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.”