Hannah Darabi wins the Prix Elysée

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

© Hannah Darabi. Courtesy 1854 | British Journal of Photography

by Simon Bainbridge, 1854 | British Journal of Photography

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

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

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

The geometry of memory: Persian patterns and diasporic identity

Nazila Keshavarz uses felt to reconnect with her Persian roots

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

Garland Magazine

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

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

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

Andy Warhol in Iran

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

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

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

by Ravelle Brickman, DC Theater Arts

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

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

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

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

Censorship into art:

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

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

by Habib Moghimi, The Conversation 

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

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

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