Raising their Voices: the Iranian artists fighting back

In Iran, women are forbidden to sing in public. A handful of Berlin’s Iranian artists are fighting back with rebellious records.

Faravaz Farvadin / Makar Artemev. Courtesy The Berliner.

by Dan Cole, The Berliner

In 2016, then-26-year-old Faravaz Farvardin was arrested in Tehran. She’d violated one of the country’s many restrictions on what women are allowed to do: she sang in public. The musician faced a year behind bars.

This May, Faravaz – who has since claimed asylum in Berlin – put out her debut album, Azadi. She performed the record live to a sold-out crowd at SO36, in what was billed as “A Night of Musical Rebellion”.

Since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, women have been banned from singing solo in public, as part of a wider framework of restrictions imposed on women’s rights. In the decades that followed, many Iranians left the country in search of greater freedom and opportunity abroad. Germany, and Berlin in particular, has become home to a growing Iranian diaspora. And over the past year, several Berlin-based Iranian women have released records that reflect not only their musical heritage but also the ongoing struggles faced by women in Iran. These migrant artists have created a cross-cultural musical scene, forging new sub-genres of Persian sound and embodying the city’s electronic pop and liberal output.

“We are all exilers, doing something we cannot do in our home country,” says Faravaz, who goes by her first name as an artist. Back in Iran, authorities continue to crack down on female artists who find ways to share their voices. “Every time I thought about doing something crazy, I would just look around and see someone doing something crazier than me,” she says.

Iran and Art in a Cage

A century of cultural rupture and decline

Golestan palace, glory of Iran’s rich arth history. Courtesy Asia Sentinel.

by Amirreza Etasi, Asia Sentinel

This is an autopsy of a century of rupture and decline in Iran’s authentic arts, a decline not built on natural evolution but the product of three successive waves of structural, political, and ideological interventions by ruling governments.

It is a decline built on tragedy. Iran boasts one of the world’s richest art heritages, spanning millennia and encompassing disciplines like architecture, textiles, calligraphy, miniature painting, metalworking, and pottery. It encompasses ancient monumental structures like Persepolis, intricate Safavid-era tilework, Persian carpets, and detailed engraving and marquetry.

They are now in a cage, sometimes adorned with the golden bars of modernization and at other times with the steel walls of ideology. Over the past century, the state has become the primary patron, buyer, and commissioner of art, destroying the independent market and suppressing creativity. The artist is forced to answer to power, not to society.

The direct consequence is a devastating brain drain. The continuous exodus of artistic elites has hollowed out the country’s creative body. This is not a “brain circulation” that enriches the homeland upon return; it is a one-way flight. While this exodus has created a vibrant diaspora—a “second bloodstream” of Iranian art in the pop studios of Los Angeles and the galleries of Paris and New York—it severs the artists’ organic connection to their primary source of inspiration and depletes the cultural capital within Iran.

Real State

Interview-In Conversation with Shirana Shahbazi About Her Solo Show in Emkan Gallery

Shirana Shahbazi, Schaedel-01-2001, c-print on aluminium, 90 × 70, 2007. Image courtesy the artist and Collection Pictet. 

by Kimia Akhtari, Darz

Kimia Akhtari (KA): Tell us about your first encounter with photography. What led you to choose this medium?

Shirana Shahbazi (SS): I originally wanted to become a photojournalist — that’s how it all began. I had the usual expectations that came with that aspiration, but I soon realized how idealistic that thinking was. That realization pushed me to re-examine my artistic language and what I wanted from photography.

KA: If you were to define your artistic journey in a few stages, what would they be?

SS: During my studies, I entered with the idea of photojournalism and left with a completely different approach. Understanding and articulating that shift was, in itself, a major question for me. My thesis marked the first concrete step in my practice. After that, I decided what paths I didn’t want to continue and began to travel.

After a period of traveling and combining earlier works from Iran with newer ones, I had 2 children and spent some time in the studio, developing my still-life works. Later, I returned to exploring perspective, and in many ways, each stage naturally led to the next.

