In “When the Div Came Home,”

Soheila Kayoud Mixes Whimsy and Macabre

The Iranian-born artist’s first solo exhibition at Andrew Rafacz uses mythological creatures to explore otherness.

Soheila Kayoud, “Divs #11,” 2025, Hand dyed wool on muslin, 19.75 x 16 in. Courtesy Newcity Art.

by Emma Riva, Newcity Art

To understand reality, Soheila Kayoud turns to the fantastical. The Iranian-born artist’s first solo exhibition, “When the Div Came Home” at Andrew Rafacz, uses mythological creatures to explore otherness. Where it can be alienating to be on the outside, Kayoud uses the div, a demon-like figure from Middle Eastern mythology, to show the whimsy in being an outsider.

Kayoud had a long career as an engineer and began formally making textile work during the pandemic. “When the Div Came Home” is the work of an artist with a lifelong love of learning and a mixture of technical skill and a vibrant imagination.

The dynamism Kayoud achieves with thread is astounding. She renders fabric as a painterly material. The divs’ bodies have vertical threads defining their figure, whereas the landscapes have swoops and long horizontal lines to create structure and composition. The works have real movement in them, even more so than some painted canvases. “Divs #11” is an impressive example of this, with the cross-legged div sitting on a glamorous chaise on a checkered floor. The sheer amount and depth of patterns is staggering—with only one material, Kayoud creates multiple planes.

Bashu, Beyzaie and the Paradox of Iranian Identity

In 1986, as the Iran – Iraq war raged on, Bahram Beyzaie completed a film that would define his career and challenge Iranian self-image for decades to come.

Bashu Gharibeh Kouchak (Bashu, the Little Stranger). 1986. Iran. Directed by Bahram Beyzaie. Courtesy Little White Lies.

by Johnny Massahi, Little White Lies

Few filmmakers have loved their country as deeply or as tenderly, as Bahram Beyzaie loved Iran. A founding father of the Iranian New Wave, Beyzaie emerged, alongside Dariush Mehrjui and Masoud Kimiai, as one of the most culturally significant directors of his generation. His films – a pick-and-mix of Persian folklore, symbolism and allegory – favoured stories of outcasts on fraught journeys toward societal acceptance. Beyzaie, himself a member of the persecuted Bahá’í faith, was able to draw on his own direct experiences of exclusionary politics to become a rare, and necessary, champion for minority resistance. Nowhere is this clearer than in his 1986 film, Bashu, the Little Stranger.

Bashu stands as a sobering antidote to Iran’s state-supported ​“Sacred Defence Cinema”, a genre of war films commissioned during the Iran-Iraq war that attempted to reframe martyrdom (particularly child martyrdom) as a divine act of nationalist self-sacrifice. Beyzaie instead turns his camera toward a tragedy of displacement, uncovering an Iran far more divided than wartime propaganda dared to acknowledge. In response, the Ministry of Culture banned Bashu from screening publicly for almost three years. ​“At that time,” Beyzaie explained in a 2025 interview, ​“any word that did not glorify the war was met with threats and was strictly forbidden.” 

When the film was finally released in 1989, it was hailed as a humanist masterpiece, with a 2018 poll of Iranian critics declaring it the greatest Iranian film ever made. Now, 40 years later, at the dawn of a new conflict, Bashu has re-emerged – thanks to a timely restoration that premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival – as an urgent and enduring work that not only explores the perennial perils of war but also the complexities of Iran’s national identity.

From the Rooftops of Tehran

We in Iran own our grief, mourning all by ourselves.

Leanne Shapton: Untitled, 2022. Courtesy The New York Review.

by Anonymous, The New York Review

For the author’s safety, the translator’s name has also been kept anonymous.

It’s the second time in a year that we in Iran have found ourselves in the middle of a war—the first was launched by Israel with US aid, the second by the two armies hand in hand. In Tehran the night sky lights up when missiles hit the ground, and we look at one another with terror. Many people have already left the city. Between these two wars the Islamic Republic, our own government, killed thousands and thousands of Iranians around the country who were protesting the rulers’ incompetence and corruption, the rising price of goods, the economy’s stagnation, and the country’s lack of social and political freedom, and who by a certain point were asking for regime change. During all three of these horrors the Internet has been all but completely shut down. (I still have highly unreliable, limited access today.) Checkpoints have been set up across cities; militia forces threaten people in the streets. This paragraph is the shortest summary possible of what we have been living through since the beginning of last summer.

As I write this, on the ninth day of the war, oil facilities have been hit and black columns of smoke have darkened the horizon, rising to the heart of the sky. I cannot tell where the sun is anymore, and I write quickly, for fear that at any moment I might be killed. Writing under such urgency demands an economy of words. If I have only a few more minutes left of my life, would the things I want to say even be considered of value? What should I put down on the page as some kind of trace of myself in this world, or as a document of our time?