Dialogical Narratives

at Elizabeth Moss Gallery

Samira Abbassy, Nocturnal Bird Spirit, Collage, acrylic, gouache on board, 11 x 14 in, 27.9 x 35.6 cm. Courtesy the artist, Elizabeth Moss Gallery and Whitehot Magazine.

by Noah Becker, Whitehot Magazine

Samira Abbassy was born in Ahwaz, Iran in 1965. When she was a child, her family moved to London. Her early days—settling into new surrounds—would be deeply influential on her poetic, symbolic and surreal paintings. She graduated from Canterbury College of Art, and started showing her works in London. At this early stage of her career, she already had a distinctive style.

It was in 1998 that Abbassy decided to tackle the monolith that is New York. During this phase of her career the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and the EFA Studio Center were both developed with her assistance. This gave her a foothold in the upper echelons of the New York art world.

Major museums came calling—the Metropolitan, the British Museum—her works were internationally collected.  Abbassy’s paintings fit into the canon of art history with museum artists like Paul Klee, Odilon Redon, Theodore Gercault and Jacob Lawrence. These are quiet artists who prefer to immerse viewers in color and unlock private spaces full of symbolism and mystery. Her latest exhibition at Elizabeth Moss Gallery invites us into that world.

The influence of 19th century Qajar Court paintings has played a big role in her work for over 30 years but Abbassy also has European aspects to her style—images of figures and animals caught in symbolic transformation.

Review: Desolation

Hossein Asgari’s Desolation speaks powerfully of the destructiveness of war and the hope that lies in fiction

Daniel Handl/Pexels. Courtesy The Conversation. 

by Michelle Hamadache, The Conversation

Hossein Asgari’s Desolation tells the story of Amin, an Iranian man whose life and family are shattered when the USS Vincennes shoots down an Iranian passenger plane in 1988.

The plane was carrying 290 passengers as well as crew, all of whom were killed. Among the dead was Amin’s older brother Hamid, a gifted mathematician, who was travelling to an interview to enter a prestigious US university. Grief transforms Amin and his family; their lives are irrevocably shaped and reshaped in its wake.

In some respects, Desolation is a war story. The novel explores the far-reaching effects of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, US meddling and violence in the Middle East, and the “war on terror”. It boldly reimagines the events leading up to September 11 2001.

The tragedy of the downed plane coincides with the discovery of teenage Amin’s innocent yet forbidden romance with the girl across the road, the lively and sophisticated Parvaneh, whose family moved nearly 1,000 kilometres from Tehran to Mashad to escape Iraqi missile attacks. Amin is seen sneaking out of the house by a neighbour. Under the theocracy of Ruhollah Khomeini, Amin’s transgression risks flogging, but his secret courtship ends without punishment, in deference to the family’s loss and the shocking way Hamid died.

A man from Shiraz bares his scars:

Shayan Sajadian’s best photograph

‘Censorship in Iran is pervasive. The state is unwilling to allow an honest portrayal of public life. I focus on the overlooked’

I met Ali in an alleyway. We connected and he agreed to be photographed’ … Shayan Sajadian’s best photograph. Photograph: Shayan Sajadian. Courtesy The Guardian.

by Chris Broughton, The Guardian 

Shiraz, my home town, is widely known as the city of Hafez and Saadi – two of Iran’s greatest poets. It is celebrated for its poetry, wine, and the scent of orange blossoms. But beneath this beauty lies a darker reality that I feel compelled to expose through my lens.

I was born into a middle-class family, and grew up quite isolated from the outside world. My grandfather had been addicted to drugs and alcohol, and my mother’s childhood was often filled with conflict and violence. Her deep-seated fear of harmful people and bad influences led her to become extremely distrustful of others, and she built a metaphorical wall around us. Despite financial difficulties, my parents made an effort to raise us in a more affluent area. I had almost no real understanding of Shiraz or its people and only started exploring its older, historical districts after returning from university.

I was studying architecture and bought a camera for my coursework. One day, while photographing the southern parts of the city, I came across a neighbourhood filled with homeless people and drug-users. The scene was strange and shocking and deeply affected me. From then on, I frequently visited the area with my camera. Initially, I focused on individuals dealing with addiction – those who are often abandoned by their families, society and the state. In Iran, heroin and crystal meth are among the most commonly abused substances, and addiction rates are rising. I also became acquainted with drug-dealers and criminals, which allowed me to document their lives, too.

‘I painted so prison wouldn’t swallow us whole’:

An interview with Iranian journalist Vida Rabbani

‘When space and materials are scarce, your mind does the work of finding freedom’

Vida Rabbani, ‘Sit-In in the Rain,’ 2024. Acrylic on bedsheet fabric, 50 x 70 cm (19.6 x 27.5 in). Photo courtesy of the artist and Global Voices. 

by Omid Memarian, Global Voices

Inside the walls of Tehran’s Evin Prison — a space synonymous with repression and pain — Vida Rabbani created a language of resistance through painting. Using bedsheets as canvas, smuggled brushes, and colors brought in tube by tube, she documented the intimate textures of carceral life in Iran’s most notorious women’s prison ward. Her work, both courageous and tender, transformed confinement into a form of creation. From portraits of fellow political prisoners to layered renderings of institutional staircases, Rabbani’s paintings gave a visual voice to the unseen lives of women navigating both isolation and solidarity behind bars. Her images were not just acts of self-expression; they became acts of collective preservation.