A Magician of Imagination

In Dialogue with Farhad Hasanzadeh

Interview by Dr. Neda Farnia & Dr. Johari Murray, CooterMag

Born in 1962 in Abadan, Iran, Farhad Hasanzadeh became a war migrant during the war between Iran and Iraq (Sep. 22, 1980 – Aug. 20, 1988). Since 1989, he began working with Iranian children’s and young adult magazines in Tehran as a writer and a journalist. He has been the executive editor of Research Quarterly for Children’s and Young Adult Literature for four years in Iran. He’s also one of the founder members of the Association of Writers for Children and Youth in Iran. As part of a program, he read stories for children who spend difficult days in prison and for immigrant children and children from disadvantaged areas of the capital.

So far he has published over 130 books in various genres such as short stories, novels, fables, fantasy, comedy, biographies, and rewritings for children, young adults, and also adults. He has received more than 40 national awards and is one of the best writers for children and young adults in Iran. 

Hasanzadeh has been Iran’s nominee for the Astrid Lindgren (ALMA) in 2023. He’s also twice shortlisted for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2018 and 2020. He has several books in White Raven’s Lists. Furthermore, more than 30 of his works have been translated and published in English, Swedish, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, etc. 

So let’s read this wonderful interview with Mr. Farhad Hasanzadeh.

From migration to rebirth: A story of pain and liberation

Iranian painter Saye Sohrabi rose from the heart of repression to turn her canvas into a voice for silenced women. Migration wasn’t an escape, it was a rebirth; the awakening of a woman who redefines freedom through art, transforming pain into colour and silence into strength.

Image courtesy the artist and The Prisma.

by Rola Zamzameh*, The Prisma

Saye Sohrabi, an Iranian painter and photographer and textile artist, portrays the feminine world with striking honesty and courage.

Emerging from a society where women’s voices have long been repressed, she learned to break silence with colour.

For Sohrabi, migration was not an ending but the beginning of a new journey—one that led her to rediscover freedom and identity.

In this conversation with The Prisma, she reflects on life in exile, her cultural roots, and painting as a language of resistance and rebirth.

Through her art, she builds a vivid bridge between pain and liberation, transforming personal struggle into universal expression.

Jafar Panahi’s Cinematic Rebellions

In the director’s most defiant film yet, a group of Iranians consider killing the man who tortured them in prison.

Panahi films a desert scene in It Was Just an Accident. Photo: Pelleas. Image courtesy Vulture.

by Roxana Hadadi, Vulture

The third time Iranian director Jafar Panahi was arrested, it was with his wife, his daughter, and 15 of his friends. It was March 2010, and he and Mohammad Rasoulof had been filming a movie that would examine, in Panahi’s typical social-realist style, how the recent disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the wave of protests that followed rippled through multiple generations of one family. The pair knew Iran’s conservative government, which reviews scripts and withholds permits for movies of which it doesn’t approve, would never let them make it. So they began filming at Panahi’s home in secret. They had nearly 30 percent of the movie shot when news of their project got out and his apartment was raided. “It’s not important how they found out,” Panahi tells me. “We just were not experienced enough, and we didn’t know how to hide it.”

Panahi, 65, and I are seated at the upscale restaurant Reign in Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York hotel along with theater historian and professor Sheida Dayani, who is serving as his translator during the press tour for his latest film, It Was Just an Accident, which was made in secret over 25 days on the streets of Tehran. (He’s since learned how to hide better.) He arrived in what I’ve come to think of as the Panahi uniform: darkly tinted glasses, a black polo shirt, and an army-green jacket with a whiff of cigarette smoke about him. (He goes through three packs a day.) His voice is a rich baritone, like a rumble coming from deep inside a mountain. He’s feeling a little under the weather today. In lieu of the Persian folk remedy nabat, or rock candy, he’s sipping from a mug of hot water with honey hours before It Was Just an Accident’s Toronto Film Festival premiere this past September, the sixth stop on a worldwide tour that began at Cannes in late May, where Panahi’s film took the Palme d’Or. With that award, he joined the “triple crown” club, comprising filmmakers who have won the top prize at Europe’s major film festivals, along with Venice and Berlin. (He has three predecessors: Henri-Georges Clouzot, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Robert Altman.)

