The Foot-Licking Demons & Other Strange Things in a 1921 Illustrated Manuscript from Iran

Courtesy OC.

by Josh Jones, OC

Few modern writers so remind me of the famous Virginia Woolf quote about fiction as a “spider’s web” more than Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. But the life to which Borges attaches his labyrinths is a librarian’s life; the strands that anchor his fictions are the obscure scholarly references he weaves throughout his text. Borges brings this tendency to whimsical employ in his nonfiction Book of Imaginary Beings, a heterogeneous compendium of creatures from ancient folktale, myth, and demonology around the world.

Borges himself sometimes remarks on how these ancient stories can float too far away from ratiocination. The “absurd hypotheses” regarding the mythical Greek Chimera, for example, “are proof” that the ridiculous beast “was beginning to bore people…. A vain or foolish fancy is the definition of Chimera that we now find in dictionaries.” Of  what he calls “Jewish Demons,” a category too numerous to parse, he writes, “a census of its population left the bounds of arithmetic far behind.

Simorgh in Exile:

Reimagining Iranian Diaspora in Fereshteh Molavi’s Thirty Shadow Birds

by Mahdiyeh Ezzati, World Literature Today

In Thirty Shadow Birds (2019), Fereshteh Molavi constructs a literary landscape where diasporic identity is neither fixed nor nostalgic but refracted through narrative, myth, and memory. The novel’s protagonist, Yalda—an Iranian immigrant woman residing in Canada—finds herself in an unfamiliar Montréal apartment where she must offer her story in lieu of rent. This exchange, story for shelter, forms the narrative spine of Molavi’s novel and serves as an extended metaphor for the transactional and often uneasy nature of diasporic storytelling within the context of state multiculturalism, literary markets, and cultural consumption. Through its interweaving of Persian literary motifs—particularly the myth of the Simorgh from Attar’s Conference of the Birds—and a persistent refusal to conform to Western expectations of diasporic victimhood, Thirty Shadow Birds maps out a space for diasporic re-collectivity grounded in what Yalda herself calls “woodling,” the act of weaving and doodling fragments of her life into a form of storytelling that refuses closure or commodification. This hybrid mode of narration resists neat categorizations, mirroring Yalda’s own hyphenated existence as an Iranian-Canadian woman attempting to articulate a coherent self across cultures, languages, and political histories.

Molavi opens the novel with a direct invocation of a Persian matal, a folkloric nonsense rhyme traditionally used to lull children into sleep: “I have a tale to tell, with a bird as a head, with a bird as a tail. Shall I tell it, or shall I not tell it?” While such matals are repetitive and playful in their original context, their appearance in Thirty Shadow Birds is deeply defamiliarized. In Yalda’s voice, this rhyme is not a call to sleep but a demand to be heard. Rather than amusing or pacifying, the matal opens a space where urgency replaces lullaby, where voice asserts itself against silence. Its repetition throughout the novel serves as both an invocation and a challenge, suggesting that the stakes of storytelling in exile are always entangled with the question of audience, legibility, and worth. For Yalda, the telling of the tale is never an innocent act. It is a means of survival, a performance negotiated under the shadow of expectation, and a gesture toward diasporic collectivity.

Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives, Second Edition (New Texts Out Now)

“What does contemporaneity signify for Iranian artists, and how have they drawn inspiration from contemporary life?”

Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives, Second Edition (Saqi Books, 2025). Image courtesy Hamid Keshmirshekan and Jadaliyya.

by Hamid Keshmirshekan, Jadaliyya

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Hamid Keshmirshekan (HK): Having worked for decades on the modern and contemporary art of Iran—and the wider Middle East and North Africa (MENA)—and its relationship to discursive movements and socio-political developments, I have come to see that Euro-American paradigms cannot be uncritically applied to the study of Iranian art as though these frameworks possess universal validity. These analyses often fail to account for the local discursive contexts of artistic production, their cultural implications, and their integration into local historical narratives. This has produced unbalanced historiographies and art-historical sources that consign non-Western art to the periphery. This book emerges from that problem and continues my broader scholarship on the “decolonization” of art history, with a particular focus on the so-called Global South and the MENA region in particular. Here, I aim to challenge the authority of a single, dominant art-historical discourse and to expose how different subjectivities are reproduced within particular narratives. My objective is to establish ways of defining art-historical and temporal perception in the context of Iran.

