe in it.” That is her lasting message to her readers, an infectious one that makes me want to believe that the student who decried diaspora fiction all those years ago now understands its importance in the literary canon—one that Khakpour has enriched with this delightful novel.

***

Iranian artist opens Leeds show exploring disability and migration

Paralympian Mohammad Barrangi hopes his work will help people think of human stories behind headlines about migration

Barrangi’s work has a lighthouse motif at its centre, a nod to John Smeaton who is regarded as the father of civil engineering. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian. Courtesy The Guardian. 

by Mark Brown, The Guardian

A decade ago, the artist Mohammad Barrangi was representing Iran as a Paralympic sprinter and was ridiculously speedy. “My best time for the 100 metres was 10.72 seconds, in Tunisia,” he says with understandable pride. “I have friends who don’t believe I’m an artist.”

Barrangi is speaking to the Guardian precisely because he is an artist, about to open a major show in Leeds that shines light on his remarkable story of turning what may seem like adversity into endless possibility.

The show tells a fantastical story of a girl called Lily who sails in a small boat from Anzali, a city on the Caspian Sea in northern Iran, to England.

In his art, Barrangi is also telling a story about himself and his lived experience, exploring themes of disability and migration.

“The Grandest Orphan Cinema”:

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

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

Interview by René Baharmast in Festivals & Events, Filmmaker Magazine 

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Artdaily.cc

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

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

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

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

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