The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860–1979 (New Texts Out Now)

“We discovered what we call the matrilineal network of activism, spanning from grandmothers to mothers, to daughters, and nieces...” 

Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor, The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860–1979 (Stanford University Press, 2025). Image courtesy Hamid Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor and Jadaliyya.

by Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor, Jadaliyya

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

Talinn Grigor (TG): The idea for the book was conceived in May 2019 during the Second Feminist Armenian Studies workshop, which took place at UC Irvine, as we began to think about a question posed by a participant following my talk on Armenian women architects in modern Iran. She asked whether these women had “managed to move the needle” to benefit women’s causes. That sparked our initial conversation about doing research and writing a book together on the history of Iran’s Armenian women. Although Houri is the authority on Irano-Armenian women’s history, at the conference she was presenting on the revolutionary Rubina, so we both noticed that I was the only one, among fifteen speakers, who presented on Irano-Armenian women. That, along with the question posed by the audience member, was the dual spark that started the project.

Houri Berberian (HB): I had wanted to write my second book on that very topic, but several hindrances, from not being granted a visa to enter Iran to not having the network and connections to the Irano-Armenian diasporic communities, kept me from going beyond producing an article at the time. Moreover, it became very clear that this history could not be told solely by relying on textual sources. We had to rethink our time-honored methods for writing histories and mining sources.

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.

Women for Peace: Voices of hope and humanity

“Women for Peace” is a unique concept-concert that unites voices from around the world to promote reconciliation, hope, and solidarity and peace. The initiative blends opera and storytelling to highlight women as agents of peace. It uses music as a universal language capable of bridging cultures, inspiring reflection, and sending a clear message: peace is not a luxury, it is a human necessity.

Forooz Razavi and Serena Malfi during a rehearsal. Courtesy Vatican News.

by Linda Bordoni, Vatican News

Rome’s Palazzo Farnese opened its doors on Monday evening to host Women for Peace, a special concept-concert produced by the non-profit organisation Opera for Peace. Far more than a traditional concert, the event is designed as an immersive experience: a blend of music, storytelling, and stage design that highlights the voices of women with a message of resilience, reconciliation, and hope.

Vatican Radio joined a rehearsal in the run-up to the event and was treated to a sneak preview featuring singers Serena Malfi, Pumeza Matshikiza and Forooz Razavi, coached and accompanied on piano by Kamal Khan, the co-founder and Musical Director of the organisation, and Michel El Ghoul, Art & Production Design Director.

“This is not only a concert,” says Julia Lagahuzère, general director and co-founder of Opera for Peace. “This is a moment for us to honour women all around the world who have done such incredible actions for the next generation. To be able to pass forward this kind of message in such an important venue is really a very special moment.”

Persian Poet: A Woman Made of Fire

Courtesy Persian Poet and UP Magazine.

by Stained Napkins, UP Magazine

As a poet, I’m always looking at words throughout the city, whether it be the ‘you look beautiful today’ message posted at my train station or newspaper headlines when at my local corner store. However, none of these words have been as profound or as consistent as the words of Persian Poet.

Persian Poet, who was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, has been writing poetry her entire life, beginning as early as elementary school when she stitched together a hardcover book of poems about family for an assignment. It’s come natural to her ever since. Inspired by the short yet visceral and thought-provoking poetry by Rupi Kaur, Yung Pueblo and the original Iranian poets like Hafez and Rumi.

Persian Poet’s work often explores themes of self-improvement and healing. In one of her poems, she writes, “sometimes we have to grow apart to grow closer to who we are meant to be.” A characteristic of her poetry is how the reader inserts themselves into it. I’ve found myself one way or another in most of her work. My favorite is: “time is the only currency that never loses value so be mindful how you spend it.” Time is a big theme within my poetry and as someone who’s constantly trying to get his head out of the past and be present, this poem serves as a reminder that time is not as disposible as we think.

