Returning the gaze:

 Hoda Afshar investigates a colonial obsession

Working with an archive of photographs made over a century ago, the artist folds the gaze back onto the Eurocentric lens that shaped the images in The Fold

© The Fold, Hoda Afshar. Courtesy 1854 | British Journal of Photography

by Dalia Al-Dujaili, 1854 | British Journal of Photography

In 1918 Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, a French psychiatrist and photographer, travelled to Morocco for a second time (his first was in 1915, when recovering from a war wound). While there, he took thousands of photographs of veiled Moroccan women. These images attempted to fulfil a certain fantasy, one that can be attributed to a French colonial imagination, and were used by de Clérambault to support psychoanalytic theories around covering and desire. Though de Clérambault was making work over 100 years ago, this French fascination with veiled Muslim women remains. Since 2010, France has banned the niqab and burqa in public places, and in June 2023, the Constitutional Council upheld the right of the French Football Federation and similar bodies to ban hijabs (or any other overt religious symbols) during matches. 

Iranian-born, Melbourne-based Hoda Afshar came across de Clérambault’s images during her research at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, in Paris. He was different to photographers she had previously come across in other archives, she says, in the sense that he was fascinated by the coverings, or ‘hayek’, rather than the naked bodies of North African women. He became seemingly obsessed with the hayek, in fact, making almost 30,000 images over two years in Morocco. 

After returning to France, de Clérambault continued to photograph the hayek, using models or mannequins to display the coverings. When he realised he was losing his eyesight in 1934, he took a gun and killed himself in front of a mirror and, Afshar explains, his body was surrounded by mannequins dressed in hayek, piles of fabric, and boxes full of handprinted images of women in the coverings.

Art Gallery of St. Albert highlights the immigrant experience

Visual artist Mohammad Hossein Abbasi depicts the process immigrants face in rebuilding their lives in a new country built around a different culture, social norms and political system

Mohammad Hossein Abbasi's collection of art on the immigrant experience is currently on display at the Art Gallery of St. Albert until Jan. 31, 2026. Courtesy Art Gallery of St. Albert and St. Albert Gazette.

by Anna Borowiecki, St. Albert Gazette

In its final exhibition of the season, the Art Gallery of St. Albert (AGSA) launches The Home by Edmonton-based visual artist Mohammad Hossein Abbasi.

The exhibition features the slow and difficult process and emotions immigrants face while integrating into a new culture and a new land without losing their sense of self.

“The Home’s conversational theme and title is a search for belonging, stability and understanding in a new place and how that changes over time,” said Emily Baker, AGSA curator.

The Iranian artist originally lived in Tehran and trained as a civil engineer while at the same time studying painting. Abbasi and his wife moved to Edmonton in 2021 so he could work towards an MFA in painting at the University of Alberta.

“It was also hard to make ends meet even though both he and his wife had good jobs, and it (political situation) was becoming more precarious in Tehran,” Baker said. Currently, Abbasi is employed as a graphic designer and teaches painting.

She describes Abbasi as an artist whose visual work speaks with intellectual ease.

150 Years of Iranian Graphic Design

Courtesy The Daily Heller, Print Magazine.

by Steven Heller, The Daily Heller, Print Magazine

Various books, exhibits and at least one magazine attest to the innovative graphic design and typography that originated Iran, notably and paradoxically, following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. There has yet to be a formal history that chronicles the over 200-year legacy of Persian/Iranian graphics until now. The History of Graphic Design in Iran, edited and organized by Majid Abbassi, an Iranian-born, Toronto-based designer, writer and editor, fills the void. A long time coming, this is a two-volume visual encyclopedic reflection of Iran’s graphic design heritage—”a country with millennia of cultural and artistic history, where some of the most influential examples of graphic design emerged,” says Abbassi.

The content is divided into two main sections. The first focuses on practitioners and presents 182 designers, illustrators, calligraphers and graphic artists from the Qājār dynasty, 1794 to 1925, to the present; the second section concentrates on topics related to graphic design, encompassing 84 thematic entries. Additionally, the book examines the roles of organizations, institutions, governmental and private companies, advertising agencies, graphic design studios, publications and assorted media that have shaped the field.