Rabbani, a journalist and former reporter at Shargh Daily and Seda Weekly, had never considered herself a professional artist. But following her 2022 arrest during Iran’s anti-government protests and her subsequent sentencing to more than 11 years combined over two cases, she began to paint in earnest. She spent 32 months in prison before her sentence was suspended, and she was released from Evin Prison. The Iranian authorities may have tried to stifle her speech, but through brushwork and imagery, she documented what she could not publish: the contours of captivity and the quiet, defiant rituals of daily survival.

“In prison, limitations sharpen the imagination,” she said. “When space and materials are scarce, your mind does the work of finding freedom.” Rabbani’s art evolved in secret, sometimes illuminated only by a desk lamp late at night, and often under the threat of confiscation. Aided by fellow inmates, she covertly assembled acrylics and brushes, stretching fabric over wooden frames salvaged from the prison’s carpentry shop.

Reclaiming the Geometry of Abstraction

With his latest series of shaped paintings, layered with meaning and symbolism, the artist Kour Pour insists that the so-called canon is informed by non-Western visual traditions that preceded it.

Pour annotated and redacted portions of text for his zine “Re-Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925” (left) and pasted an image of a Tantric Hindu painting from the 5th–6th centuries next to Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 “Black Square” (right). Courtesy Hyperallergic. 

by Tina Barouti, Hyperallergic

For artist Kour Pour, challenging the Euro-American art historical canon has been a decade-long pursuit. In 2015, the artist began a research project titled “Re-Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925” that was later published as a zine and distributed for a 2017 exhibition at San Francisco’s Ever Gold Projects. 

The zine’s title puts a spin on the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) 2012–13 exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, which claimed the titular decade and a half as comprising the early history of abstraction and designated the genre as an invention of the West. For his zine, Pour annotated the MoMA exhibition catalog’s essays with a yellow highlighter and a red-ink pen, correcting the authors’ short-sighted understanding of abstraction. Former MoMA Director Glenn Lowry’s foreword for the catalog argued that “abstraction may be modernism’s greatest innovation” with its “radically new” works first appearing “quite suddenly” only a century ago. Pour responded to Lowry’s claims in the margins of the text with a simple question: “Really?” 

“Did you know that Lowry has a doctorate in Islamic art history? The whole premise of Islamic art is to abstract from nature,” Pour noted to me during my visit in January to his studio in Inglewood, Los Angeles. For him, abstraction visualizes the basic principles of the natural world, and the myth that European artists invented it in the early 20th century must be challenged. Pour, perhaps best known for his massive, hyperrealistic paintings of Persian carpets, often incorporates elements of Persian and Islamic iconography in his oeuvre. He also draws from Japanese woodblock prints and Korean folk art while utilizing painting, sculpture, hand-cut block prints, silkscreen images, and various traditional techniques. 

In addition to his frustrated critiques in the Inventing Abstraction catalog’s margins, Pour cut-and-pasted reproductions of artworks from Western art history’s periphery, such as Persian manuscripts and Islamic tilework, directly onto the bookplates. On one page, he paired Tantric Hindu paintings, the earliest of which date back to the 5th and 6th centuries, with Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square” (1915). The two are nearly indistinguishable. On another, Inca textiles are paired with Piet Mondrian’s De Stijl compositions, and Persian manuscripts are placed together with irregular polygon paintings by a giant of American modernism: Frank Stella.

Seeing Beyond the Visible:

Hoda Afshar at musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac

The acclaimed Iranian-Australian artist’s first solo exhibition in France opens this September

Hoda Afshar (b. 1983), Speak the wind, 2015-2020. Inkjet photographic prints. Courtesy of the artist, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, Australia and Art Africa.

Art Africa

This autumn, the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac presents ‘Hoda Afshar: Performing the Invisible’, the first exhibition in France dedicated to the Iranian-born, Melbourne-based artist. Running from 30 September 2025 to 25 January 2026, the show brings together two recent significant bodies of work—Speak the wind (2015–2020) and The Fold (2023–2025)—each reflecting Afshar’s deep engagement with the politics of visibility, history, and photographic representation.

Curated by Annabelle Lacour, Curator of the Photographic Collection at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, the exhibition spans photography, video, sound, and installation. It is presented in close collaboration with the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Hoda Afshar has become a leading figure in Australian contemporary art, known for blending conceptual, staged, and documentary approaches. Her work challenges the traditional role of photography as a neutral recorder of reality, interrogating its historical entanglement with systems of power and control. Drawing from her own experiences of migration and cultural displacement, Afshar unpacks the tensions between truth, representation, and agency.