This Memoir Is a Bridge to Iranian Solidarity

Journalists Nilo Tabrizy and Fatemeh Jamalpour discuss the political legacy of women in Iran in “For The Sun After Long Nights”

Courtesy Electric Literature.

by Bareerah Y. Ghani, Electric Lit

For The Sun After Long Nights is an unflinching record of Iranian women’s resilience and strength against their country’s oppressive regime. The authors, Nilo Tabrizy and Fatemeh Jamalpour, are Iranian journalists who corresponded and—in Jamalpour’s case—reported from the ground as the largest uprising in the history of the Islamic Republic unfolded. 

The book centers the revolutionary moment when the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement erupted in 2022 after a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jîna Amini, was arrested and beaten to death by the city’s morality police for not adhering to Iran’s hijab rule. Suddenly, at least two million Iranians, led by young women and members of Gen Z, took to the streets to express their outrage. These young women, Jamalpour included, exchanged notes with poetry and slogans that fueled the resistance even as the regime cracked down with arrests, tear gas, and rubber bullets. Miles away in self-imposed exile, Tabrizy started covering the protests for The New York Times, analysing video and images shared by Iranians on social media. Caught in the cascade of events, Jamalpour and Tabrizy started exchanging emails despite the risk to Jamalpour, who could be imprisoned for communicating with a Western journalist. Together, they bore witness to young girls and elderly women standing up to police; young women cutting their hair; Iranians chanting “Death to the Islamic Republic.” This book captures that moment and then expands outward, recounting stories from the authors’ lives and those of the women who came before them. Together, Tabrizy and Jamalpour unveil the role of women in Iran’s revolutionary past, and deftly illuminate the blurry line between the personal and political.

Despite red tape from US sanctions, Tehran-based gallery champions Iranian art at The Armory Show

Owner of O Gallery says her participation affirms ‘importance of cultural dialogue at a time when exchange across borders is increasingly fraught’

Minoo Yalsohrabi, Let Me Know if You Need a Hand, 2024. © the artist and courtesy O Gallery and The Art Newspaper.

by Anny Shaw, The Art Newspaper

An Iranian gallery participating in The Armory Show (until 7 September) in New York for the first time has been subjected to US sanctions, which has meant its location has been removed from the fair’s website and its presence has not been promoted—in line with US government regulations adopted in 2019.

At the end of last month, O Gallery’s name was completely removed from The Armory Show’s list of exhibitors before being reinstated three days later. Two days after that, the gallery’s Tehran location was removed, though it is included on signage at the stand in the Javits Center. Two other Iranian galleries are also taking part in the fair: Sarai, which has spaces in Tehran and London; and Dastan Gallery, which has venues in Tehran and Toronto. Both are listed online as having “multiple locations”.

‘The Seasick’ exhibition shares stories of Iranian refugees arriving by boat

Markela Panegyres spoke to artist Elaheh Mahdavi about her and her brother Arman’s recent exhibition The Seasick, at Gallery 1855 in Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide, which explores the plight of Iranian refugees who arrived in Australia by boat, and those they left behind.

Elaheh is a refugee and Arman is currently in Iran. The exhibition reflected their own experiences and those of other Iranian refugees living in the city.

‘The Calling Sea’ by Elaheh and Arman Mahdavi. Photo supplied by the artists. Courtesy Green Left.

by Markela Panegyres, Green Left

Can you tell me how you came up with the title, The Seasick?

The Seasick is also the title of the art collective established by my brother Arman and I. There is a tradition of people from different branches of arts, music and visual art to name their debut album or exhibition after their collective.