While I draw on certain “global” art-historical paradigms, including critical theory and methodological models, much of the book’s content is grounded in primary sources, many in Persian, as well as my own field observations and interviews with artists, curators, critics, and cultural activists. Teaching the theory and history of art of Iran and the MENA region in universities in both the United Kingdom and Iran has allowed me to test and refine these arguments in dialogue with students and colleagues across contemporary art history, theory, and Islamic art and material culture. My sustained engagement with Iran’s contemporary art scene over the past few decades has also given me access to insider perspectives, prevailing concerns within the artistic community, and the ways these are reflected in artistic strategies. Together, these experiences have shaped the critical lens through which this book examines its subject.

The first edition appeared in 2013, at a time when no comprehensive study of this scope existed, despite the rapid growth of research on modern and contemporary art of the MENA region. In many respects, it entered uncharted territory, aiming to fill a significant gap in scholarship. Since then, profound changes have occurred in both the Iranian art scene and the broader social and political context, making a second edition necessary. This edition takes stock of the major transformations of the past decade, both historically and intellectually. Twelve years on, I also used the opportunity to reflect on the book’s methodological, historical, and structural dimensions and to consider how the study of contemporary art and society might be further developed. The revisions vary across chapters: some have been substantially reworked, others updated with new material, and sections where the original content remained valid have been lightly revised. A new introduction sets out these reflections and brings the work up to date.

The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran

#RivetingReviews: Mandy Wight reviews THE NIGHTS ARE QUIET IN TEHRAN by Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin

by Mandy Wight, #RivetingReviews, European Literature Network

This is the story of a young Iranian couple, Behzad and Nahid, who flee Iran after the 1979 Revolution and settle and have a family in West Germany. Their story is told in four sections – each one narrated by a different member of the family – taking place at ten yearly intervals, often coinciding with significant events in Iran, and capturing both Iranian and German society at particular moments in time. Behzad is a revolutionary, and political developments in Iran are very much at the forefront of the narrative, yet these are interwoven with the characters’ personal lives, family relationships and the experience of exile and loss of culture. 

We first meet Behzad in 1979, when the Shah has been deposed, and progressive political activists are on the streets campaigning for a fairer society. Behzad and his comrades dream that portraits of the Shah in each schoolroom will be replaced by those of Che and Castro, of Mao and Lenin. For all the heady revolutionary fervour, the allusions to street fighting and blood, Behzad at twenty-seven still lives at home, enjoying observing the womenfolk prepare stuffed vine leaves, aware his mother watches him intently as he leaves to join the protests ‘as if she’s trying to memorise my face’. He’s also aware of a young woman amongst their group with serious, clever eyes – Nahid. As the revolution progresses it’s clear that religious elements are taking control, and within a short space of time, the revolutionaries have been outdone by Ayatollah Khomeini. The Revolutionary Guard starts carrying out the torture and executions of political opponents, and Behzad and his comrades start fearing for their lives.

Filmmaker Homa Sarabi maps her place in the world

Sarabi's inscribed pieces of parchment drape down to the floor in her office at the Boston Center for the Arts. Courtesy Jesse Costa/WBUR.

by Khari Thompson, WBUR

On the wall of Homa Sarabi’s office at Boston Center for the Arts hang three pieces of parchment, so long they drape down to the floor. Tracks of black and red calligraphy snake up and down the paper. Those who read Farsi will notice words for “right” and “left” repeating on the pages, corresponding with the transcription's changes of direction.

These murals are journeys etched in ink.

Each sheet tells the story of a walk the Iranian-born artist and filmmaker took with a friend, which she transcribed afterward. The catch: the two walkers were thousands of miles apart — usually with Sarabi in Boston, her walking partner in Tehran, and nothing but a phone and their voices connecting them.

“I was on a call with a friend one day, and I was like, 'What if we tried going on a walk together?' Because that's a thing we would do in Tehran was just walk for hours and hours. And I really missed that,” Sarabi told WBUR of the project's roots.