The scope of the book spans from 1871 (1250 in the Solar Hijri calendar) to 2021 (1400 SH), with references to earlier periods, particularly regarding writing systems, the establishment of Dar al-Funun, and early visual documents. With the advent of printing and reproduction in Iran, graphic design evolved in parallel with the country’s political, social, economic and cultural transformations. “However, this presentation does not imply endorsement or promotion of their content,” Abbassi insists, referring to the revolutionary propaganda that is included. “This book is not merely a compilation of designers’ works; it is a celebration of an important chapter in the history of Iranian art and culture—one that has gained international recognition over the past two decades.”

‘Identity is never fixed. It’s layered, constantly shifting’

An interview with Iranian-American artist Soraya Sharghi

Sharghi’s journey reveals a constant dialogue between discipline and rebellion

Soraya Sharghi, ‘Rising with the Song of Nymphs,’ 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 152,4 x 236,2 cm (60 x 93 in). Photo courtesy of the artist and Global Voices.

by Omid Memarian, Global Voices

In her most recent exhibition, “Sculpture and Painting,” presented at 24 Avenue Matignon in Paris during Art Basel’s October 2025 week, Iranian-American artist Soraya Sharghi gathered recent bronze, ceramic, and painting works in a single, immersive environment. 

In this presentation, Sharghi unveiled a luminous universe where mythology, memory, and material intertwine. Through hybrid figures that seem to rise from fire and color, she explores the feminine not as muse but as a generative force. Works such as “Rising with the Song of Nymphs” and her hand-shaped ceramic guardians create a continuum between painting and sculpture, where myth is reimagined as a language of survival and rebirth.

Born in 1988 in Tehran and now based in New York, Sharghi studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she began experimenting simultaneously with painting, sculpture, and installation. As a child, she invented elaborate stories and imaginary characters for her younger sister, narratives that later became the foundation of her visual universe. “Imagination comes naturally in childhood,” she says, “and I’ve made sure never to lose that. It still drives the way I work today.”

Her art, she explains, is a form of reclamation and protection: “Growing up in Iran, imagination became my refuge. Surrealism was not just an artistic influence; it was a way of surviving reality.” In her visual lexicon, myth becomes autobiography; every hybrid heroine is a self-created guardian of endurance, shaped by restriction, migration, and the continuous negotiation of womanhood.

Sharghi’s journey reveals a constant dialogue between discipline and rebellion. Her intricate surfaces, radiant chromatic palette, and densely worked compositions echo, in spirit, the emotionally charged figuration of artists like Niki de Saint Phalle, Hayv Kahraman and Emma Talbot, who likewise weave myth, textural pattern, and feminine subjectivity into contemporary narratives. Yet Sharghi’s voice remains unmistakably her own — unflinchingly personal, intellectually grounded, and spiritually charged.

Speaking of her multi-material approach, Sharghi says, “Each material carries its own energy and teaches me something new… together they form a map of my spiritual evolution.” In this interview with Global Voices, Soraya reflects on imagination, hybridity, mythmaking, the politics and poetics of the female body, and the alchemy of clay, fire, and color that continues to shape her expanding universe.

‘Divine Comedy’

Iranian Filmmaker Ali Asgari on Satire, Censorship and Absurdities Behind ‘Divine Comedy’: ‘You Show How Silly and Stupid the Rules Are’

Courtesy of Ali Asgari and Variety.

by Essie Assibu, Variety

Iranian filmmaker Ali Asgari has long explored the quiet tensions and bureaucratic pressures of everyday life in Iran, from his acclaimed shorts to festival recognized features like “Disappearance,” “Until Tomorrow,” and “Terrestrial Verses.” In competition at the Doha Film Festival, he arrives with his latest work, “Divine Comedy,” which premiered earlier this year in Venice’s Horizons sidebar, and pushes his familiar themes into more overtly comedic territory.

Starring director Bahman Ark as Bahram, the story centers on a mid-career filmmaker whose entire body of Turkish-Azeri-language work has never been screened in Iran. When his newest film is once again rejected by cultural authorities, he joins forces with his sharp-witted producer, Sadaf (Sadaf Asgari), to stage an underground guerrilla screening in Tehran. What begins as a simple act of defiance becomes a darkly funny journey through red tape, cultural gatekeeping, and the range of anxieties facing any artist determined to create freely.

The film is a multinational co-production between Iran, Italy, France, Germany and Turkey, with international sales handled by Goodfellas.