Between Myth and Modernity:

On Persian Stories, Identity, and the US-Iran Divide

Ryan Bani Tahmaseb Considers the Enduring Wisdom of Iranian Myths

Courtesy Lit Hub

by Ryan Bani Tahmaseb, Lit Hub

In one of the most tragic stories from Persian mythology, the legendary warrior Rostam unknowingly kills his own son, Sohrab, in battle. Sohrab had grown up estranged from his father, and when the two finally meet, it’s as enemies. Neither knows the other’s identity until it’s too late.

It’s a tragedy built on misrecognition and the failure to truly see the human being across the battlefield.

Earlier this summer, when tensions escalated once again between Iran and the United States, I began thinking about this particular myth. Both nations project strength while speaking in threats, each certain of its own moral superiority. Yet neither one truly sees the other: its history, its culture, its people.

My father, who was born in Tehran, moved to the U.S. with his parents and siblings when he was in elementary school—well before the so-called Iranian Revolution. His father, my grandfather, was an international businessman who leveraged his American friends’ connections.

“What They Had to Conceal”

In this interview, Iranian filmmaker Maryam Tafakory discusses how she abstracts and rewrites post-revolutionary Iranian cinema to reveal the queer bodies and untold stories forced into invisibility

راز دل Razeh-del. Courtesy of the artist and IDA

by Arta Barzanji, International Documentary Association (IDA)

Maryam Tafakory has emerged as one of the most original voices in nonfiction film in recent years, showcasing a body of work that is both consistent in quality and vision while evolving with each entry. Employing essayistic, collage-based, and experimental practices, Tafakory often draws on archival extracts from post-revolutionary Iranian cinema to reflect on not only the repressive political regime under which she came of age, but also the restrictive audiovisual regime that frequently denies the existence and expression of female and queer subjectivities. 

In Irani Bag (2021), a multitude of clips reveal purses and bags as conduits of the impossible touch between men and women on screen. Nazarbazi (2022) examines the play of gazes in Iranian cinema, juxtaposing fragments of stolen glances, recurring sounds, and verses of poetry. The result is an impressionistic collage that forgoes a linearly constructed argument conveyed through voiceover in favor of an accumulation of details, fragments, and suggestions.

Tafakory’s latest works, Mast-del (2023) and Razeh-del (2024), further complicate our relationship with pre-existing sounds and images by abstracting them and releasing latent, hitherto unexpressed affects, trapped within.

In a testament to the hybrid nature of her practice, Tafakory’s work has garnered nearly equal attention in the realms of art, film, and essayistic practices, as evident by the range of publications covering her work: Artforum, ArtReview, and Frieze​; Film Comment, Senses of Cinema, and Filmmaker; Filmexplorer, Non-Fiction, and Found Footage Magazine. Tafakory received the Film London Jarman Award in 2024, the 17th edition of the annual prize, for “showcasing an artistic voice that is both profound and essential.” This interview has been edited.

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.

An interview about art, hope and building peace

with Iranian American artist Shaudi Bianca Vahdat

Shaudi Bianca Vahdat spoke with Real Change about the importance of representation in art and how it can be a source of inspiration during difficult times.

Photo courtesy of Shaudi Bianca Vahdat.

by Nura Ahmed, Real Change

When documenting the stories of everyday marginalized voices, it is often those closest to the problems who hold the real stories. Stories that become intrinsically linked to the belonging, displacement and memory of the American immigrant experience.

Too many immigrant stories are not told by us, so we are often left out, hoping to see representation where we don’t often fit. When we encounter artists who are working to change the everyday narrative, who are offering a piece of their humanity to the world, hoping to be received and embraced by all, we start to see a significant shift to the national paradigm.

Shaudi Bianca Vahdat, an Iranian-American musician, theater artist and composer based in Seattle, Washington is one of those artists who see themselves as a reflection of the world that we are in. She has a background in theater, performance, producing, directing and composing for theater. She is also a songwriter outside of her theater work. Vahdat studied both drama and music at the University of Washington and earned her master’s degree from the Berkelee College of Music. Ever since she was in her early 20s, she has been a part of Seattle’s extended theater and music communities.

‘Sunrise at the Vortex’

Behind Nima Nabavi’s vast geometric vortex painting: converging energy, labor, and structure

Image by Tonee Harbert. Courtesy of The Third Line and Designboom.

by Ravail Khan, Designboom

Roswell2223: An Energetic Anchor to Sunrise at the Vortex

Nima Nabavi brings together a constellation of radiant energies that converge with structural order in his solo exhibition Sunrise at the Vortex in Dubai. On view at The Third Line, Roswell2223 forms a gravitational center, laying out a monumental hand-drawn piece that stretches across an 18-foot-long canvas. Saturated with color and encrusted with detail, it distills the core of Nabavi’s practice which seeks to evoke awe, resolve inner resonance, bridge abstraction with emotion, and manifest precise complexities and natural energies through geometry.

Created over the course of a year during a residency in New Mexico, Roswell2223 marks the furthest the Iranian artist has ever pushed the limits of his process. The result is a sprawling, crystalline composition that channels a spiritual intensity and meditative clarity. While the exhibition presents a range of works — some meticulously hand-rendered, others made with the aid of architectural pen plotters — they all maintain a sense of transcendence. Whether plotted by machine or drawn line by line, Nabavi’s geometries work somewhat like elusive discoveries. ‘These patterns, structures and geometries carry a magical appeal that I’m not getting any closer to understanding,’ he tells designboom. ‘It feels more like archaeology to me – I’m finding and exploring these visual phenomena, not inventing them.’ We spoke with the artist to learn more about the methods, philosophies, and intentions behind Roswell2223 and how they resonate with the introspective and technical undercurrents of Sunrise at the Vortex.

'I Want to Sing Alone':

Iranian Film Wins International Prize Despite Persecution

“Bidad”. Courtesy of KVIFF

by Romina Omidpanah, IranWire

Iranian director Soheil Beiraghi’s film “Bidad” has won the Special Jury Prize at the 59th Karlovy Vary Film Festival in Czech Republic, even as several cast and crew members face prison sentences in Iran for their involvement in the film.

Bidad addresses the prohibition of women’s solo singing voices in Iran. Iranian courts convicted multiple people involved in the production of the film on charges such as “propaganda activities against the system,” “producing vulgar content,” and “encouraging behaviors contrary to public decency through virtual space.”

Beiraghi himself was sentenced to four years and three months in prison, a verdict he announced on Instagram with the comment, “For not reproducing lies, that’s all.”

The film was added to the Karlovy Vary competition lineup shortly before the festival began, in an effort to protect the safety of its creators.

Among those facing legal consequences are prominent actors Amir Jadidi, Leily Rashidi, and Servin Zabtian, as well as crew members including Beiraghi’s wife, Roksana Nikpour.

At the center of Bidad is Seti, a young woman whose bold declaration reverberates throughout the film.

“I want to sing alone, just that,” she says, responding to a music teacher who insists that women’s voices must remain beneath men’s - a reflection of Iran’s effective ban on female solo performances in public.

Iran’s repression of artists in ongoing assault on freedom of expression

My Favourite Cake directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha. Photograph: Mohammad Haddadi. Courtesy The Guardian.

by Parvin Ardalan, Researcher on Iran at Freemuse

At the United Nations Palais des Nations in Geneva on 1 July, the Islamic Republic of Iran came before members of the Human Rights Council to defend its human rights record under the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), the Council’s mechanism that requires each member state to undergo a peer review of its human rights every 4.5 years.[1] The review had been carried out in January 2025, and the report on the UPR outcome was presented for approval of the Council. In its oral statement, the Islamic Republic of Iran gave an orchestrated display of defiance towards human rights, as it refused to support over half of the 346 recommendations for improvements that had been made by over 100 UN states. It’s worth noting that only 16 recommendations related to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, issues of special concern to Freemuse, of these just three were supported.[2]

The Israeli military attack on Iran and the 12-day war between Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran from 13 to 25 June 2025—marked by missile exchanges and intense airstrikes—escalated the longstanding hostility between the two countries from proxy wars to direct war. Iran asserted this aggression threatens its ability to implement human rights obligations under the UPR. This confrontation, which involved large-scale attacks by both sides and resulted in significant casualties and damage, further complicated the situation for freedom of expression and art in Iran. Restricted internet access, bans on citizens taking photos and videos, arrests for these actions, and charges of espionage have narrowed the space for cultural activity. Under the pretext of insecurity and with an emphasis on national security, strict control, a war atmosphere prevailed in the cities, and the judicial system of the Islamic Republic of Iran has intensified the atmosphere of repression in the war atmosphere that has emerged. The law has expanded the definition of espionage and intensified the legal prosecution of individuals, groups, religious and ethnic minorities.

From under the Dining Table

by Amir Ahmadi Arian, London Review of Books

I met the great Iranian novelist Mahmoud Dowlatabadi in 2006. We had the same publisher, and through them he sent me a message inviting me to tea at the Azadi Hotel in northern Tehran. At one point he told me: ‘Everyone says great writers know what to write and how to write. But everybody can figure that out. What matters is knowing where to write from.’

I was too young to get his point. Many of Dowlatabadi’s books are set in his hometown in Khorasan, and I assumed he was championing a sort of primordial loyalty to one’s origins. I didn’t want to be that kind of writer. I longed to be metropolitan and worldly, the kind of eastern writer the West notices and praises. It wasn’t until two decades later, in June 2025, as I watched Israeli jets bomb Tehran with impunity, that I understood what he meant.

In the early hours of the attack I called to check on my friends and family in Tehran. I asked them where they hide when they hear the explosions and the planes. Nowhere, they said. There was no public shelter, no bunker, nowhere to go.

‘You’re going to have to do the dining table thing again,’ I told my father. He didn’t find that funny.

I grew up in Ahvaz, in southern Iran, during the war with Iraq. A few years ago, as I was researching a novel set during the early days of the war, I found (online) a newsreel about a blackout in Ahvaz. It reminded me of my mother waking me up in the middle of a sweltering summer night to give me a cold shower with my clothes still on, then putting me back to bed so I could sleep a few more hours through the heat. It ended with a footage of people crammed into bunkers and under stairs, which reminded me of the basement of our house, its ceiling so low an adult couldn’t stand upright, the room bare except for a picnic stove that we’d huddle round as we took shelter from air raids.

A Land Made of Mirrors and Stone:

 A literary response to the incursion on Iran

by Ezz Monem. Courtesy Arena Online

by Somayeh Falsafi, Arena Online

When Israeli missiles rained down on Iranian soil, many of in the Iranian diaspora froze, not only in fear, but in recognition. We had seen this story before: skies lit up with war, silence from allies, and a region forced to choose between repression at home or destruction from abroad.

I’ve lived half my life in Australia, and the other half between several countries, including Iran. Iran, where I was born, a place that, like Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, is now living under the shadow of aggression, facing the unfolding plans of a so-called “New Middle East.”

For those who have known Iranians or heard them speak of their home, Iran is not just a name on a map. When Iranians talk about their country, they don’t just place a finger over geography. They usually describe their homeland in descriptive detail, pointing to the Caspian Sea, to the green forests and jagged mountains where you can ski and climb, or to the southern islands in the Persian Gulf, where dolphins dance in turquoise water, or to the deserts with their copper skies and wind-sculpted silence.

But often, they’ll tell you what Iran means to them. And their tone changes.

They’ll speak of the light-catching beauty of muqarnas, those intricate, honeycombed domes and ceilings in houses, palaces, mosques, synagogues, and churches, and fire temples, like in Isfahan, Tehran, or Yazd, built from wood, mirror, and tile. They’ll describe the mirrorwork, where thousands of broken shards are placed in impossible precision. It’s as if the very ceilings are made of shattered history, reassembled into something stronger, something that refuses to disappear.

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.